Lessons from the Middle East’s Theme-Park Experiment — and What They Mean for the Next Generation of Resorts
For several decades, the Gulf has been one of the world’s most ambitious laboratories for tourism development.
Dubai built islands, hotels, shopping malls, indoor ski slopes, waterparks and entertainment districts. Abu Dhabi developed Yas Island around motorsport, leisure, hospitality and increasingly theme parks. Saudi Arabia is now doing something even larger through Qiddiya and its wider Vision 2030 entertainment strategy.
The scale is extraordinary.
And that makes the Middle East unusually valuable to anybody planning a resort somewhere else in the world.
Because the region provides examples of both sides of destination development: what happens when capital and ambition run ahead of proven demand, and what happens when attractions are gradually integrated into a functioning destination ecosystem.
The most important lesson is surprisingly simple:
A theme park can be built. A destination has to be grown.
That distinction should influence almost every decision made when developing a new resort in South America, Asia, Australia, Africa or anywhere else.
1. The Gulf discovered that money can solve construction — but not demand
The Gulf states entered large-scale leisure development with several enormous advantages.
They had capital. They could build infrastructure quickly. They could acquire major international intellectual property. They could hire the world’s leading architects, ride manufacturers, consultants, operators and master planners.
They could therefore solve problems that stop most developments before they begin.
But one problem cannot simply be bought:
guest behaviour.
You cannot instruct tourists to visit a theme park because you spent three billion dollars constructing it.
You cannot assume that because twenty million people visit a city, five million of them will buy a theme-park ticket.
You cannot assume that a spectacular roller coaster turns a two-night city break into a five-night family holiday.
And you cannot assume that somebody who visits once will come back next year.
This is where parts of the Gulf leisure boom became such an important case study.
The engineering sometimes came before the market.
2. Dubai: a successful tourism destination does not automatically create a successful theme-park market
Dubai is particularly instructive because there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Dubai’s tourism industry.
Quite the opposite.
Dubai received 14.9 million international overnight visitors in 2016, the year the major Dubai Parks and Resorts complex started opening, and 15.79 million in 2017.
This is important.
Dubai Parks and Resorts did not open in an unknown city with no tourists.
It opened beside one of the world’s most successful aviation and tourism hubs.
The original investment case nevertheless illustrates the danger of converting destination visitor numbers directly into attraction attendance forecasts.
Dubai Parks and Resorts projected 6.7 million visits for 2017. Actual attendance was approximately 2.3 million. The resort was also not fully operational until late in the year, which should be acknowledged, but the gap between forecast demand and realised demand was enormous.
Attendance improved to approximately 2.8 million in 2018, but the operator still reported substantial losses; the 2018 net loss was around AED1 billion. Plans for Six Flags Dubai were subsequently stopped in their existing form after a strategic review that explicitly considered customer demand.
That gives us one of the most valuable equations in modern destination development:
Tourist arrivals ≠ theme-park attendance.
Dubai already had tourists.
The problem was converting them.
3. Why didn’t Dubai’s millions of tourists simply go to the parks?
Because tourists do not arrive as empty containers waiting for attractions to fill their schedules.
Dubai was already competing against itself.
A visitor might have three or four days available and dozens of possible activities: beaches, shopping, restaurants, desert excursions, Burj Khalifa, waterparks, hotel pools, nightlife, cultural attractions, excursions and simply relaxing.
A full theme-park day therefore has a substantial opportunity cost.
This is an important distinction from Orlando.
Many people travel to Orlando because of the parks.
Many people travelled to Dubai and then decided whether a park deserved one of the limited days they were already spending there.
Those are completely different demand models.
A theme-park feasibility study that treats them as equivalent can produce extraordinarily optimistic forecasts.
4. Dubai also demonstrated the danger of building supply simultaneously
Another problem emerges when an emerging destination develops too much entertainment capacity at roughly the same time.
Every individual project may have a feasibility study showing demand.
But collectively those projects are competing for the same households, tourists, hotel nights, discretionary spending and leisure days.
This creates what I would call the Masterplan Paradox:
Every attraction looks viable when analysed individually.
The destination becomes unviable when all those individual forecasts are added together.
This problem is particularly common in government-supported mega-developments.
Park A assumes three million visitors.
Park B assumes four million.
The waterpark assumes two million.
The entertainment district assumes eight million.
Hotels assume seventy-five percent occupancy.
Retail assumes millions of additional visitors.
The masterplan then quietly assumes that all those demand projections can coexist.
Often they cannot.
