Holland Gulf Chamber of Commerce » hospitality http://www.hgcoc.com Holland Gulf Chamber of Commerce is een organisatie gericht op het stimuleren van handel tussen Nederland en de Golfregio. Wij helpen bedrijven die zaken willen doen in de Golfregio aan de juiste ingangen bij de belangrijkste beslissingsmakers. Thu, 22 May 2014 10:31:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.40 Saudi tourists spent £78m in London in 2012 http://www.hgcoc.com/blog/2013/08/30/saudi-tourists-spent-78m-in-london-in-2012/ http://www.hgcoc.com/blog/2013/08/30/saudi-tourists-spent-78m-in-london-in-2012/#comments Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:18:25 +0000 http://www.hgcoc.com/?p=1370 Initial estimates on foreign tourist purchases in London during this summer season are estimated to be worth £4 billion. Official statistics have not yet been disclosed.
The contribution of Arab citizens to this figure is estimated to be worth £1.3 billion, says the British Commercial Association.
The average spending of a Saudi tourist reached about £2,487, followed by that of the UAE at £2,395, then Kuwait at £1965 per head and Russia and Singapore at £1169 and £980 per head.
There has been a 36-percent increase in sales due to the contribution of Arab tourism in London. This is translated to a 13.5-percent increase in employment rates.
The positive effects of Arab tourism in the UK are not confined to the huge revenues reaped by shops and businesses as a result of Arab procurement, but also contributed to the revival of the hospitality sector as well.
Simon Jack, public relations officer at The Leonard Hotel Marble Arch in central London, said that GCC tourists, in particular those coming from Saudi Arabia and UAE, as well as Libya, spend long periods in London during the summer.

Jack said, “Some families spend more than three consecutive months sometimes.”
The phenomenon has prompted many hotels to offer services in the Arabic language and allocate spaces for prayers. London-bound Gulf tourism has raised rates of hotel occupancy.
Jack said: “Last year, estimates indicated that Saudis alone spent £78 million on hotel stays in London. They are expected to spend between £93 and £101 million this year.”
Most GCC tourists prefer to stay in apartments in central London. “This offers them more privacy and allows big and extended families to rationalize in expenditure,” he said.
Amid the huge spending by GCC tourist, the British government stands out as one of the biggest beneficiaries of these financial returns via the many channels available, mainly through taxes.
Peter Dey, tax expert at HM Revenue and Customs Department, said that tax benefits from GCC tourists to the British economy are categorized into several categorizes.
Dey said: “There is always this competition between Gulf and Russian tourists on who spends more during the season.
“But tourists coming from Russia, Hong Kong and Singapore are keen on restoring what they have paid in taxes as soon as they leave London because they are entitled to regain the proportion of taxes they paid while shopping according to the British law, unlike GCC tourists who often don’t bother to keep their invoices.”

]]> http://www.hgcoc.com/blog/2013/08/30/saudi-tourists-spent-78m-in-london-in-2012/feed/ 0 21 hotels to come up by 2017 http://www.hgcoc.com/blog/2013/03/08/21-hotels-to-come-up-by-2017/ http://www.hgcoc.com/blog/2013/03/08/21-hotels-to-come-up-by-2017/#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:43:33 +0000 http://www.hgcoc.com/?p=831 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.

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