Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority eyes China

ABU DHABI - This city's tourism authority is planning a mission to China to leverage on the opportunities opened by the recently inaugurated service of Etihad between the city and Beijing.

Gillian Taylor, Business Tourism Manager, Product Development Division, Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA) said that they will visit Beijing "before Olympics", which will be held in August.

Etihad launched its inaugural flight to Beijing on March 30.

ADTA is going after high-spending tourists and business travellers. For the meantime its business tourism division is focusing on UK and Western Europe due to infrastructure constraints. But Taylor stressed that they "cannot ignore" Asia, particularly China and India.

"At the moment we have challenges in that we don't have enough hotel rooms. So we are taking things quite slowly. We only have 10,000 hotel rooms. We are building. The next couple of years will be a little bit challenging with availability until we get these new hotels."

Impressive infrastructure developments are currently happening all over the city. Some 4,000 new hotel rooms will be completed between 2007 and 2010, and another 13,000 rooms between 2010 and 2015.

ADTA is touching base with business tourism markets in Asia through global associations. They will be participating at the next China International Business Travel Mart, which will be held in Beijing in 2009. They were in the recent SITE Executive Summit in Malaysia and ICCA Congress in Pattaya.