Dubai best in the world for Christmas shopping

To be a good place to shop, a city first needs a wide selection of things to buy, according to The Economist.

If you want to do some last-minute holiday shopping, don't go anywhere else - stay in Dubai. Because the city tops the list of "best cities for last-minute Christmas shopping," according to The Economist.

"Dubai comes top by virtue of having both a surfeit of shops and relatively cheap prices," published The Economist on its business travel blog.

Dubai topped the list with 139.4 points in the Christmas shopping index, followed by Johannesburgh with 127.5 and Bangkok, 123.7. London came in fourth place (121.4 points) while Toronto (120.6), Berlin (118.4) and Boston (118) came in fifth, sixth and seventh places respectively. Rounding off the top 10 places are Prague (8th, 115.9 points), Beijing (9th, 115.6) and St. Petersburg (10th, 111.6)

To be a good place to shop, a city first needs a wide selection of things to buy, according to The Economist.

"We used a ranking by CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate firm, to assess the penetration of global retailers in cities around the world," wrote The Economist

"Second, it must not break the bank. So we applied cost-of-living data from The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, both on the average cost of a night's stay and the price of the sort of items Christmas shoppers might covet, such as clothes and perfume." it added.

The index includes three categories: Retail penetration (50 per cent); value for money, day-to-day costs for visitors (25 per cent); and value for money, shopping (25 per cent).

To decide whether a city offers value for money we compared it to New York, which came in far at 16th place with 100 points

"The results will surprise some, though perhaps not regular globetrotters. Visitors to America will have noticed that value for money is now hard to find given the strengthening dollar," The Economist explained.

"In fact only a shopping trip in Singapore is more expensive than New York based on our sample. And although the penetration of international retailers in New York is high, it is still below those of other shopping hubs like London and Dubai. This explains why it sits in the bottom five of the 20 cities we ranked," it added.

angel@khaleejtimes.com

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