Bangkok-based Minor Hotels will expand in Dubai next month as new hotel construction gathers pace in the UAE.
Minor will take over the operations of a 216-room property from Mövenpick in Deira in July. The property’s parent company is Bin Sulayem Investments.
Called Avani Deira, this will be its first Avani branded hotel in the Middle East.
Minor Hotels will open another Avani at the Ibn Battuta Mall which is undergoing expansion. The 372-room property is expected to open in 2018. The Thai group has a joint venture with Nakheel to build a 500-room Avani beachfront resort at the developer’s Deira Islands project.
The supply of new hotels means demand is yet to catch up with the glut of new hotel rooms in the market, putting a downward pressure on the room rates.
There are 27,344 rooms waiting to come on stream across 93 hotels in the UAE, according to STR on Tuesday. The UAE followed Saudi Arabia, which reported the largest number of hotel rooms in the planning stage with 34,680 rooms across 77 hotels.
In April, the average room rate in Dubai was Dh771.74, a 15.4 per cent decline year-on-year, while occupancy declined 0.9 per cent year-on-year to 79.7 per cent, according to STR.
“Although Dubai reported overall performance declines, the [five-day] Arabian Travel Market [in April] helped the market reach occupancy levels above 80 per cent for [the] five consecutive days,” it said.
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Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
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More from Janine di Giovanni
Try out the test yourself
Q1 Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 per cent per year. After five years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow?
a) More than $102
b) Exactly $102
c) Less than $102
d) Do not know
e) Refuse to answer
Q2 Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1 per cent per year and inflation was 2 per cent per year. After one year, how much would you be able to buy with the money in this account?
a) More than today
b) Exactly the same as today
c) Less than today
d) Do not know
e) Refuse to answer
Q4 Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”
a) True
b) False
d) Do not know
e) Refuse to answer
The “Big Three” financial literacy questions were created by Professors Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington School of Business and Olivia Mitchell, of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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