Rented for the weekend

A race weekend does the same thing to a city every time, and Jeddah gets one around this point in the year.

The hotel rate multiplies. The restaurants near the circuit sell out for three nights running. Every table has somebody at it who flew in, and a manager stands in the doorway looking at a room that has never been that full, doing arithmetic on the next twelve months.

Then comes the mistake. The menu gets rebuilt for the visitor. Prices go up and stay up. A set menu appears, the portion narrows, the service charge arrives, and the whole room is pointed at a person who is here for seventy-two hours, will never audit the bill, and was always going to overpay for this weekend because it is not their city.

The visitor pays once and leaves.

Meanwhile the family who eat there most Fridays turn up in the middle of it, find the price changed and the room full of strangers, and go somewhere else. The sheet records a slightly quieter Friday. What actually happened is a household deciding again where it eats, in the last weeks before the heat empties every terrace in the city for five months.

That is the part a full room hides. May is coming, then June, and the only customers left in Jeddah are the ones who live in Jeddah. The room being priced for the visitor now is the same room that has to be filled on a Tuesday in July, by a resident whose last visit cost them more than it used to and felt like somebody else's party.

A windfall is not a strategy. It is one month's rent, paid by someone who is not coming back.