Welcome to the Dubai UPdate newsletter, brought to you from Dubai Tourism and Commerce Marketing. If you want to receive the latest Dubai news delivered straight to your inbox . And don’t forget to tell your colleagues all about us.

It’s been an amazing year for Dubai as the city continues to mature as both a premier tourist destination and global business hub. Home to some of the world’s most exciting and innovative developments – from the world’s tallest building to palm-tree shaped islands and state-of-the art theme parks to the largest shopping mall on earth, Dubai continues to astound.

Readers of the DTCM’s Dubai UPdate newsletter have witnessed this city’s phenomenal growth over the past few years. As you may already know, this year the DTCM has set up a series of new initiatives to improve inbound tourism from the UK and Ireland to Dubai. For a start, we’re working closely with many of you on marketing campaigns, familiarisations trips, hospitality events and incentives. We have also enhanced our trade-specific online training programme, Dubai Expert, developing the content to better facilitate sales. In addition we now deliver our monthly newsletter Dubai UPdate directly to your email inbox, each issue packed full of news specific to your area of interest – be that tourism, commerce or MICE. 2008 also saw the development of Dubai Travel Market, a completely neutral online meta-search engine that offers consumers all the best deals on flights and hotels, as well as listing our trade partners and a host of attractions and activities available in Dubai.

And all these initiatives have had a significant effect on visitor numbers, with the UK and Ireland recording a 13.2 per cent increase in visitors for the first half of 2008, leading current international growth which stands at 8.6 percent. But we couldn’t have done it alone, so a big thank you to all our trade partners and co-participants.

Ian Scott, Director UK & Ireland, DTCM

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