Cricket World Cup boosts Dubai hotel revenues

The Cricket World Cup proved a windfall for hotels and sports bars in Dubai showing the games as fans flocked to support their teams, outlets in the emirate said.

The tournament, which saw India beat arch rival Pakistan and Sri Lanka to take the trophy, drew in massive crowds from Dubai’s large sub-continental expatriate population.

“Obviously there has been a lot of interest in going to see these games, at bars and restaurants in the UAE. And obviously, Indians, Sri Lankans and Pakistanis make up a huge proportion of the population in this country, so I imagine that business has been very significant for the food and beverage sector here,” Guy Wilkinson, managing partner at Viability, a specialist in hospitality consultancy, told Arabian Business.

With the semi-finals and finals taking place over the last week, some venues reported being sold out for the entire week of the finals. The major attraction was the semi-final showdown between India and Pakistan, which was watched by more than one billion viewers around the world.

“Soon after the semi-finals started, we were doing pre-advanced bookings on tables and we literally sold out on semi-finals and finals. Total capacity over the first two semi-finals, we had an average of around 320 roughly, for the India-Pakistan game, we were touching over 400 people,” said Haroon Rashid, bar manager for the sports lounge at CityMax Hotel.

He added that games featuring India, Sri Lanka and England attracted the largest crowds.
A number of hotels polled said that revenues garnered during the World Cup would contribute significantly towards their first quarter results.

Sachin Dhinga, food and beverage manager for Dubai’s Ramee Royal Hotel, said the World Cup drew in around 20 percent of revenues for the first quarter.
“I’d say that about 20 percent of our business has come [from the World Cup] this quarter. We crossed our expectations,” he said.

For the final match, Dhinga said the hotel’s Time Café had taken around AED200,000. During the India- Pakistan match, the outlet generated around AED260,000 in revenue, as more than 1,500 customers visited the venue.

“The good thing about cricket is that it’s not over in two halves of 45 minutes. It takes a long time, it takes all day. People would have been hanging out in these places all day and there have been a lot of exciting games leading up to the finals, so obviously it would have made a good impact,” Wilkinson added.

He said that he expected that hotels in Dubai would see an upswing in the first quarter of 2011, powered by the impact of events like the Cricket World Cup, the Dubai World Cup and a number of other events and exhibitions.