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Dubai / Emirates Business
The Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing, Dubai Tourism, has launched its inaugural ‘Ticketed Events in Dubai’ 2015 report, as it seeks to share collective findings to better equip organisers in the decision making process.
The report will help grow existing events and to launch new ones based on type, scale, price points, calendar opportunities, buying behavior, event attendee potential and optimum capacity.
Dubai’s event industry, a core pillar of the city’s tourism destination proposition, remains a strong and growing contributor of economic value to the emirate’s GDP. Building off a mature calendar of regularly renewed, world-renowned leisure and business events, the event offering is well complemented by a diversified mix of entertainment, sport, theater, art and cultural entrants, collectively aimed at attracting international and domestic audiences.
“Close collaboration across all the fundamental levers of sector development, between government, public and private sector stakeholders, from venue developers and operators, to event organisers and the network of promoters and distributors, has been instrumental in laying the foundations for Dubai’s success to date. Looking ahead to 2020 and beyond, as the events industry prepares to cater for the evolving needs of an even more diversified target of 20 million visitors to the emirate, sustained cross-industry partnership will be even more crucial to retain Dubai’s status as a leading global event destination,” said Issam Kazim, CEO, Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing, DCTCM.
Covering the full year of 2015, the new event industry whitepaper provides a snap shot of the performance of ticketed leisure events hosted in Dubai across three main leisure categories, Entertainment, Sports and Culture. According to the report, which only captures events applied for via Dubai’s e-Ticketing platform, there were a total of 656 system registered ticketed leisure events delivered in 2015, representing 1.1 million tickets being sold.
Leisure events constituted 27% of the total volume of unique ticketed events hosted during the 2015 calendar year and accounted for 60 percent of the number of tickets recorded as sold for the period.
According to the report, for the specific event categories covered in the analysis, the UAE residential population and international travellers already in Dubai had the highest propensity to attend ongoing events in the city so should be the priority for any event related marketing investments.
In general, peak sales were within two weeks of an event irrespective of event type with event-day sales being a dominant category. Propensity of more advanced (4-5 weeks before the event) ticket purchases were limited to those buying tickets either from other countries as part of their Dubai trip planning process, or for extremely sought-after events like niche plays, performances etc., or for premium seats or crucial games within popular sporting events.
Online bookings gained popularity as the maturity and security of e-commerce transactions grew within the domestic market and near-region.