Tourism Breaking News
At the recently concluded Switzerland tourism roadshow where they hosted over 100 trade partners recently as the final of their GCC roadshow with 18 key partners that showcased their offerings from tourism boards, hotels, Railways, cablecars, airline and DMCs, it was shared that they had achieved 20% more in terms of visitors than pre pandemic or 2019. Matthias Albrecht, Director Switzerland tourism stated, “This is the last roadshow for the year. Roadshows are very important as we meet people directly in their own home ground. As we all know there are many possibilities to book online and its important to speak to people on digital channels but we all know the big families, VIPs don’t want to stay online for many hours and compare they want the travel agents to organise, add additional rooms or connecting doors, especially in this region this will stay, these contacts are able to arrange everything for them, we are here to meet these contacts.”
Speaking on the year that was, “it was a fantastic year, we had a great start, there was a survey conducted early 2022, it was asking many UAE residents and nationals about their favourite travel destination and Switzerland became third after Dubai and Abu Dhabi which are both within UAE which means Switzerland the most prominent and most popular destination outside the UAE which is a fantastic result and of course helped us a lot to advertise Switzerland throughout the year.”
This summer proved to be good for most destinations, Albrecht shared, “there is one figure which we received from September comparing now to 2019, pre pandemic and we are 20 percent plus from the whole of GCC which is fantastic result and I think its really great. I know that the country which contributed the most was the UAE, which has made it stronger. Despite the visa issues which we experienced, the whole Schengen region, this is a good sign as we aim for growth next year.”
“With regard to the trade, we re-establish or renew our race to Switzerland which was actually our last event we did pre pandemic in February 2020, so three years later we are back with our race to Switzerland where we will invite about 100 travel agents from the UAE and about 100 travel agents from Saudi Arabia to 24 hours race where we play games against each other team who wins gets a trip to Switzerland.”
