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The purpose of this study is to provide context to the evolution of tourist attractions in Dubai, retrospectively learn from the experiences of the Milan and Shanghai Expos and to highlight the tourist attractions of Dubai Expo 2020. In so doing, the paper also seeks to understand how attractions play a role in shaping the growth of the tourism and hospitality sectors in Dubai.

Data for this paper were gathered from primary and secondary sources. Informal discussions with officials of Expo 2020 generally and tourism stakeholders, in particular, who were willing to participate in this study, form the core of the primary data reflected in this paper. These discussions, which span a period of four weeks, were transcribed for later study and analysis.

First, the tourism industry, the bedrock of Dubai’s economy, has witnessed remarkable growth during the period 1990-2015 and beyond because of its rich tourism infrastructure comprising hotels, tourism activities and tourist attractions. Second, it is important that Dubai Expo draws on the experiences and expectations of prior events and can apply lessons learnt from the Milan and Shanghai Expo events. Third, that Dubai Expo 2020 can enable Dubai to build on its established image for excellent infrastructure, attractions, hotels, affordable amenities, easy accessibility and highly-developed air and road transport systems.

Even if lessons learnt from the Milan and Shanghai Expo are taken into account, they may not account for unforeseen circumstances and sources of failure – though they provide a guide in relation to the conduct of a mega event.

Dubai Expo 2020 can enable Dubai to build on its established and broadening global appeal.

Employment prospects will be enhanced by Expo 2020 that will project an image of Dubai as a world tourist destination to a far greater extent than it has done so to date. Social changes may also occur because of cultural exchanges during the Expo 2020 period.

The paper discusses how strategic planning for new attractions combined with the existing attractions will help spread awareness of Expo 2020. The observations made from this study can be used by other nations hosting similar events in similar geographical areas, to help prepare and draw on prior experience and lessons learnt.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the phases and kinds of marketing strategies being employed during the conduct of mega events such as expos. The study also aims to familiarize the reader with the detailed marketing strategies used by Dubai Expo 2020 and the marketing strategies adopted by tour operators in Dubai, alongside their most used digital channels of communication and marketing. Further, an attempt has been made to understand how the marketing methods for Expo 2020 can be integrated with the marketing of general travel products in Dubai.

Short, unstructured interviews with open-ended questions were conducted as part of the data-collection method over a period of two weeks. The interviewees are a core group of officials from the marketing and IT sections of Dubai Expo 2020. The data were recorded for later retrieval and analysis. Also, a survey of 150 tour operators and travel agents was conducted over a period of five weeks. This garnered a comprehensive set of data on the preferred marketing strategies to promote tourism products.

The marketing strategies used for Dubai Expo 2020 have been attractive, varied and innovative. Digital marketing is the most opted-for channel of communication for marketing purposes by both Expo 2020 officials and tour operators and travel agents in Dubai. Maximum popularity in terms of usage by tour operators and travel agents is reflected in social media channels of marketing, especially Facebook. There is a need to evolve a distinctly separate digital marketing strategy that will create more tailored marketing campaigns based on the characteristics affecting the consumer behavior of people engaged in Expo 2020.

This study could have incorporated more varied data if other stakeholders, e.g. hoteliers, had been included. More varied data would certainly have been useful in arriving at well-founded observations about the ideal marketing strategies that could be adopted for an event of this magnitude. Another limitation is that interviews with a greater cross-section of the officials of Dubai Expo 2020 would have rendered a more detailed and finer description of the marketing methods used in promoting Dubai Expo 2020.

Dubai is being equipped as a world-class venue for large-scale conferences and conventions rivaling Las Vegas for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions. Further, Dubai will be able to position itself as a favored location for hosting a wide array of events with global participation.

Based on this study, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a need to rethink and innovate ways of marketing by customizing the marketing strategies according to the market structure and consumer behavior, without abandoning any particular marketing channel.

This research on the marketing strategies of Dubai Expo 2020 is of interest to industry, government agencies and other stakeholders. The observations drawn from this study on marketing strategies can be used by other nations hosting similar events in similar geographical areas to provide a basis to design or redesign their tourism and marketing strategies.

This paper aims to outline Emaar Hospitality Group’s (EHG’s) role as the official hotel and hospitality partner for Dubai Expo 2020.

This paper draws on personal insights from an industry and trend perspective, aligned with the Expo 2020 Dubai theme, “Connecting minds, creating the future,” and its three sub-themes: mobility, sustainability and opportunity.

As an outcome, EHG’s commitment to Dubai Expo 2020 encompasses the provision of rooms and hospitality, meeting and events venues including outside catering, a hotel of the future innovation stand that reflects the company’s commitment to innovation in the Middle East, gender parity (female-male ratio) employment of women and youth, support to small- and medium-sized enterprise and global apprenticeships for six months during the Expo 2020 event an a commitment to sustainable economic growth.

