Qatar, which has recently won the right to host FIFA 2022 World Cup, is currently experiencing a shortage of 55,000 guest rooms to settle all guests, football teams and mass media.
The country plans to have around 240 hotels fully operating and ready to accept guests at the time of this soccer tournament. This exceeds the number of the existing hotels more than 2 times. The rest of the needs is planned to be covered with cruise ships docked near Al Wakrah.
As Jalil Mekouar, the Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels regional director, states, ships are a good solution as Qatar is not a big place like, for example, South Africa, so hotels in Qatar are not likely to accommodate all guests who are expected to visit this country during the World Cup days.
Over 90,000 rooms in total are expected in operation until 2022. 55,000 rooms from these are planned to be covered by 17 construction projects with first three of which opening until 2016.
Another problem is that currently the hotels in Qatar represent mostly 4 and 5 star categories, while 3 and 4 star ones are almost not available. According to Qatar Tourism Authority currently there are around 4,000 rooms of the abovementioned categories in the country.
Over 1 million of tourists visit Qatar each year. The country plans to invest into advertising to grow the flow of tourists up to 20%, but current occupancy levels show that even the existing number of hotels is more than enough as average occupancy level in Qatari hotels reaches just 59%. That is why so called ship-hotels may become the best decision.