They are different claims on the same consumer’s time and wallet.
5. Yet Dubai also contains one of the best counterexamples: Global Village
Dubai’s experience should therefore never be reduced to “Dubai theme parks failed.”
Some leisure concepts have been enormously successful.
Global Village welcomed 10.5 million visitors during its 2024–25 season, following 10 million the previous season.
That is fascinating because Global Village does several things very differently from the traditional mega-theme-park model.
It is seasonal rather than pretending the climate does not exist. It combines food, shopping, culture, entertainment and rides. It is highly repeatable. It appeals strongly to residents as well as tourists. Its content changes. People can visit for an evening rather than surrender an entire holiday day.
It therefore fits the behaviour of its market.
That gives us another lesson:
Adapt the attraction to the market rather than expecting the market to adapt to the attraction.
Climate is particularly important in the Gulf. AECOM notes that extreme heat directly affects attendance forecasting and forces developers to choose between expensive indoor environments, climate-sensitive outdoor parks or hybrid approaches.
6. Abu Dhabi took a slower route, and Yas Island became something different
Yas Island is perhaps the most useful Middle Eastern counterexample.
The important thing about Yas is not simply that it has good theme parks.
It is the sequence and accumulation of destination assets.
Yas began welcoming visitors around 2010. Ferrari World opened as an early anchor. Yas Waterworld followed. Warner Bros. World came later. CLYMB, hotels, retail, Yas Marina Circuit, events, golf, Yas Mall, Etihad Arena and eventually SeaWorld expanded the reasons for people to come.
In other words, Yas did not remain:
“an island with a theme park.”
It progressively became:
“a destination that happens to contain several theme parks.”
That difference is enormous.
Today someone can visit Yas for Formula 1 without intending to visit Ferrari World.
Another visitor can come for a concert.
Another for Warner Bros.
Another for shopping.
Another for SeaWorld.
Another for a conference.
Another for a family holiday.
Another may stay in a hotel and combine several of them.
Every new attraction can therefore feed the existing ecosystem instead of being required to generate an entirely new market by itself.
7. Infrastructure is part of the attraction
Yas also demonstrates something that theme-park developers frequently underestimate.
The guest experience does not begin at the park gate.
It begins when somebody asks:
“How difficult is it to get there?”
Yas sits close to Abu Dhabi’s airport and has been developed with roads, hotels, internal transport, tourism infrastructure and connections between attractions. Yas itself describes access from Abu Dhabi and Dubai alongside multiple ways of moving around the island.
Abu Dhabi’s wider Tourism Strategy 2030 explicitly identifies Infrastructure and Mobility as one of its core pillars alongside accommodation, attractions, marketing and the visitor experience.
That is not glamorous.
Nobody produces beautiful concept art of airport immigration capacity, road junctions, public transport, hotel inventory, staff accommodation or baggage systems.
But these things determine whether beautiful concept art eventually becomes a successful destination.
8. The Yas numbers now suggest that the ecosystem is working
Miral reported more than 38 million visits to Yas Island in 2024, up 10% from 2023, while Yas hotels achieved approximately 82% average occupancy. These are island-wide visits rather than individual theme-park attendance figures, an important distinction, but they demonstrate the scale the destination ecosystem has achieved.
Perhaps an even stronger signal came in 2025.
Disney chose Yas Island for its first new major theme-park resort development since Shanghai Disneyland.
Disney and Miral announced a new Disney destination for Abu Dhabi, with Miral financing, constructing and operating it and Disney Imagineering responsible for creative design and operational oversight.
Disney did not choose an empty patch of desert and hope tourists would eventually arrive.
It chose an existing leisure destination containing transport access, hotels, established parks, tourism flows, destination marketing and complementary entertainment.
That is almost the perfect demonstration of the principle:
Create sufficient destination gravity and eventually attractions want to locate inside your ecosystem rather than you having to invent the market for every attraction.
9. Abu Dhabi’s real achievement is therefore not Ferrari World
It is tempting to identify the physical icons as the success.
Ferrari World.
Warner Bros.
SeaWorld.
Formula 1.
But strategically, those are components.
The real achievement is destination gravity.
Destination gravity exists when one reason for visiting strengthens all the other reasons for visiting.
A concert creates hotel nights.
Hotel guests visit the parks.
A conference delegate extends a trip.
Formula 1 creates global awareness.
Theme parks extend family stays.
Restaurants capture evening spend.
Shopping gives bad-weather or low-energy alternatives.
New attractions create reasons for previous visitors to return.
