The Gulf Outbound Hotel Index
Methodology and definitions
Every number on the Index links here. If a figure and this page disagree, this page is wrong and will be corrected with a dated changelog entry — the number will not be quietly changed.
Motivation
No public dataset describes Gulf-outbound business-to-business wholesale hotel demand at destination level. Published cancellation benchmarks disagree with each other by roughly a factor of two and none of them is resolved by destination for this market.
Composition
36,154 bookings. The export holds 36,159 records; five carry no product line and are excluded from all calculations.
| Product | Bookings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Hotel | 36,002 | 99.6% |
| Attraction | 102 | 0.3% |
| Transfer | 45 | 0.1% |
| Car | 5 | 0.0% |
| Status | Bookings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed | 25,933 | 71.7% |
| Cancelled | 8,641 | 23.9% |
| Pending | 1,572 | 4.3% |
| Quote | 5 | 0.0% |
| Other | 3 | 0.0% |
Collection
One wholesale desk, 22 March 2022 to 31 August 2023. 18 distinct suppliers appear in the source, the top three carrying 57.8% of the 25,076 bookings where a supplier field is populated. No supplier is named, in any field, including metadata.
Preprocessing
90.8% of bookings resolved to a city through a curated gazetteer of cities, aliases and districts, followed by a manual pass over the long tail. Low-confidence placements were discarded. The 9.2% that could not be resolved are excluded from every city and country aggregate rather than guessed into one.
Property names were normalised and clustered to 7,345 canonical properties from a larger set of raw name variants. Brand words are retained during clustering; an earlier version stripped them and incorrectly merged distinct properties in the same city.
Definitions
- Cancellation rate = cancelled ÷ (confirmed + cancelled) = 8,641 ÷ 34,574 = 25.0%. Pending bookings are excluded from the denominator. Against all rows it is 23.9%. Both are stated; they are never mixed.
- Lead time = travel start − booking timestamp, in whole days, computed on confirmed bookings only. Median 9 days.
- Out-of-hours booking = created between 18:00 and 08:00 desk-local time.
- Decided booking = confirmed or cancelled. Excludes pending.
Suppression floors
A city needs 25 bookings to enter any ranking and 150 to appear in a destination cut. These are the re-identification control. They are published because a control that is not visible is not a defence.
Limitations
One desk. One origin market. Seventeen months. The window ends 31 August 2023, so it predates current regional conditions. It is not a global sample and is not claimed to be one. It is non-reproducible rather than largest or only.
Maintenance
Version 1.0, last updated 4 August 2026. The underlying window is fixed, so new editions come from new cuts of the same data, never from restamping an old page. Every change is logged with a date.