[IMG=18450-4048]
A shopping festival in Dubai started this year 10 days earlier – not on the 14th but on the 4th of January and will last, respectively, not till the 14th but till the 5th of February. Sergey Kanaev, representative of the Department of tourism and commercial marketing of Dubai in Moscow, told the information to a BANKO correspondent: ‘This is the second change in the history of the festival, earlier it was held in March, or the past several years – from the mid January.’ The decision came from the Secretariat of the festival, the initiative – from the sellers who thought it would be better if the festival covered winter holidays.
Meanwhile operators of the UAE, interviewed by ‘BANKO’, did not express their excitement about the change of the date of the event. ‘The beginning of January is always the problem period for the destination’, explains Larisa Ermakova, head of the UAE department in ‘PAX company’. - ‘Most people try to celebrate the New Year at home and go on holidays after that’. According to experts, during the period when Dubai has a shopping festival the demand for the destination grows by 25%. The growing travel activity is also explained by the fact that many of those who once visited the event try to attend it every years. The dates after the New Year, according to the specialists, have a high demand on the market anyway. This way, market players risk facing even a larger deficit of accommodation.
Yet the market players say that many operators, making a plan for sending tourists for the season, always foresee possible mistakes. ‘Problems can be avoided if you prepare for them in advance’, believes Ludmila Vtorova, head of the department in Croatia and the OAE in ‘Capital tour’ company. – ‘For example, as soon as we discovered the change of the dates for the event, we increased our quota for the relevant dates on flights and provided a safety net for the hotel accommodation’.
In the relation with the possible reduction of tourists in February because of the festival moving to the earlier dates, operators did not express their anxiety. Last year the demand was stable till the beginning of spring and even half a month after the end of the festival.
