Dubailand - would the pharaohs have dared?

Résumé du document

Dubai is the second largest of the seven city states in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with Abu Dhabi as the largest. Since Dubai has proven reserves of only 4 billion barrels of oil, the government decided to implement a new strategy of economical diversification in order to get out of the petroleum industry dependency.

The main focus of this strategy is to turn the city state into a major financial center and tourism location. This strategy was successful with the building of innovative real estate complex such as the “Burj Dubai” the world tallest building or the manmade islands “Dubai world” (with the appearance of a world map) and “the Palm””.

The success of this strategy has been favorized by the development of the national airline company “Emirates” which turned Dubai into an enormous hub, mainly for passengers in transit from Europe to Asia (27 million a year). Dubai then became a major “flying through” country which was an essential conclusion for the future strategic planning of the country. “Indeed the main objective was no longer only to bring more people to come in Dubai but also to make them stay longer as the average stay in Dubai was lower than in equivalent places around the world.”

In order to answer to this objective and to become the choice destination for tourists all over the world, the Dubai development and Investment Authority came up with this solution:

The creation of a globally competitive entertainment and leisure hub that would not only increase the number of tourists attracted to Dubai (8% growth per year) but would also increase the length of their stay.

This idea was the founding principle of Dubai Land, the world's largest theme park and entertainment center, able to compete with the most fashionable leisure and entertainment industry places such as Las Vegas, Orlando, Disneyland or Macao and Hong Kong… with a maximum final capacity of 15 million tourists a year.

This theme park will be an attractive place for people all over the world looking for entertainment and experience, especially for people in countries close to Dubai. Indeed the entertainment industry is not or lowly present in this area of the world in terms of theme park with hospitality and entertainment infrastructures.

The project was initiated in 2002, and the delivery will intervene in December 2010. In order to successfully reach this deadline and due to the enormous size of the project, Tatweer the company behind DubaiLand and its board of directors had to fight several challenges. These challenges were the establishment of a strategy and key priorities, how to implement it and to communicate it with others.

Extraits

[...] Thanks to its willingness to operate the core elements of the park, Tatweer will be able to set up standards in terms of quality, customer satisfaction and services. These standards have to be used to legally bind the other parties (investors and operators) by redacting a behavioral chart that all parties will have to sign and respect. This will give an insurance of good behavior of the third parties. b. Recruiting and HR: This part of the strategy consists in designing a recruiting and human resource policy to attract and keep the brightest and the most efficient. [...]

[...] Also relying on third parties for all the aspects of the operations, even for the core businesses may be dangerous for the company. On top of this, the action of the government was critical as it promised infrastructure to Tatweer that the company then promised to its investor. The main challenges concerning the third parties, as these parts of the business was out of hands, is to make sure that they deliver a good quality product or service on time, and also to find a way to legally bind the people that have invested or who are operators in the project. [...]

[...] Once implemented, the strategy will have to be monitored, as the service and customer satisfaction is at the center of it, it will be really efficient to conduct customer surveys on the first clients. This will allow getting data and inputs in order to correct the possibly occurring errors. II/ THE WORKFORCE: AN ESSENTIAL PART OF DUBAILAND: Due to the size of the project, the workforce will be an essential part of it, moreover the efficiency of the HR management may determine the overall efficiency of the project as people will be involved in it. [...]

[...] IMD ; 2007 “Business strategy, what is strategy”. Tutor2u. May http://tutor2u.net/business/strategy/what_is_strategy.htm Strategic management seminar. ISM. Professor Paul Perreira. January 2010. Paris “Dubailand : Would the Pharaohs have dared”. Anne Valérie Ohlsson, Prof Jacques Horovitz. [...]

[...] The workforce and the customer satisfaction will be two critical parts of the project, thanks to this strategy, they will be taken into consideration and DubaiLand should have a successful future. Introduction: “Dubai is the second largest of the seven city states in the United Arab Emirates with Abu Dhabi as the largest. Since Dubai has proven reserves of only 4 billion barrels of oil, the government decided to implement a new strategy of economical diversification in order to get out of the petroleum industry dependency. The main focus of this strategy is to turn the city state into a major financial center and tourism location. [...]