This is an original, experience-based piece that focuses on an Expo 2020 operator’s viewpoint.

The purpose of this study is to know about the recent environmental changes that have impacted society worldwide have led to increased interest in and attention to the topic of sustainability. A good example of this new trend is provided by the Expo 2020, which is focussing on sustainability as one of the key sub-themes of the event.

This study explores guests’ and employees’ perspectives on the deployment of sustainable practices in hotels. Particular attention is placed on the identification of challenges and drivers of sustainable practices in luxury hotel properties in Dubai.

The discoveries made during the study hold meaningful implications for industry professionals and provide insightful recommendations for the upcoming Expo 2020, which can be leveraged as a tool to increase awareness and drive education on effective sustainable practices.

With 35 different nationalities contributing to the data collection, the present study provides a diverse sample, enabling the researcher to shed light on the previously identified literature contradictions.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how luxury hotel operators in Dubai interpret the current disability laws in the region, and further how they currently provide accessible accommodation to disabled tourists.

This study draws on data collected using document analysis of UAE Federal Law 29 (English translation), Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing Hotel Classification Manual, some five star hotels’ internal guidelines and semi-structured interviews with 12 hotel representatives.

The majority of participants were unaware of existing statutory law addressing the rights and needs of the disabled community in Dubai. Despite their perceived absence of a legal framework, tendency toward provision of accessible accommodations was prevalent. Uniformly, the participants focused exclusively on tourists with physical disabilities.

There is a need for detailed and comprehensive legislation protecting the rights and needs of disabled tourists, particularly in view of Dubai’s successful bid to host Expo 2020. This need will, no doubt, be fulfilled in light of the recent announcement that Dubai will enact its own disability law intended to make the emirate fully accessible to persons with disabilities.

Research into the rights and needs of the disabled community has been largely overlooked in the Middle East, an oversight which is due for correction by virtue of an anticipated increase in tourism numbers in Dubai. The opportunity exists for enactment of model legislation taking into account the needs of disabled tourists, expectations of local industry, realities of the marketplace and regional cultural influence.

Grounded in the theory of mental budgeting, this paper aims to investigate how the regret and perfectionism of exposition attendees influences their purchasing strategy.

This research collected on-site data at a well-established specialty food exposition in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the proposed model.

The findings confirm the effect of psychological mechanism (regret and perfectionism) on exposition attendees’ purchasing strategy as one that boosts/impairs their confidence in purchasing healthy food at the exposition. Specifically, regret and perfectionism show differential contributions to purchasing strategy dimensions. Variety seeking has a positive effect, whereas price consciousness has a negative effect, on purchase confidence.

Event organizers and exhibitors should understand attendees’ consumption-related psychological mechanism and devise effective management and marketing strategies for optimal consumption experiences at expositions. They can create an informative and worry-free experience that facilitates a pleasant thought process to reduce uncertainty in attendees’ on-site decision-making.

The current research pioneered a unique model conceptualizing the important, yet underexplored, phenomenon of purchasing mechanism in the exposition setting. Addressing the emerging interest in food expositions, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first for examining purchasing mechanism from the perspective of mental budgeting, providing insightful knowledge about how the psychological mechanism affects exposition attendees’ pre-purchase evaluation and confidence toward purchasing healthy food at expositions.

The UAE has set an ambitious target to become one of the most sustainable countries in the world. In addition, the country's infrastructure is playing a pivotal role in terms of electric vehicle (EV) usability with regard to its roads, power generation capacity, availability of charging stations and the drive towards customer adoption. The readiness for EVs in the UAE is assessed in this study as part of its development towards its sustainable target. This research aims to study EV readiness among the UAE car users from a sustainability perspective.

The proposed methodology follows with a comprehensive literature review to identify the various drivers of EV readiness and their contribution to sustainability. A list of hypotheses was developed based on the identified drivers to EV readiness. A questionnaire survey was designed to validate the hypothesis, and data were collected from consumers in the UAE. In total, 140 complete responses were received across different consumers and the results were studied using partial least square based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method.

An initial framework for EV readiness was developed, and analyses of the variables that are driving the relationships was done. The analysis confirmed that quality of service, power quality and infrastructure are positively linked to EV readiness in the UAE. However, the role of blockchain as a moderator to enhance the relationship between power quality, infrastructure and sustainability is not significant, indicating blockchain adoption in the UAE is still nascent in nature. However, its adoption has some potential to save energy.

The research is limited to the UAE region in terms of sample collection and respondents' profile. Further, research on EV readiness seemed to be early at present and therefore this research on EV readiness and its associated variables could set future research directions.

