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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