Tourism increase for Dubai in 2018
Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing has highlighted that Dubai’s visitors in 2018 increased by 0.8 per cent from 2017 – having welcomed a total of 15.92 million people in the last year.
Dubai Tourism Chief Saeed Al Marri said in a statement: “[The emirate is] focused on ensuring that [it] becomes the number one most-visited city in the world.” Indeed, Dubai and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been implementing measures to boost tourism to the country. Just some of the actions taken include granting Russian and Chinese tourists visas on arrival – a move which will help to increase the number of visitors from these countries – and marketing itself as a family-friendly destination, complete with theme parks such as the Marvel-inspired IMG Worlds of Adventure.
It was revealed that the top source market for travellers was India, with more than two million in total in 2018; Saudi Arabia came second, growing from three per cent in 2017 to 1.6 million travellers; the UK came third, though its visitor numbers dipped by 5.5 per cent to 1.2 million; and China took the fourth spot, with a 12-per-cent increase: 857,000 people in 2018. Russian visitors also increased by 28 percent to 678,000, taking up the fifth place in 2018.
On the other hand, the numbers of Gulf tourists to the region declined, likely following the UAE (and three other Arab countries) boycotting Gulf Cooperation Council member Qatar in June 2017.
“Our strategic investments, innovative destination promotion programmes, responsive federal policy reforms and long-term global partnerships – all backed by the tremendous support of our stakeholders across the government and private sector – continue to yield strong results,” said Helal Al Marri, Director-General of Dubai Tourism.
The desert city-state aims to attract 20 million visitors annually by 2020, when it is due to host the six-month global trade fair Expo 2020.