I am off to Riyadh today via Singapore. It was meant to have been via Paris but a flu bug changed my plans. It has a nasty way of doing that, as we’ve all learnt in the last few years. Nothing’s going to stop us now – yeah! A bug will.
So, I am sitting at the Emirates Lounge, which is freezing, Airports and hotel ballrooms have their own climate zones, namely, cold. At check-in, I asked if everything was back to normal at the Dubai airport because I have a four-hour layover for my onward connection to Riyadh. The girl (masked), smiled (I think) and replied, “Yes, all back to normal.”
Dubai’s reputation as a global hub took a serious hit with the Great Flood of April 16 but true to form, the government has acted swiftly to repair damage done and yesterday, approved a $545m package to repair rain damage of citizen homes.
“We learned great lessons in dealing with severe rains,” said Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum after a cabinet meeting, adding that ministers approved “two billion dirhams to deal with damage to the homes of citizens”.
Emirates chairman Sir Tim Reid sent an open letter of apology “to every customer who has had their travel plans disrupted during this time”.
He stated, “We sent over 100 employee volunteers to look after disrupted customers at Dubai Airport departures and in the transit area, prioritising medical cases, the elderly and other vulnerable travellers. To date, over 12,000 hotel rooms were secured to accommodate disrupted customers in Dubai, 250,000 meal vouchers have been issued, and more quantities of drinking water, blankets, and other amenities.
“Behind the scenes, it was all hands-on deck for thousands more employees across the organisation to get our operations back on track.
“As of this morning, Saturday 20 April, our regular flight schedules have been restored. Passengers previously stranded in the airport transit area have been rebooked and are enroute to their destinations. We have put together a taskforce to sort, reconcile, and deliver some 30,000 pieces of left-behind baggage to their owners.”
Just as bugs can stop us, so can Nature – the two are entirely related of course, and we’d do well to respect them.
I am in Riyadh right before the Future Hospitality Summit which is due to convene April 29-May 1 and hoteliers, consultants, lawyers, investors, developers, will gather to talk about their grand plans to build for the greatest tourism development unfolding before our very eyes in history.
A Knight Frank report says that Saudi Arabia is projected to have 320,000 new hotel rooms by 2030 across the country to accommodate an influx of 150 million domestic and international tourists annually.
I’ve never been good at numbers but even I know that’s a lot. I wonder if in the history of hospitality, have so many rooms been built in such a short a time.
The expansion, says the Knight Frank report, will boost the nation’s travel and tourism industry which already accounts for nearly six percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP today and is central to achieving the government’s goal of tourism contributing 10 percent to the economy by 2030.
Saudi Arabia welcomed a record number of visitors in 2022. Tourism spending reached $23.2 billion (SAR 87 billion) in the first half of 2023, a 132 percent increase over the same period in 2022. Over the same six-month period, it recorded 14.6 million international arrivals – marking a 142 percent surge year-on-year – reflecting the strongest half-year performance for Saudi’s tourism industry on record.
Well, I am glad to be added as a statistic.
I am curious to see first-hand what’s going on. Just as I visited Dubai all those decades ago and my jaw dropped, and my fingers hurt, from keeping up with all those reports of development after development, I am sure I’ll be beset by the same feelings, except probably a thousand-fold.
The numbers just sound bigger, the possibilities more incredulous.
I am looking forward to the journey ahead. I will go check out the airport in Dubai, to see if there are any signs of water damage. I have time.
And when I arrive in Riyadh and check in at the Radisson Blu in the Riyadh Diplomatic Quarter, I will imagine 320,000 more hotel rooms such as the one I am staying in, coming on the next six years.
Anyway, with time on my hands at the lounge, I asked AI to visualise for me an image of Dubai by 2050, and it gave me this. It has lots of water.
Out of curiosity, I also asked AI to imagine Riyadh by 2050 and this was what it cooked up.
Hallucination or inspiration?
