Qatar Wants Tourists Who Stay Longer – and Spend More

Qatar’s new goal for tourism isn’t to have the most travelers in the region – it wants travelers who stay longer and spend more, according to the chairman of Qatar Tourism, Saad Bin Ali Al Kharji.

“I’m not looking to drive the [visitor] numbers high, rather [to increase] people staying longer and increase the quality of visitors,” said Al Kharji at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Wednesday.

Qatar had 9.95 million room nights last year, according to Qatar Tourism data, referring to the total number of rooms occupied. The country had around five million total tourists.

“Everyone globally wants to increase their number of visitors. We are focused more on room nights, though,” said Al Kharji. “That’s the most important [metric] for Qatar.”

Al Kharji said Qatar’s room nights grew 22% last year.

Accor CEO and chairman Sebastien Bazin was also on stage with Al Kharji. Accor is a major operator in Qatar and a member of the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) sits on Accor’s board. Bazin agreed that increasing the length of stay is key.

“It costs a fortune to get people to Doha, so we need them to stay an extra two nights,” he said. Bazin added that, even though Qatar gained visibility when it hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2022, more needs to be done to create awareness.

On the topic of extending vacations, Bazin said that one of Qatar’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t have enough beach resorts.

“The difficulty of this country, and it’s one, and it’s being addressed, it doesn’t have enough luxury beach resort experiences,” Bazin said. “They built it in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, they’re doing it in Saudi Arabia, but Qatar is late. Most of the hotels [in Qatar] today don’t have great beach access.”

“That’s what is missing in this country. We need to go quick at it. We need to catch up.”

Responding to Bazin’s point, Al Kharji said Qatar has stopped issuing new hotel licenses, unless they are beach projects. “We stopped licensing new hotels in Qatar, the only hotels I’ll give licenses to are those on the beachfront,” said the tourism chief.

Qatar has around 40,000 hotel keys and 7,000 in the pipeline, Al Kharji said.

Wanderlust follows the latest stories in tourism and experiences from across the globe.

Get it in your inbox every Thursday.

By submitting this form, you agree to receive email communication from Skift.