SALALAH, July 18 - Monsoon is hanging everywhere on the Salalah mountains for more than two weeks now.
Its clear impact can be seen in the city in terms of nice weather, off and on normal to heavy drizzling and big umbrellas put up everywhere in front of numerous coffee shops spread over all parts of the city.
But for the hoteliers in Salalah something is missing amid these niceties. That something lies in the number of visitors this time around.
“Occupancy is there, demand is there, enquiries are on for the last week of July and whole of August, but spoiled by the Khareef demand we hoteliers probably are in the habit of boasting our ‘full occupancy’ tag. That is missing,” said a city-based hotel manager.
Factors for this may be too many, but most of them do not want go into the details of those factors.
What they are hoping is the fact that the city should get more rains in remaining July and August and the prospective guests should have their pockets full. To be more specific they are pinning hopes on last week of the month when everyone should have some surplus money and think about coming to Salalah from the neighbouring GCC countries.
“For the last three years Eid al Fitr holidays and onset of Khareef were happening almost simultaneously. This year Eid holidays happened when there were no rains in Salalah. So we missed those visitors. We still had guests, but the numbers were not that great,” said another hotel staff.
Long weekend due to Renaissance Day (July 23) holiday is likely to boost domestic movement of people for whom Salalah is the best option with nice weather, drizzling delight and temperatures ranging between 24-26 degrees Celsius in the city. Mountains, however, are having far less temperatures with continuous fog like condition and visibility as low as 50 metres at certain places.
Going into factors for the big hotels for the situation, are availability of many new accommodations and group B hotels in and around the city. Now many new accommodations are available in central Salalah, New Salalah, Dahariz, Saada and
Awqad.
The big hotel managements are fine with their competition with the organised group B or whatever commercial establishments, but some of them raised concern over “unregulated” domestic suppliers, who are letting out their apartments without any commercial obligations.
They rued their competition from an entirely unorganised sector and asked for setting up of some benchmark to serve the tourists in a better way and maintain the high image of the destination, “Because the uniqueness of Khareef is not available in whole of the GCC region.”
Some hospitality experts called for regulating the practice of renting out furnished apartments on an urgent basis, because it would become more complicated if not addressed urgently. “If regulated properly, that sector can give a healthy competition to other hospitality operators in the city and be part of a system that safe and secure,” said Robert, a visitor from UAE who works as a tourism faculty.
Kaushalendra Singh
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