Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) announced the launch of the annual Dubai Tourism Summit, a first-of-its-kind travel forum in the region.
The summit will lay the foundation for a home-grown world-class thought leadership programme to boost the city’s resurgent tourism industry and support regional and global tourism.
DET made the announcement at its bi-annual ‘city briefing’ event held during the Skift Global Forum East, the first-ever MENA extension of the Skift Global Forum.
The proposed Dubai tourism event will provide a networking platform for industry stakeholders to share their vision, ideas, strategies and best practices.
It will also provide insights on leveraging the latest innovations and trends to create a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable future for global tourism.
January – October tourism, hospitality performance
At the briefing, DET also shared the latest tourism report for the first ten months of 2022.
Data showed that Dubai welcomed 11.4 million international overnight visitors between January and October, a year-on-year increase of 134 percent, taking the city further on its journey to becoming the world’s most visited destination.
Helal Saeed Al Marri, Director-General of DET, said the performance in the first ten months of 2022 indicated that the department was on target to achieve its tourism goals.
Al Marri said Dubai’s growing popularity among global travellers was also evident from the fact that there were 54 million online searches for Dubai per month during Q3 2022, which was close to pre-pandemic levels, with bookings in the last few months surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
Average hotel occupancy in Dubai between January-October 2022 stood at 71 percent, one of the highest hotel occupancies in the world.
This compares to 64 percent in the corresponding period of last year and just short of the 74 percent during the pre-pandemic period of 2019.
Dubai’s occupancy continues to closely trail the top benchmark cities: Istanbul (75 percent), New York (74 percent), Paris (73 percent), London (73 percent) and Los Angeles (72 percent).
Dubai’s hotel inventory in October 2022 comprised 144,737 rooms at 790 hotel establishments compared with 122,185 rooms available at the end of October 2019 across 724 establishments. The total number of hotels in the first ten months of 2022 saw an 8 percent growth over the same period in 2021, highlighting strong investor confidence in Dubai’s tourism sector.
The hotel sector outperformed pre-pandemic levels across all other key measurements – occupied room nights, average daily rate (ADR) and revenue per available room (RevPAR).
Follow us on
