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75% of Dubai hotels to be 5-Star |
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6/5/2006 9:22:54 AM |
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Dubai: About 75 per cent of hotel rooms in Dubai will be in the five-star category in the next few years, the emirate's tourism chief said on Sunday.
The government is also reviewing its hotel classification system and hopes to add new categories to the existing list within a year.
"Around 40 per cent of hotel capacity in Dubai is five-star. What is coming in a few years is that 70 to 75 per cent of our hotel rooms will be five-star," said Khalid Bin Sulayem, director-general of the Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM).
He said the planned three-fold expansion of the hotel room capacity by 2010, when the ongoing mega tourism and real estate projects are finished, will not affect service standards. "We are strict with hotel classification, and that includes services, not just buildings," Bin Sulayem told Gulf News.
He said there would be between 15 and 20 categories to account for relative newcomers to the UAE market such as boutique hotels and various types of resorts.
The new ratings are not expected to exceed the seven-star rating enjoyed by the Burj Al Arab.
The city currently has hotel categories from one to five-star and two types of furnished and hotel apartments.
"We are doing a full review of hotel classification. We are including so many different categories from boutique hotels to beach resorts, all with different specifications. This is a new review," he told reporters after inaugurating the three-day Hotel Show at Dubai International Exhibition Centre. The event has attracted some 700 exhibitors from 49 countries, according to the organisers said.
Dubai would need between 80,000 to 100,000 hotels rooms to cater for an expected 15 million annual visitors by the end of this decade, Bin Sulayem told. At present there are some 30,000 hotel rooms in different categories.
"We had 6.3 million hotel guests in 2005. We are looking at 15 million in 2010. We cannot have that unless we have the capacity," the DTCM chief said. The tourism sector directly contributes to about 20 per cent to Dubai's economy.
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