Yas Hotel 'full' for F1 race weekend - Aldar MD

The Yas Hotel which straddles the Abu Dhabi F1 circuit will be full on race weekend while some other hotels in the UAE capital have "enormous waiting lists", a senior Aldar Hotels and Hospitality official has said.

Managing director Paul Bell said all rooms at the new luxury hotel were booked in advance of Formula 1 racing arriving in Abu Dhabi later this month.

"We are full in the hotel over the race weekend; there are no rooms available in the hotel," Bell said in an interview published by Hotelier Middle East.

"For the other hotels, I can’t tell you that everything is full, but I know that we are almost there and I know there are enormous waiting lists in some of the hotels," he added.

"I guess it depends what you mean by full occupancy, but from our perspective we’ve got 2,250 rooms on the island, assuming all of the rooms are available — you get the odd room out of order in new hotels now and again as you know — [it is]."

He said: "As far as our hotels are concerned on the island, the demand is significantly more than the supply."

Commenting on the run-up to launching the hotel, Bell added that he thought Aldar Developments had "pulled off a miraculous development coup by delivering these things on time" for the Grand Prix which takes place on November 1.

"Normally in these situations you would have a long period of soft opening running up to a heavier trading period. In these circumstances, we are in a situation where we will be experiencing much higher levels of occupancy at an earlier stage than any soft opening we’ve ever been involved in. That requires us to do a lot of planning."

The Yas Hotel boasts two towers - one of which sits on the land side of the track and the other one at right angles to it sitting in the marina on the other side of the track.

"You’ve got a building which effectively expands the track itself; the cars go through the building and the two towers are linked by a two-storey bridge," Bell said.

"Effectively you can see the track from every room, we have pool decks on both of the towers; you can see up to 70 percent of the track from there. It’s the only hotel that has back-of-house access, we have a bridge that goes directly into the pit area of the track so it allows access which is unprecedented anywhere else."

On room rates, Bell said that they were controlled for the race weekend by Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, without specifying what they were.

"We’ve also done some work on rates that have been charged at other F1 events elsewhere in the world; we certainly don’t believe that our rates are anything outside what you see anywhere else. We also recognise that because of the position of our hotel sitting right on top of the track, this is bound to be a period at which our rates are at their highest because the demand is at the highest as well," he added.