My company has multiple investments at The Pearl. It's a complete fiasco. Ever since they "temporarily" suspended alcohol sales in December 2011, it's basically died. Many of the upscale restaurants have closed or never opened as planned (the ones that remain open have virtually no traffic, nor does the upscale retail), construction in general has slowed to a halt, the developer has shuttered its hospitality subsidiary, and there has been no progress on the Four Seasons. Retail and residential rents have dropped considerably.

The only amenities working well at The Pearl are the lower-end places like coffee shops, Arabic restaurants, and burger outlets. Ironically, it is these types of venues that were conspicuously absent when The Pearl first opened; had they built them, instead of insisting on "luxury" for everything and ignoring basic lifestyle services that would make people want to live and visit there, the site might have received better foot traffic from the beginning. But as it is now, I fear that it's too late, and the place has the feel of being in a death spiral.

Of course the Four Seasons wouldn't say that they have dropped the project due to the alcohol ban (Gordon Ramsey did say this as the reason for closing his bistro) -- and in fact it's a major issue in Qatar that no one is really allowed to discuss alcohol. You won't see it mentioned at all in the Qatar media, with the exception of Doha News, and it's not like there is a chamber of commerce than could lobby the government. Even the decision to stop alcohol was made in a completely opaque and extralegal manner, and to this day the authorities don't give a straight answer about their reasoning. I don't think that it's the alcohol ban per se -- the hotel would be allowed to sell alcohol, like the upcoming Kempinski -- but I think that it is fair to presume that the Four Seasons ownership has observed that alcohol ban was a traffic-killer that just precipitated, or reinforced, or hastened, the island's demise.

I agree that the five-star market in Doha is saturated, and only getting more so, with the number of rooms set to triple over a decade, but Four Seasons knew this when they initiated the project.