With the grand opening of IMG Worlds of Adventure on the horizon, chief executive officer Lennard Otto tells Dean Carroll that people can expect the ‘first real mega-entertainment offering in Dubai’
How many years will it take for the theme park to pay for itself in terms of the massive capital outlay that was necessary to build it and how does this timescale compare to industry norms?
“It is a multi-billion dollar project with all of the infrastructure, land and theme park cost. We are looking to break even in the first year of operation and then we are looking at a return on investment of three to four years. That’s pretty good by industry standards.”
How many millions of visitors are you expecting in the first year of operation and does Dubai have the infrastructure in place to cope with that extra influx of visitors?
“We are looking at bringing in roughly 4.5 million people in our first year of operation. We expect 50 per cent to be tourists and 50 per cent to be residents, so it will be a nice mix. The infrastructure is pretty good in terms of our location with an eight-lane highway on both sides and ample capacity to increase traffic levels. We also have over 80,000 residents within a 10-minute radius of the park so there is already a strong captive market.
“We are also only 15 minutes away from Sharjah and both the international airports, and 20 minutes away from downtown so in terms of accessibility everything is in place. The resident numbers coming may stabilise but we expect the number of tourists coming to Dubai to keep growing at 7 per cent annually for the next five years.
“We are the first in this new entertainment space so we are creating the first real mega-entertainment offering in Dubai. That will drive tourism. We have a third of the world’s population in a four-hour flight radius so we can capitalise on that. Today, the United Arab Emirates has 120,000 hotel rooms and that will grow to 220,000 by 2020. The airlines and airports are also growing.”
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