Logistics industry and automotive industries will benefit from the outcomes of the study especially while operating in the UAE. Also, the research recommends EV makers to understand the relationship between quality of service, power quality, infrastructure, EV readiness and sustainability in order to move towards a more sustainable transportation future.

Poor performance remains a challenge for the construction industry worldwide. One of the key performance indicators of the construction industry is the timely delivery of projects. Despite the recent methodological and technological advances in the field, project-overrun remains a significant challenge for the industry. This paper seeks to propose practical solutions that allow overcoming the challenges and promote the opportunities for improving the performance of the construction projects in Dubai.

This study focussed on the construction projects in Dubai; therefore, this research adopted a sequential mixed approach in two stages. The first stage involved face-to-face interviews with seven carefully selected construction professionals. Their answers were analysed to provide with the literature study “the informed-basis for the development of the online questionnaire”. The second stage involved an online survey administrated to 425 carefully selected construction organisations working in Dubai. Accordingly, a meticulous analysis for the prime causes of project overruns has also been undertaken. This analysis assisted proposing the most suitable solutions-based technologies that enabled alleviating overruns in the construction projects.

The findings revealed that, there was a consensus agreement on the formidable opportunities for improving the performance of the construction industry in general and in particular in Dubai. These opportunities are intrinsically linked with the adoption of the latest technologies such as building information modelling, augmented reality, virtual reality and the artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas, adopting AI has already assisted two public authorities to release No Objection Certificates and work permits effectively within one day instead of 14 working days, which has saved 90% of the time and cost. Likewise, adoption of the AI has assisted delivering the construction project with a 9% of time saving and a 6% of cost saving due to embracing an automated system that enabled them to instantly detect and report the delays, once occurred.

The main limitation of this study is that the study was limited to the construction industry in the Emirate of Dubai. Therefore, future research could target the whole United Arab Emirates construction industry to propose the practical solution on the country level.

The literature study is replete with solutions, which tend to be theoretical more than practical. Therefore, the proposed practical recommendations will significantly assist the construction industry to improve its suboptimal performance to rescind the sovereignty of the irrelevant involvements. The research recommended establishing independent entity to lead the change in the construction industry; this entity will have the power of enacting rules and legislations. Furthermore, this independent entity will have the power and authority of dictations and impose sanctions on the non-committed organisations that are reluctant to adopt the recommended technologies and approaches.

Based on the findings of the study, this paper draws a road map for the construction industry by determining practical solutions for improvements starting with an establishment of an independent authority that selects and tests the most appropriate technologies and approaches to contribute to performance improvements.

This study aims to uncover marketing strategies to restore a positive image in times of pandemic crisis to bring tourists back to a popularly affected tourism city in China, Wuhan in Hubei Province. The paper argues that the process of restoring city image requires understanding the perceptions of Generation Z, a segment of the population who have a high propensity to travel after COVID-19.

This study employed a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the perspectives of China’s Generation Z consumers of Wuhan’s future image to restart tourism. The data is collected through semi-structured interview of 29 respondents and analyzed with the initial, focused and theoretical coding process.

Start by narrowing the gap between projected and perceived image, the findings suggest that Generation Z could be pulled to visit Wuhan city through four core products such as dark tourism activities, special-interest leisure, heroism and storytelling.

The destination image restoration framework after health-related crisis is creatively proposed. It combines the analysis of crisis and urban characteristics from the perspective of the target audience (Generation Z) and provides specific strategies to restore the tourism city image from cognitive, affective and conative dimensions. Significantly, two novel characteristics of Generation Z (i.e. lighthearted and patriotic) emerge in addition to the typical features of this generational cohort. This study also found a high preference for a technologically oriented type of attraction that reverses the morbid COVID-19 memories into an entertainment tool.

Expo 2020 is scheduled to open on October 20, 2020, and will be the largest mega-event to-date in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, drawing in up to 300,000 visitors a day, half of them from abroad, in its six months of operation. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on how the story has evolved in terms of preparation for the event since Dubai won the bid to host Expo 2020 in 2013.

Content analysis of the existing literature was undertaken and industry white papers and government portals were consulted to assimilate knowledge sources and to formulate an informed opinion about the impact of Expo 2020 on Dubai.

The backdrop to Expo 2020 is outlined, followed by an overview of events with the support of literature. The pre-event buildup in terms of policies and infrastructure is assessed and an impact analysis is performed based on the framework of the triple bottom line model. The framework is used to explore post-event challenges, and the steps that will need to be taken by stakeholders and policymakers are also discussed.

There is a dearth of academic literature on Dubai as a destination. This paper brings into focus the importance of Expo 2020 to Dubai's sustainable development and, thus, addresses a critical gap in literature.