Why now is the best time to get a sweet hotel deal in Dubai
The city is experiencing growing pains, which means many luxury 5-star hotels opening up there currently have excess capacity and are offering rooms at bargain prices
Dubai is jam-packed with five-star hotels, beaches, luxury malls and newly minted landmarks designed to be the biggest of everything – tallest building, largest indoor theme park, second-biggest mall, etc.
It’s all part of the city’s aims to be the most popular tourist destination in the world by 2025.
Already, it is the fourth-most visited city in the world, with a projected 16.7 million visitors this year, according to Mastercard's Global Destination Cities Index.
But all of that development aimed at the future of Dubai comes with growing pains. If you're someone who's been itching to visit the city, now's the time to take advantage.
Currently, there are 703 hotels with 111,864 rooms in Dubai, a city of 3 million people. That's slightly more than the supply in New York City, a city of 8.6 million people.
Only about 20 per cent of Dubai's rooms are in one- to three-star hotels. By comparison, 43 per cent of Paris's hotel rooms are in one- to three-star hotels.
And development is far from over in Dubai. The city is currently ramping up to host the World Expo in 2020, when it is expected see 25 million visitors over the course of the six-month event.
The number of hotel rooms is set to rise to 132,000 by the end of next year, and an additional 53 five-star hotels will open before 2020.
Dubai has a lot of fancy hotels and a lot of open rooms