Dubai's year is not a smooth line. It is a handful of weeks when every room in the city is spoken for, a long summer when the same rooms are wide open, and a set of trade shows in between that quietly decide what a hotel will sell you and at what notice. A destination management company lives or dies on knowing which week is which.
Every date below comes from the organiser, the venue or a UAE government media office. Where the next edition has not been announced, this page says “dates to be announced” and stops there. That is not caution for its own sake: while this calendar was being verified, listing sites were carrying three mutually contradictory date ranges for a single Dubai festival, none of them traceable to the organiser. An agent who contracts against an invented date pays for it twice — once in the rate and once in the apology. We would rather publish an honest blank.
The calendar runs on two tracks, and they are separated below because they are bought by different people. The leisure track — the Shopping Festival, Summer Surprises, the Diwali programme, Eid Al Etihad, New Year's Eve, the Marathon, the Dubai World Cup, the Grand Prix at Yas Marina — moves guest demand and decides what an itinerary should look like in a given month. The trade track — Arabian Travel Market, GITEX GLOBAL, Gulfood, Big 5 Global, WETEX, the Dubai International Boat Show and the biennial Dubai Airshow — moves rooms. Those 7 shows are what an agent actually plans around, so they get the operational detail rather than the pretty photograph.
The 2026–2027 window is an unusually unstable one, which is precisely why last year's notes are dangerous. Arabian Travel Market has left its long-standing spring slot and now runs in September. GITEX GLOBAL has moved out of October into December and out of the World Trade Centre to Expo City, stacking the largest MICE block of the year straight on top of the leisure peak. The Dubai International Boat Show has been repositioned into late November, in the same week as Big 5 Global. Three changes, three months reshaped.
What you will not find here is a price. Net rates are contracted per agency and move with season, volume and length of stay, so a published number would be wrong for everyone reading it. What you get instead is the demand calendar further down — month by month, peak through low, with what each season means for rates and availability. Send us your dates and pax and a coordinator in Bur Dubai will tell you which weeks to move, and why.
