Luxury Hotels Boom in the Middle East

Feb. 6, 2008— -- In the Middle East, it's not only oil that's booming.

Business and leisure travel to the region has climbed 18 percent a year since 2005 , according to Deloitte's annual Hotel Benchmark Survey, released this week, and is expected to grow another 6 percent this year, to 41 million visitors.

This has fueled renewed interest in the palace-style hotels that once pampered kings and aristocrats more than a century ago. As a result, exquisite restorations of such ancient structures, including cave dwellings and Bedouin camps (some dating to the 1st century) coupled with modern luxuries such as air conditioning and Bulgari toiletries are now available to luxury travelers across the Middle East, from Bethlehem to the Turkish hinterlands. And new hotels are going up "at breakneck speed," says Lorna Clarke, director of the survey.

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This tourism is transforming the Middle East, particularly Dubai, says Albert Herrera, vice president of luxury hotel reservation service Virtuoso, Ltd.

"When I first came in 1999, they were giving hotel rooms away," he says. "Now tourism is their biggest revenue source, and it's having rippling effects on other economies in the region."

Indeed, the average gross domestic product in the Middle East grew 5.4 percent in 2007 (compared to 3.4 percent for the rest of the world), according to Deloitte's report, in part because of the tourist boom.

New buildings like the Burj Al-Arab in Dubai and the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi are following a trend started in the mid-1960s, when Middle Eastern architects began their painstaking renovations of palaces and ancient monasteries.

The Emir Amin Palace Hotel in Beiteddine, Lebanon, was the first of these; restored by the late Lebanese architect Pierre El-Khoury in 1965, it was originally built by Emir Bashir Shihab II for his son, and was inhabited by the Emirs for centuries. It is part local monument, part upscale hotel with its historical brandishes serving as the décor for an otherwise modern-looking space.