Extended Eid holiday shopping hours for Dubai malls

DUBAI // Shopping malls are to stay open late during Eid Al Fitr following last year's 24-hour shopping experiment.

This weekend, shops at Mall of the Emirates, Mirdif and Deira City Centres, will stay open until 1am, while restaurants will stay open until 3am.

Fuad Sharaf, the senior director at Majid Al Futtaim Properties, said the late opening hours were based on sales statistics from the 24-hour shopping festival that was held during Eid Al Adha, in October last year.

Malls managed by MAF, as well as Dubai Mall, were directed by the government of Dubai to stay open for 24 hours over the course of two weekends last October.

There has been no such directive issued this year for Eid Al Fitr.

However, Mr Sharaf said the Eid Al Adha experience had been useful in determining which hours were peak times during holiday seasons.

"That experience definitely gave us some indication over which were the peak trading hours during holidays," he said.

"We found that until 1am it was busy. That's why we decided to extend the working hours until that time.

"Restaurants get busy even after 1am, so they are staying open until 3am."

The malls normally close at midnight, as does Dubai Mall, which this weekend is opening until 2am. A spokesman for the mall operator, Emaar Properties, was unavailable for comment.

Mr Sharaf said malls are fully capable of staying open for 24 hours again, if required to do so for the Eid Al Adha shopping festival this year.

"We work closely with the government of Dubai and we will follow any of their initiatives," he said. "We've done it before and we're more than happy to do it again."

He said although most shoppers left before the sun came up, many more came to the mall in the early hours out of sheer curiosity.

"After 3am the numbers of people went down a bit," he said.

"But there were still a lot of people there. Many of them came in just to check that the mall really was going to be trading at that time."

mcroucher@thenational.ae