Take a dollop of the sophistication of Paris, add Orlando-style theme parks and plentiful golf courses and surround it all with buildings packing the urban heft of New York City. This is a reasonable description of the development program underway in Abu Dhabi, a tiny but extremely wealthy emirate located on the Persian Gulf.
Though sometimes overshadowed by its brassier neighbor Dubai, per capita, Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest emirate among the United Arab Emirates — and it’s engaged in its own full-throttle development binge.
Like Dubai, Abu Dhabi’s rulers have embarked on plans to greatly increase the number of tourists, but with a difference. Whereas Dubai seeks to make waves in the worldwide mass tourism market, Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoun Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s ruler, recently declared that his emirate is focused on “five-star travelers where visitors would spend 10 times more,” the newspaper Arabian Business reported in May.
To meet this goal, Abu Dhabi’s rulers have created a five-year plan for tourism. By the end of 2012, the emirate plans to increase the number of hotel rooms from 12,000 to 25,000, to cope with projected visits by 2.7 million tourists.
This five-year plan is a revision of a prior five-year plan launched in 2004, which called for 21,000 hotel rooms and 2.4 million visitors by 2012. Presently, Abu Dhabi has around 1.6 million visitors annually.
U.S.-based hotel chains are stepping in to help meet the new goals. In April, both the Hilton Hotel Corporation and Marriott announced plans to greatly increase the size of their Middle East portfolios in the coming years. Marriott announced the company will grow from 26 hotels in the region to 65 by 2010. According to a recent study by Deloitte, there are 64 hotels, totaling 19,482 rooms, currently in the pipeline.
Jean-Paul Herzog, the president of Hilton Hotels for the Middle East and Africa, recently told Arabian Business that his firm has the goal of “signing an additional 20 management agreements and doubling our portfolio by 2012.”
Pools of oil are underwriting Abu Dhabi’s drive to become a tourism destination; the emirate has about 8 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Along with tourism, the emirate is also making significant investments in heavy industry and education.
For some, Abu Dhabi, where the average temperature throughout the summer exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit, might seem like an unlikely tourist destination. Yet according to the Deloitte report, the average room rate in Abu Dhabi for the first quarter of 2008 was $252 and the occupancy rate was at 86 percent. The Deloitte report attributes some of these gains to increased passenger traffic at Abu Dhabi International Airport, which jumped 31 percent in 2007.
The Deloitte study further showed that the Middle East now has the highest average room rates in the world at $181 (overtaking Europe for the No. 1 spot), as well as the highest occupancy rate in the world at 74.3 percent.
To continue luring those “five-star travelers,” Abu Dhabi’s rulers are at work on an ambitious development program. Over the last few years, the city-state has been enticing some cultural brand names and building a multi-billion-dollar arts district that the New York Times likened to a “daring cultural Xanadu” on Saadiyat Island, adjacent to the city’s downtown. In the next few years the Guggenheim, the Louvre and New York University are all poised to open outposts.
Nearby, work has commenced on a maritime museum, a museum of history and a performing arts center with expected completion dates in 2012. There’s also a Formula One race track being built at the cost of $40 billion on Yas Island, also near downtown. Yet the emirate is cultivating a softer side to its image: An ecological preserve located 6 miles into the Persian Gulf on Sir Bani Yas Island is under construction, and the Qasr Al Sarab retreat in the Liwa desert is in the works.