Be careful what you wish for!
Qatar isn't the best place to work. They will promise you the earth and it's very easy to be swayed by the promise of high salaries and good living.
The ex-pat lifestyle can be brilliant, however beware: They can turn contracts off quicker than they award them, same day in some cases.
To leave Qatar, on termination, for holidays or whatever reason, you require to have an exit visa. To get this, your sponsor (company) must grant permission. It used to be that your company had to request the exit visa, this has changed now so that you may request one, but your company still has to grant permission. If they dont give it, then you're stuck.
I was working out in Qatar and my contract was terminated early (They dont need a reason, even then, they will make one up) and they held me for nearly 4 months before finally granting my exit visa. The embassy are powerless to help and wont get involved for the fear of upsetting the Qatari's.
They will stop your pay, take away your allowances, and rob you blind. Life is worthless to them and you're basically just hired help. They have access to monitoring equipment and will spy on you (they say that Qatar has the most sophisticated surveillance system going with more equipment per square mile than London). I took the step of taking the battery out of my phone so that it couldnt be traced as I was sure they were watching my every move. Within 30 minutes, the company were driving slowly past my villa to see if I was still there.
Some of the other guys that were on the same contract as me, decided that they weren't going to get burned like me, and "went on holiday" to Bahrain, clearing their bank accounts of as much as they could whilst in the departure lounge and emailing their resignation letters when in Bahrain waiting for their flights back to the UK / US, they still lost a lot of money.
You have been warned, it may be the land of milk and honey and the pop star salaries are very attractive, they will treat you like kings initially (for the first month or so), then the facade will drop and you will quickly realize what it's really like. You will quickly realize that the trappings of wealth are just that, you will become trapped, "suckered in" and before long you will tire of it.
The weather is awesome. The ex-pat lifestyle can also be awesome, but when the Friday brunches become a habit then the novelty wears off. The oppressive heat in the summer ceases to be enjoyable. The problems being remotely located away from your friends and relatives becomes a problem. If you like a drop of booze then you can only buy alcohol and pork products from 1 outlet (Qatar distribution company) and need a permit via a letter of authority from your sponsor. You can buy booze for consumption at hotels, normally where they have ex-pat brunches.
The banks will trip over themselves to loan you money, giving you multiple credit cards and encourage you to use them to gain air miles or other such benefits and each month clear the balance, take out loans for cars, luxury cars and 4x4's, they make it so easy, you go to the showroom and tell the sales man what car you want and they will contact your bank and hey presto in a few days you are driving around in an new bit of bling. This (like the UK) depreciates fast and if your contract is terminated, you have to sell it at a loss. You cannot leave the country owing any money. They encourage you to spend your money in country so the money stays in country, they dont like you sending large sums back. Shopping is one of their pastimes along with eating!
Please treat this as a cautionary tale and make sure you do you research. Scour the expat websites. There are many stories about people who have been held against their will for much longer than I was. Check out their human rights records. The police are corrupt, you will get traffic violation fines frequently. I was 80Km away from Doha on a beach one day and I got a text from the authorities telling me I had been fined and given points for a traffic violation in Doha. When I went to the department to clarify and fight the violation, they told me I had to prove that I wasn't there yet they had no evidence that I had committed a violation (no camera etc), that it had been manually entered by a traffic officer. If you have an RTA involving a local national, then you will always be in the wrong, a friend of mine was told simply that it was his fault as he shouldn't have been there at the time, if he hadn't then the accident wouldn't have occurred.
All I will say is: If you have any doubts at all, they there should be no doubt! If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
UAE and Bahrain are different, you do not need and exit visa. Look at the stories of 100's even 1000's of cars abandoned at the UAE airports when people have fled the country.
Last edited by WASALOADIE; 17th Jan 2018 at 02:57.
Reason: spelling