Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder. It's Tuesday the 25th of

February and I'm delighted to be talking to Isam Qazim, he's chief executive of the Dubai

Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing. I'd like very much, first of all, to catch up on

your very recently released figures for tourism, because they seem to be almost off the scale.

Can you tell me what the highlights are?

Yes, of course.

I think, first of all, Simon, thank you so much for having me.

It's really exciting to be talking about a destination that I call home.

We just announced our record year yet again.

It was 18.72 million international tourists

in 2024, which is a year-on-year growth of about 9%. It's definitely a great number. But I think

what's more specifically important to us as well is when we look at the key source markets that we

go after, UK has consistently been one of the most important markets for us, and we saw over 1.3 million

visitors from UK in 2024, which is in itself up 14% year-on-year.

And that is actually more people that went to Dubai, one city, one Emirate last year,

than actually went to the whole of Canada, the second biggest country in the world.

So quite an impressive performance. But surely there are limits. I mean, 9% growth overall. Sure, we're still

making up ground from COVID. But to have that kind of growth looks, some would say, unsustainable,

Yusam. I think, look, I mean, for us, the way that we've grown the numbers in Dubai over the years,

it's been part of our strategy that was launched in about 2013, 2014. And we had set four clear-cut

KPIs for ourselves. Increased number of visitors, increased length of stay, increased spend within the city,

contribution to the GDP from tourism, and increased repeat visitation. I can probably say that

...