Ras Al Khaimah capitalises on Brexit as UK visitors seek affordable luxury
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Ras Al Khaimah has benefitted from the UK’s Brexit decision as more British families seek affordable luxury, the destination’s tourism chief has revealed.
“We are capitalising on Brexit,” said Haitham Mattar, the CEO of Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority (RAKTDA), who spoke to Travel Daily at this week’s World Travel Market in London.
“We are giving UK travellers good value for their British Pound – offering five-star properties but at four-star prices.”
He said RAK was offered good value for money versus more expensive neighbouring destinations at a time when the value of Sterling against the UAE Dirham, which is pegged to the US Dollar, had been at an all-time low.
The UK is Ras Al Khaimah’s second largest source market with visitor numbers growing 28% year on year, according to Mattar.
“We receive 31,000 UK travellers a year; we want to increase that by 20% next year,” he said.
Partnerships with some of the UK’s major tour operators such as Southall Travel, Thomas Cook, TUI, TravelZoo, Virgin Holidays, to name a few were helping to drive business, particularly from the family market.
“Our overall family market has experienced huge growth of 70% year on year,” Mattar said.
Strong support from airlines including Qatar Airways, Royal Brunei, Emirates and British Airways, had also helped develop UK market business, he added.
The next challenge, Mattar, revealed, was to look beyond the family market and “focus on the younger generation”.
“We have a number of exciting adventure tourism products we want to promote,” he added.
These include the region’s first commercial Via Ferrata (Iron Path), which will open later this month, which spans the rocky facades of Jebel Jais, the country’s highest peak.
“We are also building the longest zip line in the world,” Mattar revealed.
RAKTDA is targeting one million overnight visitors by 2018.
The destination welcomed 740,383 visitors in 2016, up 12.4% year on year, and is on track to cross the 800,000 mark in 2016.
Mattar said the emirate needed to build more hotel rooms to keep pace with visitor growth given annual tourism demand was 10.5% versus hotel inventory growth of 3-5%.
“We have 5,000 rooms now and we need to double that by 2018,” he told Travel Daily.
“We have 4,000 rooms in the pipeline so the focus now is joint ventures between private and government entities [to get more hotels built].”
To find out more about RAK’s Via Ferrata, click here
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