Dubai to unveil B2B ‘attractions marketplace’ next year

Dubai / Emirates Business

Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism) introduced a new business to business (B2B) online platform that will deliver an enhanced technological backbone to the emirate’s attractions and experiences, offering them integrated digital support and wider visibility among both domestic stakeholders and global markets. Launching in January 2019, the B2B ‘Attractions Marketplace’ has been designed to create 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.
As highlighted in the ‘Skift Research Report: The State of Tours and Activities 2018’, 69% of global travellers prioritise their spending on tourist activities over their accommodation choices, making the attractions and experiences segment the third most prominent in the travel ecosystem. Developed with the aim of strengthening awareness of the emirate’s varied portfolio of leisure offerings, the Attractions Marketplace will raise the profiles of the city’s entertainment options among relevant partners, in turn helping to increase their sales and
revenue potential.
The interactive platform will enable all B2B stakeholders including online travel agents, hotels, tour operators, aggregators and destination management companies to discover Dubai’s full range of offerings, allowing stakeholders to create a more bespoke and customisable visitor experience for the needs of today’s global traveller.
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.”
Guided by the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai and the government’s 10X Initiative, 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. Developed by Dubai-based technology provider, PrioHub, an entity under the dnata group, in partnership with PrioTicket technology, the Attractions Marketplace has been 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. Providing attractions and experiences with a world-class platform to automate their operations instead of manual spreadsheets and legacy systems, the Attractions Marketplace offers sophisticated booking management with its centralised system, secure e-commerce capabilities, dynamic pricing options and real time global marketing channels.

Alkhatib, Manging Director of PrioHub, the business to business platform provider, said: “Attractions are the industry’s third largest sector and the fastest growing globally. We have seen a significant shift towards digitalisation, representing strong growth potential for the online tours and activities marketplace. PrioHub’s focus is to help facilitate a more digitally connected tourism ecosystem, connecting attractions to a wide portfolio of global and local resellers. We provide attractions with an integrated platform that enables them to easily manage their distribution, capacity, content and ticketing across multiple sales channels through one control panel. The Attractions Marketplace will also enable resellers to retail Dubai’s attractions and experiences seamlessly, with real time availability and instant confirmation in addition to a wide range of reservation and ticketing solutions.”
Mohammed Ibrahim, Founder of My Jetski, a start-up water sports attraction, said: “The attractions market worldwide is growing with tourists and specifically millennials spending more on experiences when visiting a new destination. We need to increase the visibility of our offering across our distribution channels but face challenges when marketing ourselves to a global audience which requires investment in advanced digital solutions. The Attractions Marketplace platform provides high level technical services at a fraction of the cost, allowing us to monitor our business performance and expand our reach internationally.”
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.