Air connectivity expands the catchment.
That creates a flywheel.
The strongest resorts in the world work this way.
10. Qiddiya is the next great test
Saudi Arabia has taken Gulf entertainment development to an entirely different scale.
Qiddiya City is planned not merely as a theme-park resort but as a huge entertainment, sports, cultural and residential destination around Riyadh.
Its components include Six Flags, Aquarabia, motorsport, stadiums, gaming and esports, cultural experiences, hospitality and other entertainment assets. Long-term official projections have reached 40–48 million annual visits.
And as of 2026, Qiddiya is no longer only a rendering.
Six Flags Qiddiya City opened on 31 December 2025, while Aquarabia opened to the public in April 2026.
But an important caution is necessary.
We cannot yet call Qiddiya a proven success.
A park can generate tremendous curiosity during its opening years. Long-term success requires repeat visitation, pricing power, operational efficiency and continued demand after novelty wears off.
That takes years to establish.
11. Qiddiya does, however, appear to have learned several lessons from the previous Gulf generation
The strategic proposition is much broader than “build Six Flags and wait for international tourists.”
Qiddiya sits beside a huge domestic metropolitan market in Riyadh.
Official planning has explicitly included repeat visitation, transportation, entertainment, sport, culture and nature rather than treating the theme park as an isolated object. Earlier Vision 2030 planning even specifically identified transportation connections and sustainable phased growth as requirements.
The development is also being positioned simultaneously as somewhere to live, work and play.
That matters.
The domestic audience can provide the base load.
Regional tourists provide additional demand.
International tourists become upside rather than necessarily carrying the entire business case.
That hierarchy is considerably healthier than:
“We will build something enormous and therefore international tourists will come.”
Qiddiya’s eventual performance will therefore be enormously important for the global attractions industry.
It may prove whether a Gulf mega-destination can combine extraordinary capital investment with a sufficiently strong domestic demand engine.
12. That leads to perhaps the biggest lesson: design for three markets, not one
A new resort should normally distinguish between three fundamentally different audiences.
Market 1: Residents.
People who can visit repeatedly and sustain weekday, shoulder-season and off-season demand.
Market 2: Regional visitors.
People who can realistically drive or take a short flight and may visit several times during the destination’s life.
Market 3: International destination tourists.
People who must choose your resort instead of hundreds of competing destinations around the world.
The mistake is designing the financial model around Market 3 while assuming Markets 1 and 2 will somehow follow.
A more resilient resort works in the opposite direction.
Build something the local and regional market actually wants.
Then make it sufficiently distinctive that international tourists become interested too.
13. Ten lessons I would take from the Middle East into any new resort development
- Never confuse tourism arrivals with attraction demand. A city receiving ten million tourists does not give a park ten million prospects. Analyse who they are, why they visit, how long they stay and what else competes for their time.
- Prove the catchment before determining the scale. Start with realistic domestic and regional demand. International visitation should strengthen the model, not rescue it.
- Build a destination, not a collection of gates. Theme parks, hotels, food, retail, culture, sport, nature, nightlife and events should reinforce one another.
- Infrastructure must lead capacity. Airports, roads, public transport, utilities, parking, hotels and staff infrastructure are part of the product.
- Phase investment according to demonstrated demand. A successful Phase 1 gives permission to build Phase 2. A masterplan is a direction, not an instruction to construct everything simultaneously.
- Design for repeat visitation. Seasonal events, festivals, changing entertainment, new attractions, food and evening experiences may create more lifetime value than another enormous signature ride.
- Respect climate and geography. Do not copy Orlando into Arabia, Singapore into Patagonia or Dubai into Peru. Operating hours, indoor/outdoor balance, landscaping, energy use and seasonality must belong to the location.
- Create complementary reasons to travel. Sport, conferences, culture, concerts, nature and festivals reduce dependence on theme-park attendance.
- Measure destination economics rather than park attendance alone. Hotel nights, length of stay, food and beverage spend, transport, retail, employment, repeat visits and regional economic impact matter.
- Never let ambition replace evidence. The most dangerous sentence in destination development is: “If we build something spectacular enough, people will come.”
14. This completely changes how I would develop a new resort in South America
Imagine that somebody proposes a major new resort in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Chile or Argentina.
The old approach might begin:
Theme park → waterpark → hotels → shopping → projected international tourists.
The Middle Eastern lesson suggests reversing the reasoning.
First ask:
Who already has a reason to come here?
Then:
How easy is it for them to reach us?
Then:
How frequently could they realistically return?
