My first day in Dubai over and I can feel the excitement in the air – the reason, a four-digit number, 2020.
It may be six years away but that number is emblazoned everywhere I look and everyone I meet is citing that number – the year of the World Expo – as why this city is once again bullish and optimistic about the future.
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“The stock market is strong, property prices are rising, business is good,” a friend said, and then adding a cautionary note, “but prices are going up, and we are worried about inflation.”
It feels a little bit like those days before the BIG crash – that sense of euphoria and invincibility – but I also feel – or rather hope – there’s a bit more realism this time round for if there’s one thing we have learnt and hopefully we don’t forget, it’s how fragile everything is.
It seems loads of money is pouring into the city again in anticipation of this world event and cranes will once again become the national symbol of Dubai.
Having just visited Shanghai last week which held the World Expo in 2010 and seeing all those massive sites standing empty, I can’t help but wonder what Dubai will look like in 2021 but that’s too far into the future for me to grasp.
For now, Dubai is experiencing great weather and good business. Hotels, more than I can count, are full – it’s peak season and they are packed with Russians and other Europeans escaping their winters, and I see more Chinese tourists packing the malls and wandering around the Atlantis theme park.
I am staying at Sofitel The Palm Resort & Spa (pictured right), the latest addition to the Accor luxury brand portfolio. It opened six months ago and is supposedly the biggest Sofitel in the world in terms of keys with 361 rooms and 182 serviced apartments.
It’s got a Polynesian theme to differentiate it and like all the grand resorts in Dubai, it’s got lots of jaw-dropping stuff for you to admire. I especially like the vertical gardens – all the rage these days in modern buildings – on the walls of the corridors.
This is where we intend to hold the first WIT Middle East and it will make a nice change to hold our event at a resort and beachfront setting (pictured below left).
I’m also getting a sense of the excitement that’s around the nascent online travel space, after meeting with industry experts yesterday with more lined up today. It’s been thrilling zipping around Dubai, going from city to city – Dubai’s a city of cities in case you don’t know.
There’s Festival City, Media City and Dubai Internet City. The latter is interesting – it started off as a zone to attract big brand technology companies to set up offices but now it wants companies that want to develop knowledge capabilities, so not just companies which want to set up sales offices but also development functions.
All the brands are there – LinkedIn, Facebook – and it’s also the hub for technology start-ups. The Dubai Internet City acts as the facilitator and catalyst for start-ups so they provide the usual – office space, networks, access to resources, etc – to help a start-up.
VCs are beginning to set up and so far the portfolio is very varied – across all sectors, with travel slowly emerging on their radar.
The opportunities are huge and diverse and I find it interesting the parallels I am seeing between markets in Asia and those here and I see similar patterns of evolution. Growing middle class, leapfrogging due to rampant smartphone adoption – one industry expert told me that the Middle East is one place which is seeing real traction in mobile commerce, low cost airlines emerging and a younger generation getting online …
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Right now, the big three OTAs are booking.com (by a long stretch, I am told, followed by Expedia and Agoda. Other Asia-based brands are coming in – Wego, MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, hotelscombined, to name a few.
There’s no big local OTA as such so is there an opportunity for a Ctrip in China or MakeMyTrip in India play?
Last minute bookings are also making a strong showing – the Middle East traveler, I am told, is notoriously last minute – so is there an opportunity for a HotelTonight model?
Vacation rentals? This place is full of expensive second or third homes, lots of inventory around. An Uber model? I hear some players are coming into that space. Airbnb clones? I understand a law is about to be enacted that would see regulations around sub-lets relaxed.
I get the feeling that like the desert that lies beyond the city grid, the online travel market in the Middle East is as wide open as our imagination allows it to be. Sure, there might be some mirages along the way but with the right insights hopefully, our vision will be as clear as the night sky is presently in this amazing city built on sand.
Can’t wait for March 26-27 when we will begin our adventure in the desert.
