Cruise passengers aboard AIDAstella and Celebrity Constellation, which are both in Dubai for New Year’s Eve this year, will not get to see the huge fireworks display around the Burj Khalifa that has become the city’s official celebration at midnight on December 31^st.

Emaar, the Dubai property developer that manages the Downtown Dubai area in which the Burk Khalifa is located, announced on Twitter that there would be a major laser show instead.

https://twitter.com/MyDowntownDubai/status/939132583799029760

Dubai has typically played a game of one-upmanship with other global cities on New Year’s Eve, with a fireworks display that is generally regarded as the most opulent in the world. It usually lasts more than 10-minutes and last year cost a whopping US $6-million.

The 2014 New Year’s Eve display involved 400,000 fireworks and set a Guinness World Record for the World’s Biggest Pyrotechnics Display.

See the video below:

For cruise tourists in Dubai, the use of lasers instead of fireworks means that the display will likely be far less spectacular, especially from the Dubai Cruise Terminal, where both AIDAstella and Celebrity Constellation will be docked.

It is unclear at this point whether the announcement on Twitter by Emaar means that there wont be any fireworks at all, or whether it will simply be scaled down.

Lasers vs fireworks – pyrotechnics are just cooler!

Although the property developer hasn’t said it, the decision is likely a result of The Address, Downtown fire last year, which gutted the hotel just two hours before midnight on December 31st, 2016.

That fire was caused by an electrical fault in a spotlight, but heightened concerns that having several tons of explosive pyrotechnics scattered around a neighborhood with some of the tallest buildings in the world, might not be a good idea.