Fears of Qatar’s smallness increase as FIFA World Cup looms in 2022
With the 2022 World Cup in Qatar widely prepared, the crisis of its tiny territory is once again coming to the fore – one of the huge concerns of fans and organizers, as clamor to find a place in Qatar for the World Cup has led to payments of up to £60,000 for a month in a private flat.
An estimated 1.2 million visitors are expected to visit the small Gulf state, which usually has less than three million people, during the tournament in November and December. Friday’s World Cup draw, which drew England, Iran, the United States, Ukraine, Scotland or Wales, has prompted a wave of inquiries from fans looking to secure a place to stay.
In an interview, C.J. Joyner, a England fan from Coventry who travels to every major tournament and hopes to book an apartment in Qatar so he can take his partner and newborn son, said: “If you go on booking.com or Airbnb, you’re talking now about 50 or 60,000 for a month in an apartment or in a room.. Hotels and actual things that you can’t really book – there’s literally no availability.. There are many families available but they are not yet available for reservations”.
Joyner continued: I can understand that there will be a lot of people thinking or not what I’m going to do.. However, I am still confident that everyone will find a place to live.
Organizers say that various accommodation options can now be booked through their official gate – a room for two people on a cruise ship currently available at £3,000 for six nights. Cruise ships will save a total of more than 4,000 rooms and will dock in the Gulf overlooking the skyscraper in Doha. Their goal, organizers say, has always been to get fair and reasonable prices to visit fans.
“More than 30,000 hotels and rooms are still under construction and will be put on the market in due course”, the Supreme Committee said.
Some private accommodation providers are quoting astonishing numbers of luxury villas – the owner of one of four bedrooms said that it would be £20,000 a night for visitors to use their properties during the World Cup, the most expensive option being camping in the desert outside Doha.
A beach resort located south of the city has a huge area of sand between sand dunes and the sea. They plan to erect hundreds of luxury cabins, but so far they cannot confirm the cost of erecting them.
