World Cup hotel shortage for supporters planning Qatar trips
Qatar wants to attract 1.2 million people to the World Cup but will struggle to accommodate many of them.
With ticket sales beginning in January, supporters are in for a shock when they look for somewhere to stay: Qatar already looks sold out.
Extensive searches by The Associated Press of leading hotel chains and aggregation websites found only one property with availability for the entire tournament which runs from Nov. 21 to Dec. 18.
Most rooms have already been block-booked by World Cup organizers, in part to prevent price gouging, but mainly to ensure availability for teams, FIFA officials, sponsors and media.
“If a team is qualified, it’s now that people are trying to find accommodation,” Ronan Evain, executive director of the Football Supporters Europe group, told the AP. “And at the moment there is nothing.”
Qatar’s Supreme Committee, which in charge of World Cup planning, has provided the first details to the AP acknowledging the accommodation challenges after weeks of questions.
Only approximately 90,000 rooms will be made available to the public via a website. That is around the same number of fans from the United States who had tickets for the 2018 World Cup which was spread across Russia and had hotels available on the open market.
Yet the AP has been told that surveys and data modeling by Qatari officials based on travel to previous World Cups show they now anticipate 850,000 overseas visitors will require rooms. World Cup organizers have also said more than 1.2 million visitors will come. The most recent data from the Qatar Tourism Authority said there are 33,208 rooms in hotels and hotel apartments.
What Qatar boasts as being its key selling point — the most compact World Cup ever with the eight stadiums within a 30-mile radius of Doha — could prove...
