Qatar's Battered Tourism Sector Will Need Three Years to Recover - Bloomberg

Qatar's Battered Tourism Sector Will Need Three Years to Recover - Bloomberg:

Qatar’s tourism industry will need three years to recover from the loss of tourists from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states after the gas-rich country was boycotted by its neighbors in June 2017.

The host of the 2022 World Cup plans to add a further 17,000 hotel rooms to the 26,000 it already has to prepare for the soccer tournament, a target that’s putting pressure on room rates as visitor numbers decline, Hassan Abdulrahman Al-Ibrahim, the acting chairman of the Qatar Tourism Authority, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in Doha.

“Our previous strategy focused on regional markets,” Al-Ibrahim said. “We will need two-to-three years to recover from the drop that we had in visitors.”