By Bernama,
Abu Dhabi : Abu Dhabi, riding a wave of unprecedented growth and expansion in line with the government’s vision of making tourism a key contributor to the emirate’s burgeoning and rapidly- diversifying economy, Emirates news agency (WAM) reported Wednesday quoting the Harvard Business Review, as saying.
In a research article in its April 2008 issue, two prominent writers said:” With new centres of economic power emerging, companies should also establish themselves in rising metropolises such as Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and Abu Dhabi, where prices on the prime real estate will surely climb as demand outpaces availability.”
Entitled ‘The Tourism Time Bomb’, the report has been written by Paul F. Nunes, an executive research fellow with the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Boston, and Mark Spelman, the London-based global managing director of Accenture’s strategy practices.
The Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership and enjoys the reverence of academics, executives, and management consultants.
Its worldwide English-language circulation is over 240,000, and there are 11 licensed editions of the magazine, including two Chinese-language editions, a German edition and a Brazilian (Portuguese-language) edition. The magazine is editorially independent of Harvard Business School.
The writers observed: “International travel is no longer the exclusive province of the rich. Over the next several decades, hundreds of millions of new entrants to the middle class will want not only the things-but also the experiences-that money can buy…. They want to see Paris from the Eiffel Tower, relax in the Maldives, and play blackjack in Las Vegas”.
According to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, international tourist visits are expected to double soon, from roughly 800 million in 2008 to 1.6 billion by 2020.
“However, only so many people can visit a particular building or beach in a given year. Where will all the other tourists go,” they asked.
They said this skyrocketing demand for travel will lead to a “scarcity of place” and companies and governments are creating facsimiles of popular destinations.
“The Eiffel Tower, for example, can be seen in Las Vegas and at Disney’s Epcot Centre, not just in Paris. Venice’s canals can be enjoyed in Macao, where the Venetian resort and casino has three canals in its US$2.4 billion, 10.5 million-square-foot complex. And the prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, are available for inspection in a meticulously reproduced duplicate 200 metres away from the real thing”, they remarked.