Middle East magic!
Part of the food court area adjacent to the Magic Island FEC at Manama.
Following our look at Dubai in our March/April issue and how the economic situation there was impacting on the area’s theme park, FEC and entertainment industry, David Snook takes in a wider view of the Middle East FEC/indoor theme park market and discovers a healthy, thriving, sophisticated industry that continues to grow and develop
DUBAI gets all the glory, but in truth, for every family entertainment project that gets under way in Dubai, there are 10 others starting elsewhere in the Middle East. And Dubai has been hitting the headlines for all of
the wrong reasons in the past year. Go there, however, and there are few signs of a country (or in this case part of a country – the United Arab Emirates) on the brink of defaulting on its financial obligations. Many of those elaborate leisure developments are
starting now, it is true, most having been placed neatly on the back-burner for a less inflammatory time. But those which have operated throughout the “crisis” have survived and even thrived. Our understanding is that the emirate’s FECs have, on average, seen their incomes diminish by just 7 per cent
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during 2009 and into 2010. That may not be the case in other areas of commercial activities, of course, but a visit to Dubai for the annual DEAL trade show (April 25-27) saw the famous monorail opening up, the streets primly clean and all the public fountains working. There was little evidence of a country in trouble. Dubai tends to get the attention because of its virtual
boom period during the past 30 years. Home to 40 per cent of the world’s construction cranes and the epitome of sophistication, Dubai is the most “western,” the most liberal and the most “moneyed” of the Islamic countries. It also has the best family entertainment centres, although that credit is these days given only marginally. Go to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar or Kuwait and you
will see some locations which will give anything in Dubai a run for its money. The competition is intense, not just to attract locals and tourists, but it has become something of a competition between the operators themselves; a location which becomes the talking point of the industry is a symbol of business success. It is all healthy for an industry created within a community
built on mineral wealth and growing significance in the world of commerce. The need to entertain a population
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