More than 5.5 million tourists visited Dubai in the first half of 2013, representing an 11.1 per cent year-on-year increase, indicating that Dubai is on the way to achieving its Tourism Vision for 2020. The first half visitor number results, released by Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM), show increases across all key indicators, including hotel establishment guests, hotel and hotel apartment revenues, room occupancy and average length of stay.
“The figures for the first half of 2013 are extremely encouraging and indicate that we are on the way to achieving our Tourism Vision for 2020. Our strategy is to position Dubai as a foremost destination for both leisure and business travellers by continuously evolving our broad and diverse tourism offering, and attracting visitors from a range of source markets, including targeting a new generation of first-time travellers from emerging markets. The increase in visitors from each of our key source markets is particularly encouraging, with a number of these markets showing particularly strong growth, including the GCC countries, China, India, Australia and many countries in Europe,” commented Helal Saeed Almarri, Director-General of DTCM.
With 5,583,379 visitors staying in Dubai’s 600 plus hotels, key indicators of success include:
– Strong growth from India (2nd biggest source market) and China (9th) – up 15.8% on H1 2012
– Hotel room occupancy averaging 84.6% for the six month period – up 2.8% on H1 2012
– Hotel apartment occupancy rate averaging 85.5% – up 6.5% on H1 2012
– Average length of stay across hotels and hotel apartments at 3.89 days – an increase on 3.82 days on H1 2012
– Revenues for hoteliers and hotel apartment operators reaching AED11.62 billion – up 18.5% on H1 2012
– Total guest nights of 21,715,848 – up 13.1% on H1 2012.
