DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Kuoni’s Global Travel Distribution arm, GTA announced today at Arabian Travel Market (ATM) that its Strategic Partnership Program (SPP) for destination Dubai has driven room-night growth of +41% Year-on-Year in 2016 for its hotel partners. While Europe and UAE remained the key source markets for Dubai inbound tourism, India, Australia and Thailand have also contributed significantly to this growth.
Launched in November 2015, the program continues to drive awareness of the destination through educational workshops across the various source markets, especially in the Far East where we see the strongest growth. Since the launched of SPP Dubai, GTA has conducted workshops in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and South Korea which was partnered by Dubai Corporation of Tourism & Commerce Marketing (DTCM) and Emirates, as well as Iran, a key new market for GTA.
“Workshops remain as one of key fundamental to the program as not all our clients has visited Dubai personally. Armed with improved knowledge of the destination, the travel agents often find the workshops useful as it always helps them improve their sales. If we can’t bring them to Dubai, we shall bring Dubai to them and it has proven that these workshops really work well for us and our clients,” said GTA’s Regional Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Daryl Lee at their ATM booth, showcasing the success story of SPP Dubai.
According to GTA, its loyalty program – g shop has also been very popular among the Middle East and Africa clients. Launched at ATM last year, there are now over 3,000 travel agents signed up on g shop and since then, GTA has already given away 9 millions of points!
“We are very excited that g shop took off really well for us in this region. It’s only been a year since we introduced g shop but the redemption has been overwhelming, demonstrating that the program works. We are glad that we are able to offer something that is rewarding to our clients and at the same time, continue to drive business for all of us,” said GTA’s Vice President of Sales for Middle East and Africa, Rami Mashini. He also added that the travel agents can enjoy 3X rewards point all year round for its SPP program.
Also, addressing the impact of the recent incidents on the business, Rami Mashini said, “The environment of course remains challenging for us! However, with all the marketing activities and sales effort in place, we are pleased to see that the destinations affected by recent instability are showing encouraging signs of recovery. Paris and Istanbul for instance are recovering strongly and we would like to thank all our partners, clients and suppliers for their continuous support.”
With the upcoming peak travel season around the corner, GTA will be focusing on promoting apartment hotels in key destinations such as London, Paris and Dubai to cater to increasing demand from the MEA markets especially Saudi Arabia. New brochures for 2016/2017 are now available at ATM 2016, which we believe will strongly connect our best partners across the region with GTA’s large distribution reach of our clients.
