Football fans will turn their backs on luxury hotels planned for the 2022 Qatar World Cup if rooms are not available at realistic rates, a senior official from a global hotelier warned yesterday.
Speaking at The Hotel Show in Dubai, Bani Haddad, regional vice-president for development at the Wyndham Group - whose brands include Ramada and Travelodge - said high-end hotels at last year's South Africa World Cup were a letdown.
"One thing that was a lesson learned from the South African experience is that the prices of their rooms were so high during the World Cup that people traded down and went and spent their money in budget hotels," he said.
Qatar told World Cup organiser FIFA it will have 90,000 rooms by 2022 - twice its current stock.
But Haddad said the intimidating target figure included the renovation of existing buildings and temporarily-berthed cruise ships and that many rooms used to house visitors for the tournament would later be converted into residential housing.
The latter move may ease fears of hotels lying empty once the final ball is kicked. Earlier this month a regional executive at hotel giant Starwood told 7DAYS the firm was cautious about major investment in World Cup hotels after South Africa's post-tournament market "went off a cliff".
But Darrell Sheaffer, of Qatar's Hospitality Development Company, said the focus on the World Cup risked obscuring Qatar's wider growth, as state infrastructure spending hits $140 billion.
"People in the financial community, the thing they like least is uncertainty. And the World Cup provides certainty now that [government] initiatives for 2030 will actually happen," he said at the dmg events show.
Earlier this week Citigroup's chief economist for the Middle East said Qatar would not benefit financially from hosting the World Cup.
"I would not say, from a cost-benefit analysis, the World Cup is going to be net beneficial to Qatar," Farouk Soussa said.
© 7Days 2011
