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29 March 2024

Revealed: How UAE residents spent their Eid Al Fitr holidays

Published
By Bindu Rai

As life returns to regular working hours post Eid Al Fitr break, a new poll indicates more than half of UAE residents opted to stay home for the holidays.

The'Emirates24|7' poll, which asked residents about their plans for the duration, saw 51 per cent of respondents state they chose to stay home.

When quizzed, several residents said it was largely due to a limited number of leave days this Eid, while others also cited traffic conditions as a key deterrent.

“This year, the private sector had Friday and Saturday as their Eid break, which is a regular weekend for majority. That didn’t give us much time to travel anywhere really; so the only alternative was to stay home instead,” said Dubai resident Ismail Shaikh.

“The uncertainty of the break made it difficult for us to plan a holiday until the last minute, and by then the airfares had shot up. So my husband and I decided to stay back here,” added another Dubai resident, Richa Chandok.

Meanwhile, other residents such as Israfil Ahmed and Mark Patane said the anticipated Eid traffic prompted them to stay indoors.

“I was following traffic updates on Twitter and the area near my home in Business Bay was a complete mess on Friday and Saturday, with cars choking the roads leading up to the Dubai Mall. It was better to stay inside and watch movies on TV,” Patane said.

While staying home proved a popular choice, 16 per cent of respondents chose to visit relatives and friends, while a similar number spent their Eid break working.

Some nine per cent of respondents managed to make their reservations for a short holiday while another seven per cent opted to catch the new movie releases at the cinemas.

“We are starved of good cinema during Ramadan, so usually during Eid, most of us make a beeline for the theatres,” said Dubai resident Anjali Bakshi. We couldn’t grab Friday tickets for Salman Khan’s ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’, so we opted to see ‘Minions’ first, and caught the Bollywood film on Saturday,” she said.

Other top billed film releases for Eid included ‘Terminator Genisys’ and Pakistani film ‘Bin Roye’, which hosted its world premiere in Dubai.

Meanwhile, only two per cent of poll respondents admitted they cut a ticket for one of the 'live' shows that were hosted over the Eid weekend.