Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism) has introduced a new business-to-business (B2B) online platform that is set to deliver an enhanced technological backbone to the emirate’s attractions and experiences.
Launching in January 2019, the B2B ‘Attractions Marketplace’, the name given to the platform, will provide the emirate’s attractions and experiences with integrated digital support and wider visibility among both domestic stakeholders and global markets, according to the release.
The design of the ‘Attractions Marketplace’ aims at creating a seamless technological framework to further stimulate industry cohesion through the connectivity of the city’s attractions and experiences with the global industry’s network of B2B resellers. The platform is also aimed at strengthening the awareness of the emirate’s varied portfolio of leisure offerings, thus raising the profiles of the city’s entertainment options among relevant partners, and in turn helping to increase their sales and revenue potential, the release said.
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It went on to say that the interactive platform will enable all B2B stakeholders, including online travel agents (OTAs), hotels, tour operators, aggregators and destination management companies (DMCs), to discover Dubai’s full range of offerings, allowing stakeholders to create a more bespoke and customisable visitor experience.
Speaking exclusively to Hotelier about the soon-to-be-launched platform, Declan Hurley, the corporate vice president – sales at Rotana Hotel Management Corporation, said: “This is certainly an interesting initiative. It will no doubt ease the process of booking and give turnkey service to clients.”
The online marketplace will give the city’s diverse portfolio of attractions and experiences a higher level of digital maturity through robust technology, mobile transactions and timely bookings by industry resellers.
His Excellency Helal Almarri, director general, Dubai Tourism, said: “The introduction of the Attractions Marketplace marks an important step towards providing the city’s attractions and experiences with the power to market themselves more effectively to a wider audience. There is a need for a hyper-connected business landscape to potentially revolutionise the tourism ecosystem in order to maintain global competitiveness. By bringing this powerful technology to Dubai’s varied leisure propositions, we continue to empower our industry partners, enabling them to create an immersive visitor experience for each customer, while addressing bottlenecks in bookings and occupancy management. The native, purpose built platform aims to bring into focus the diversity and accessibility of the emirate’s wide range of attractions and experiences, with the online portal facilitating the interaction between all stakeholders to amplify Dubai’s reach globally. It will also create a repository of attractions with real-time availability and connectivity, making it an effective one-stop-shop for global resellers.”
The Attractions Marketplace is developed by Dubai-based technology provider PrioHub, which is an entity under the dnata group, in partnership with PrioTicket technology. The platform was designed after conducting in-depth research into the local travel sphere and interaction with sector stakeholders to identify key challenges faced by the emirate’s attractions in marketing themselves to a global audience.
“The platform will help grow smaller feeder markets and will give agencies a new channel to book the entire package and promote Dubai as a whole with its extensive range of attractions. It will widen the distribution and will be a great tool that will certainly generate additional business to Dubai and our hotels,” added Hurley of Rotana.
The platform offers a white label reservation and ticketing solution for attractions and experiences to operate more efficiently, allowing better connection to their customers. Attractions will be able to create personalised ticketing systems under their own brand name, while expanding their reach and increasing their customer base to a diversified audience.
Additionally, the Attractions Marketplace will equip partners with sophisticated reporting tools, with an integrated back-end system that allows analysis of ticket sales and key distribution channels, with the system also providing an interactive dashboard summarising bookings made via each sales channel, sales target performance and inventory and capacity occupancy.