Qatar has lined up a total of 21 new hotels for the next five years as part of adding up 45,000 additional hotel rooms to its existing capacity. This would be Qatar’s major efforts to meet FIFA’s projected capacity requirement of 60,000 rooms.
Of the list of planned hotels scheduled to open by 2017, 11 are five-star properties and nine are four-stars, the Ministry of Business and Trade said on Monday.
According to the Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA), there are currently 77 hotels in Qatar, of which 80-85 percent are 4 or 5 star, that have been planned for or currently under construction which would add another 17,000 rooms to the current levels.
The Ministry noted that during 2011, the demand for hotels rooms remained strong as a result of a 12 percent and 50 percent increase in the number of non-GCC and GCC visitors, respectively. Occupancy rates dropped from 77 percent to 63 percent over the first quarter of 2012 in comparison to the same period in 2011, due to an increase in the hotel supply.
The higher occupancy rate recorded in the first quarter of 2011 was attributed to the Asian Football Confederation of AFC Asian Cup which was hosted in Doha in January 2011.”More recent drivers of the hotel industry include such as The Doha Tribeca Film Festival (200902012) and the Arab Games (2011) and conferences such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2012) and COP18 (2012)”, a data released by the Ministry noted.