Dubai Cruise Tourism, a department of Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism), has signed an agreement to form the Dubai Cruise Committee.
The Dubai Cruise Committee is a network of leading industry partners including Dubai Tourism, DP World, Emirates Airline, The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs – Dubai, and Dubai Customs.
This newly-signed agreement confirms each organisation’s commitment to work together to increase the number of cruise tourists to Dubai, and to achieving the goal of welcoming one million cruise tourists by the 2020/2021 season, a statement said.
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The committee has approved business development strategies to secure long term contracts with existing clients and attract new cruise lines to use the emirate as their winter home port in the region.
It also agreed to work to extend Dubai’s cruise season further into the summer months to appeal to additional market segments around the world.
Hamad Bin Mejren, senior vice president, Dubai Tourism, said: “Dubai has been instrumental in pioneering cruise tourism in the region, and our success could not have been achieved without our close working relationships with both the public and private sectors.
"This landmark agreement signed today by the Dubai Cruise Committee will ensure that international cruise lines will receive an end-to-end support for their plans in Dubai. We are committed to working with our network of strategic partners to continue to build on Dubai Cruise’s success and achieve our target of attracting one million cruise tourists by the 2020/2021 cruise season.”
Dubai Cruise Committee members will implement combined international marketing activities to raise awareness with a global audience of cruise enthusiast.
Incentives will also be launched that will encourage cruise lines to not only increase the number of ships they deploy to Dubai but also to increase the period of time that the lines operate in the region each year.
Dubai welcomed over 625,000 cruise tourists to the city during the 2016/2017 season, reflecting an increase of over 15 percent compared to the previous season.