São Paulo – The emirate of Dubai wants to welcome between 23 million to 25 million tourists annually until 2025, said crown prince Hamdan bin Mohammed Rashid Al Maktoum, according to the website Gulf Business this Wednesday (03).
“Our goal is to achieve the sustainability of the tourism sector after Expo 2020,” said the crown prince. He said that this target was set in a meeting of the Executive Council of Dubai. The emirate will host the world exhibition Expo 2020 between October 2020 and April 2021. Most countries will be represented in the event, with tourists coming from all over the world to visit it.
According to Maktoum, Dubai’s planning to be the most visited city in the world. He said that the emirate will adopt ambitious development plans and initiatives to form a strong foundation to reach the goal of placing the city as the favorite destination of millions of tourists across the globe. Dubai had previously set a target of 20 million tourists per year until 2020.
Last year, US payments company Mastercard conducted a survey and place Dubai in fourth place among the most visited cities in the world with 15.7 million overnight tourists, trailing Paris, France, with 17.4 million, London, England, with 19.8 million, and Bangkok, Thailand, with 20 million people.
Dubai welcomed 8.1 million tourists in H1 2018, according to the Dubai Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism), a record for the period. The top source countries were India, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. Until the end of June, Dubai had 111,317 rooms in 700 hotels.
Translated by Sérgio Kakitani