Over 17,000 hotel rooms under construction in UAE

The UAE currently has more than 17,000 hotel rooms in its construction pipeline as part of plans to attract 20 million tourists a year by 2020.

According to the STR Global Construction Pipeline Report for June, the UAE had the biggest pipeline of any country in the Middle East and Africa, which has a total of 614 hotels and 143,870 rooms under contract.

The UAE topped the list with 17,137 rooms, followed by Saudi Arabia with 15,415 rooms under construction.

STR Global said six other countries reported more than 2000 rooms under construction - Qatar (5985 rooms); Jordan (3241 rooms); Morocco (2466 rooms); Egypt (2379 rooms); Algeria (2166 rooms); and Iraq (2082 rooms).

The Under Contract data includes projects in the In Construction, Final Planning and Planning stages but does not include projects in the Unconfirmed stage.

Separately, STR Global’s annual profitability data for 2013, the Middle East/Africa achieved the strongest growth (up 5.4%) in gross operating profit per available room while Asia Pacific reported a slight decline (down 0.5%).

“We are pleased to see a growing sample of hotel operators all around the globe willing to share profit and loss data," said Elizabeth Winkle, managing director of STR Global.

“The ability for an operator to analyse their income statement compared to competitive aggregate and market performance provides increased visibility and illustrates opportunities to not only grow revenues but control costs."

The data for 2013 comprised profit and loss performance for more than 8,000 hotels globally.