The hospitality group's regional sales director, Thomas Grundner, explains why it has set its sights on educating the Kingdom's travel trade about its portfolio of products.
Over the last few years we have seen a definite growth in business from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to our Jumeirah properties worldwide.
As a result, we made the decision to expand our sales network to include the Kingdom, appointing Dnata Travel, the IATA-accredited arm of Dubai's Dnata Agencies and our official GSA, to handle our sales and marketing activities throughout the region via its offices in Riyadh and Jeddah.
Outbound business is our primary focus in this market as we do not currently manage a Jumeirah property in Saudi Arabia and therefore we are focusing strongly on the corporate and the leisure traveller.
Business towards New York and London is developing and we are receiving some great feedback from our guests, which all supports our initial decision to be present in Saudi Arabia.
Considering that we are primarily focusing on outbound business, we are also able to gain invaluable market intelligence, which enables us to plan our development within the region in line with the Group's ambitious growth plans - 60 properties by 2012 with an aim to operate 45% of total expansion for the Jumeirah Group in the GCC region.
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For domestic tourism, Saudi Arabia has a large expatriate population, which is heavily targeted by hotel groups with a presence there, while the recent introduction of low-cost to Saudi Arabia (Sama and Nasair for example has started to boost both domestic and international travel.
Key travel destinations for expatriates from Saudi Arabia include Dubai and Asia as travellers from the Kingdom enjoy staying in top-end properties and shopping for luxury goods in these locations.
The key travel period is during the long, hot summer and during school breaks, however we are witnessing an increase in the number of KSA-based travellers taking a long weekend break to try out destinations such as Dubai.
We have seen a very high level of brand awareness for Jumeirah in the Middle East and this, combined with our regional growth plans, provides us with the opportunity to further educate the travel trade about our products.
Our aim is to expand the knowledge of travel agents and tour operators of our wide variety of offerings enabling them to advise the expatriate community about the Jumeirah experience.
The travel trade is still very important in Saudi Arabia and we envisage that this will remain the case for at least another few years, however the virtual platform is catching up and the internet will become increasingly significant.
Agents are currently the key supplier of holidays in Saudi Arabia as they package the deals to include flights, accommodation and transfers.
This means that there are two key methods of marketing our product in Saudi Arabia. The first is to educate the travel trade directly and the other is to target the expatriates directly so they are well informed when they visit their travel agent to make a booking.
Jumeirah is focusing on the KSA travel trade and is currently rolling out an extensive education programme in the Kingdom as it believes it will be a key source market for Jumeirah in the future.
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