Bahrain18 November 20152 min read

‘Bahrain should focus on Family Tourism sector’

By Tahir Haneef/DTNN tahir@dt.bh. T he right strategy to develop the Kingdom's tourism sector is to attract more families and provide them with great facilities, according to Ahmed Al Banna, Chief Executive of the Origin Group. "There is no need to market to long-distance geographies, rather we will do very well

Editorial Team Legacy

Published 18 November 2015, 8:00 · Updated 22:01

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‘Bahrain should focus on Family Tourism sector’

The right strategy to develop the Kingdom’s tourism sector is to attract more families and provide them with great facilities, according to Ahmed Al Banna, Chief Executive of the Origin Group.

“There is no need to market to long-distance geographies, rather we will do very well by attracting families in the GCC region. GCC families will be willing to spend more than US$5000 on every visit, if we give them the right offers,” he said.

“Instead of looking at shopping malls, we should be looking at new ideas. For example, even though being an island, we still don’t have a good aquarium that can attract tourists, whereas a country like Malaysia has more than 20 of them,” he added.

“We need indoor play areas where children can go and enjoy, for example we need ideas like butterfly zoo, flower zoo, bird zoo to attract family tourists. The government can tie up with investors in Bahrain and outside to build innovative facilities to attract more tourists, similar to the initiative undertaken in the case of Dragon City,” he said.

According to Origin group’s top honcho, Bahrain is a service-oriented economy and thus it needs to focus on service sector: tourism, education and health.

‘Bahrain should focus on Family Tourism sector’

Editorial Team Legacy

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