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The future of travel

The findings of our latest research suggest that the region's [meetings industry] sector is poised for a massive and potentially prolonged boom.

Over the last year, Fast Future has run a continuous research programme looking at how the region's travel and tourism proposition might develop in the period leading up to 2020.
The industry is targeting 170 million visitors by 2020 and adding airport capacity for 320 million passengers. We have identified total investment of more than US $3.6 trillion going into travel, tourism and the underlying infrastructure across the Middle East.

Of this nearly $600 billion is going into more than 900 hotels, more than $1 trillion into leisure projects, around $150 billion on aircraft, more than $40 billion for airports, $8 billion into cruise lines and around $1.8 trillion on the supporting infrastructure and tourism promotion.

A key driver of these investments is the expectation that the numbers of [meetings industry] visitors will grow. Countries and states across the region are actively developing their meetings industry proposition and actively courting the sector.

Dubai is spearheading this effort with a target of increasing total tourism numbers from seven million to 15 million visitors and hotel rooms from around 30,000 to 124,000 by 2020.

This is underpinned by major initiatives such as the $110 billion Dubailand leisure development, Bawadi - a $55 billion strip of 60 hotels on a 10km strip within Dubailand - and more than $380 billion on leisure developments including the iconic reclaimed land developments such as The Palm and The World.

Competition and capacity are two other critical factors that will attract the [meetings] market.

Increasing competition: Across the region competition is rising. We identified more than 160 leisure developments ranging from $100 million to $120 billion that include some element of hotel, resort, leisure or tourism development. Every emirate and country has ambitious tourism plans and iconic projects.

Hotel Capacity: Every week new projects are announced and we estimate that more than 900 hotels are planned in the period to 2020. These will offer around 750,000 rooms in every category.

Challenges

The critical challenges for the region will include obvious ones such as the well-rehearsed debate about security and safety and others such as ensuring that adequate infrastructure is in place.

Service quality will be a critical factor and the competition for staff will only increase as new projects come on stream.

Concerns over the environment and sustainability are rising globally and the region will need to demonstrate that it is following through on the positive initiatives and commitments that it has announced.

Finally, the region will face stiffer competition globally, with destinations from Australia to Zambia promoting their meetings industry credentials and breathtaking new tourism projects being announced to attract the leisure and [meetings] market.

Prospects

The region - led in large part by Dubai - has demonstrated a tremendous ability to create and deliver a remarkable tourism proposition from a standing start. It has confounded expectations and forced even the most hardened of critics to re-evaluate their concerns.

Whilst there are clear storm clouds on the horizon, as the industry develops its tourism proposition, it is also building its managerial and operational quality and its capacity to deal with challenges.

For the [meetings industry] sector, the region's burgeoning travel and tourism proposition offers an increasingly wide range of opportunities and new attractions for the for the foreseeable future.

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