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With the Middle Eastern hubs posting record 2024 passenger numbers this latest edition of the Traveller Insights Series, produced exclusively for DFNI by travel retail data experts Air4casts, focuses on affluent travellers from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The series aims to provide fresh insights into the characteristics of each of the major travelling nationalities. All data comes from the Air4casts Luxury Shopper platform that combines travel and luxury airport shop intelligence with bespoke quarterly consumer polling.
The number of high-net-worth individuals throughout the Middle East has almost doubled in the last ten years with over seventy thousand of them in Dubai alone. They love to travel and in Air4casts’ latest quarterly poll they reveal their Spring 2025 travel intentions.
Paris in the Spring for Qataris
Top of the preferred destinations for a Spring vacation among wealthy Qatari respondents. Paris also featured as the third destination of choice for Emirati luxury holidaymakers. Saudi travellers much prefer Cairo or Dubai for a Spring break while Qataris seeking a luxury beach getaway favoured Bali.
For business trips this coming quarter both the UK and the USA feature prominently in the travel intentions of wealthy Emirati and Qatari business people while Egypt, the UAE and Nigeria are the top work destinations for high-net-worth Saudi travellers. Business travellers across the three nationalities in the study were overwhelmingly male.
Private Jets and First Class Dominate Air Travel
Together first-class legacy airline travel and travel by private jet accounted for well over half of all the trips made by this quarter's HNW Middle East panel. At 16% of the total, private jet use was higher than that recorded by either the Chinese or Indian panels in this latest survey.
Departures from Dubai airport dominated the First-Class travel scene with twice as many people choosing Dubai airport as their preferred First-Class travel departure point compared with Doha, and especially so where business travel was concerned. First Class travel to the USA topped Doha's luxury travel routes and looks set to do so again in the Spring of 2025.
Luxury Middle East Travellers and Airport Shopping
The 1000 respondents in the Q4 Middle East poll were less enthusiastic airport shoppers than their Chinese or Indian counterparts. Just over a third of them said that they had visited either the regular duty free shop or a luxury boutique at one of the airports on their last trip. However, for those that took the trouble to visit one of the stand-alone super luxury outlets at Doha airport in particular, the propensity to purchase was high at over 70%.
Those respondents that were looking to buy luxury items during their trips abroad tended to favour waiting to shop downtown at their destination rather than buying at the airport. This was especially the case among those travelling by private jet where so often the departure point is a small, specialised business aviation airport with limited or no shopping facilities.
Doha’s stunning array of luxury boutiques clearly swayed some of the panel to spend before departure. There are at least 25 truly luxury boutiques available to departing passengers at Doha. To a lesser extent this was also the case for those using Abu Dhabi airport. For those leaving from Dubai airport, however, buying lower priced traditional Duty-Free items was much more pronounced than at Doha.
Outside the Middle East the panel highly rated the luxury shopping at both London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle airports with New York's JFK much less so.
Watch out for next month's traveller insight focus which will look at the Chinese New Year domestic travel market with special focus on Hainan Island and Macau.
