DTCM and Emirates Airline bosses believe negative press reports can be overcome by an aggressive marketing offensive, says Gemma Greenwood
Dubai has taken a bit of a bashing of late — the UK press seems hell-bent on rubbishing the emirate as a tourism destination going to great lengths to portray the city in a negative light.
First it was sewage in the sea, followed by tales of “poisonous algae” attacking bathers and then ill-informed journalists just couldn’t resist rolling out the good old ‘labourer abuse’ story for good measure.
Not only that, but Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame, insinuated that anyone who left their home country to live as an ex-pat in a place like Dubai was a “loser”.
Well it’s alright for the well-paid host of a highly-successful BBC TV series to make such claims but maybe he’d feel differently if he was stuck in a miserable 9-5 job paying tax without access to top-of-the-range motor vehicles?
In that case, if he moved to Dubai, he’d have a better case of owning a decent car.
What it comes down to is ‘the bigger they come, the harder they fall’ — and Dubai was, and still is, ‘big’ — with much credit attributed to the continuous marketing efforts of the Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) and Emirates Airline worldwide.
It was not so long ago that the UK press was ‘bigging up’ Dubai with TV series such as Dubai Dreams romanticising the ex-pat lifestyle and newspapers flagging up reports documenting ‘awesome’ phenomena, such as the ‘tallest building’ or the ‘biggest mall’.
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So now they feel compelled to talk it down when the going is not so good.
Fortunately, the DTCM and Emirates are bigger and tougher than the press and despite the current financial slowdown, which they concede has impacted visitor numbers to Dubai, they have a plan of action.
The answer is to market their way through this slowdown with several campaigns, while for those members of the press who like to speculate about Dubai without having visited the emirate, they are being encouraged to visit to see it in the flesh.
“We are sending an invitation to the journalists who have hit Dubai [with negative media coverage] to come and see Dubai,” explained DTCM executive director, media relations division and acting director, business development, Eyad Ali Abdul Rahman.
“If you are talking about Dubai, please, come and see — we will not say no to you.”
Rahman added that “all successful destinations should be hit from somebody” and Dubai was no exception.
“People (the press) are big time targeting Dubai,” he said. “They are talking about sewage and saying it’s been in the sea for seven years — I mean, who will believe them? It’s a sea, not a river or a lake.”
Keep Discovering Dubai
In its bid to show journalists the real Dubai, the DTCM, in conjunction with Emirates Airline, has already invited several members of the media, as well as the travel trade, from across the globe, to visit the emirate for a three-day fam trip.
The campaign, dubbed ‘Keep Discovering Dubai’, which has also involved several hotels and DMCs, runs until May and will see more than 2000 people visit the emirate.
“We have flown them in, taken them to new properties, golf courses and shopping malls etc to show them Dubai and make sure that when they get home, they are thinking and breathing Dubai for three or four days,” said Emirates Airline senior vice president Europe commercial operations Nabil Sultan.
“We want them creating value-for-money packages to Dubai.”
Feedback from participants to date had been excellent, said Rahman.
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