Dubai's Plan To Woo You

The emirate is on a mission to show potential visitors and residents that there’s much more to it than high rises and shopping malls, tourism chief Issam Abdulrahim Kazim tells Newsweek

- MATTHEW TOSTEVIN

AN UNCERTAIN CEASEFIRE WAS just taking hold between Iran and Israel. The map of the Middle East still bore a blaze of red travel warnings.

But Dubai’s tourist promotion chief was as upbeat as ever about the prospects of attracting millions more visitors—and potential residents—to a city that has emerged from being a stable travel and investment hub in a turbulent region to become an increasing destination for travelers in its own right. “We know that some markets will be impacted by the news that travels to them and the headlines that they might see if they’re not very familiar with the region,” Issam Abdulrahim Kazim, CEO of Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing, told Newsweek. “So what we do is we're constantly looking at the globe.”

“At any time that we see a slowdown in or potential slowdown for some markets, we can quickly switch our focus onto other potential opportunities and continue our overall growth,” he said during an interview in the city.

Growing Ambitions

There's a good chance you will have seen an advertisement seeking to tempt you to spend time in Dubai with whatever is most likely to appeal to you. That targeting is by design as the city—now easily the biggest in the United Arab Emirates—seeks ever more growth, in line with a plan to double the size of its economy between 2023 and 2033.

Dubai is already within the top 10 of the world’s most visited cities, with 18.72 million visitors last year.

“We want to increase length of stay, increase spend, the economic impact on the GDP and increase repeat visitation,” Kazim said, rattling off figures and projections at speed.