Then:
What could make them stay another night?
Only then ask:
What attractions should we build?
A Peruvian destination, for example, should exploit things Dubai cannot reproduce: archaeology, living culture, biodiversity, food, landscapes, indigenous stories, Pacific geography, rainforest environments and Latin American identity.
That creates destination authenticity.
A generic roller coaster can be copied.
Peru cannot.
15. Australia creates a different equation
Australia illustrates why the same masterplan should never simply be exported from one continent to another.
Its population is comparatively dispersed, international flights are long, labour costs are high and several established leisure destinations already exist.
A new major resort would therefore need either an extremely strong metropolitan catchment or something sufficiently unique to generate destination travel.
That might favour staged mixed-use development, distinctive nature experiences, events, accommodation and entertainment rather than attempting to justify a giant theme park first and solve the destination later.
Again:
market first, product second.
16. Asia requires another model again
Asia contains enormous markets, but “Asia” is not one market.
Singapore has huge aviation connectivity and international tourism but a relatively small domestic population.
Indonesia and the Philippines have enormous domestic populations but very different infrastructure constraints.
Japan has sophisticated domestic leisure demand.
China contains huge metropolitan catchments but very different regulatory and competitive environments.
India possesses enormous potential scale but highly variable purchasing power and infrastructure.
So the Middle Eastern lesson is not:
“Do what Abu Dhabi did.”
It is:
“Understand why Abu Dhabi’s approach works in Abu Dhabi.”
Then discover what the equivalent ecosystem should look like in your location.
17. A better development sequence
This gives us a much more resilient way of developing a greenfield leisure destination.
Instead of:
Vision → giant masterplan → financing → build everything → marketing → hope
use:
Market → access → anchor → ecosystem → proof → expansion → destination
The anchor does not necessarily have to be a theme park.
It might be a stadium.
A cultural attraction.
A natural landscape.
A waterpark.
A convention centre.
A festival.
A beach.
A wildlife experience.
A historic site.
Or something completely new.
The first asset’s job is not to complete the destination.
Its job is to start the destination flywheel.
18. And that means masterplanning must become dynamic
One of the most important practical lessons is therefore about masterplanning itself.
Traditional mega-project masterplans often show the finished destination.
Beautiful hotels.
Three theme parks.
A marina.
Waterpark.
Entertainment district.
Convention centre.
Retail.
Residential development.
Everything looks inevitable.
But it is not.
A better masterplan should define decision gates.
Phase 2 happens when Phase 1 reaches certain attendance.
A second hotel happens when room-night demand justifies it.
Another park happens when average length of stay indicates additional capacity is needed.
Retail expands when actual visitor flow supports it.
Transport capacity expands ahead of demonstrated bottlenecks.
The masterplan becomes an adaptive development system rather than a picture of an imagined future.
That is a very Disentangler way of looking at development:
Keep the big vision. Remove the assumption that every part of the vision must be built.
19. The ultimate lesson from Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qiddiya
Dubai demonstrated that even 15 million tourists outside your gates do not guarantee six million people through them.
Abu Dhabi demonstrates that sustained investment in connectivity, hospitality, events, entertainment diversity, destination management and infrastructure can gradually create the gravitational pull that individual attractions cannot manufacture alone.
Qiddiya may become the next evolution: a gigantic entertainment destination supported first by a substantial domestic metropolitan market and then expanded into regional and international tourism. But in 2026 it remains a live experiment rather than a completed case study.
And Global Village demonstrates something equally important: sometimes the cleverest leisure concept is not the biggest one. It is the one that most accurately understands how its guests actually want to spend their evening.
Put those examples together and the lesson becomes very powerful.
The Destination Principle
Do not build attractions and then search for visitors.
Understand the visitors, build the reasons for them to come, remove the barriers preventing them from coming, give them reasons to stay, and then add attractions at the rate that the destination can absorb them.
That principle works in Abu Dhabi.
But it also works in Peru.
Australia.
Indonesia.
Saudi Arabia.
China.
Africa.
Or a previously unknown greenfield location almost anywhere in the world.
Because ultimately successful resorts are not created by the number of roller coasters shown on the masterplan.
They are created by an ecosystem in which access, audience, attractions, accommodation, identity, infrastructure and economics reinforce one another.
And perhaps the biggest lesson the Middle East has given the global leisure industry is this:
Capital can build a world-class theme park surprisingly quickly.
Building a world-class destination takes years.
That distinction is where an enormous amount of future resort investment can either be protected — or lost.
The Disentangler 