Despite battling severe global pandemic headwinds, the international hospitality sector could begin to rebound by mid-2021.
That’s according to Saeed Al Ghurair, board member at sprawling Dubai-based conglomerate Al Ghurair Group. The serial entrepreneur also predicts that the UAE hospitality sector could heal faster than its global counterparts.
“There is still fear around the virus even though there is a newly introduced vaccine. [The sector will rebound] when people become comfortable going about their normal lives – this requires a balance of factors between the regulatory side and the psychological side,” Al Ghurair told Arabian Business.
Dubai received a record-breaking 16.73 million overnight visitors in 2019 and 2020 was thought to continue this trend, though once the pandemic reached the UAE, Dubai occupancy rates reached as low as 23 percent.
However, hotel occupancy rates for December clocked in at 71 percent – the highest rate since February, according to research firm STR.
“I believe it could take to mid-2021 for all this to settle in globally and hopefully we can go back to normal,” Al Ghurair said, adding that the UAE hospitality sector could see recovery as soon as Q1 2021 because of its “excellent pandemic management”.
Making hay while the sun shines
For his own part, Al Ghurair is capitalising on the raft of new trends that have been accelerated by the onset of the pandemic, including the rise of home working and a slump in global hotel revenues.
As co-founder of Spacemize, a London-headquartered mobile workspace platform, Al Ghurair is offering weary-at-home workers the opportunity to work in underutilised hotel lobbies across the UK.
Spacemize is a London-headquartered mobile workspace platform
Founded in 2020, Spacemize allows its members to reserve casual spaces in hotel lobbies and restaurants from which to work and meet, alongside food and drink discounts, free parking, 24-hour access with unlimited bookings, and discounts on meeting rooms and hotel rooms.
Despite the UK continuing to be heavily afflicted by coronavirus, the Dubai-based entrepreneur said Spacemize saw an “exponential rise” in hotel and customer sign ups in 2020 – between strict national lockdowns.
“Right now, the UK is undergoing a heavy Tier 4 lockdown. However, before that – at the beginning of the pandemic from April to June – we were getting a lot of business because Spacemise offers an in-between working space. We are in-between a co-work space and working from home,” he said, adding that the pandemic has seen a raft of traditional co-work offices forced to close their doors.
“A lot of the co-work spaces closed but hotels were still welcoming guests. We work by utilising the extra space hotels have, so this trend played into our hands,” Al Ghurair said.
Spacemize co-founder Saeed Al Ghurair is also a board member at Dubai-based conglomerate Al Ghurair Group
Into America and Europe
Spacemize has a British footprint with over 1,000 UK hotels on its books, but the co-founder plans to take the company further afield into the US and Europe. However, the UAE is not yet on the company’s radar due to economies of scale, Al Ghurair said.
“Once the pandemic lifts, hotels will be very keen to maximise custom so they will be working hard to bring in co-workers. Spacemize will either become a main venue for co-working or we will get an overspill – in both cases we will increase the size of the business over the next few months,” he added.
Statistics released by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) in April showed 49.2 percent of adults in employment were working from home, as a result of social distancing measures introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Between 2012 and 2016, flexi-time has risen by 12.35 percent and ONS has revealed that the number of UK workers who have moved into remote working has increased by nearly a quarter of a million over a decade.
“There is more acceptance of our away-from-home working model in the UK and market trends are in our favour,” Al Ghurair said.
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