A look inside a fan village at Qatar World Cup
Fans have booked accommodation in more than 90,000 rooms, tents, apartments, villas and portacabins on each of the peak days of the World Cup, tournament organisers said Wednesday (November 9), adding that at least 25,000 rooms are still available each day.
"The market is still open and (fans) have enough time to decide and to book," said Omar Al-Jaber, executive director of accommodations for the Supreme Committee of Delivery and Legacy (SC), organisers of Qatar's World Cup, which begins Nov 20.
He stood in a giant tent that will serve as the dining hall for a fan village workers have set up on a stretch of desert hemmed in by expressways south of Doha.
For $200 a night, fans can rent one of 6,000 brightly-painted aluminium portacabins, arranged in long, straight rows.
After the tournament, Qatar will donate the portacabins to "poor countries" to be used as houses, Al-Jaber said.
Qatar is expecting 1.2 million visitors during the month-long tournament, with the peak number expected between Nov 24 and 28, during the busy group stage.
On average, fans will spend seven nights in Qatar, al-Jaber said.
Organisers introduced more than 500 shuttle flights a day, allowing fans to stay in neighbouring cities like Dubai and alleviating concerns tiny Qatar would face an accommodation shortage.
With a population of 3 million, Qatar has fewer than 31,000 hotel rooms so organisers identified a total of 130,000 rooms in alternative accommodation, converting all available real estate stock into temporary housing.
Accor, Europe's largest hotels operator, is managing most of the apartments and villas. Three cruise ships will dock at Doha's port to provide more than 5,000 rooms. And some fans will stay in 1,000 modern tents organisers will pitch on a man-made island north of Doha, Al-Jaber said.
In case inclement weather like sandstorms or rain make tents or fan villages uninhabitable, organisers have arranged "backup rooms in a different area...especially for the people who's decided to stay in an open space area like a fan village," al-Jaber said.
