Visit Oman a strategic platform to promote inbound tourism
Speaking to the Observer on the occasion of the recently held Arabian Travel Market in Dubai, Shabib al Mamaari, managing director, Visit Oman, said, "These numbers include tourists who have booked through our website directly as well as through our partners."
Launched in 2021 as a subsidiary of Omran Group, Visit Oman aims to connect the accredited Omani travel supply chain, which includes airlines, hotels, transfers, tour operators, and experience providers.
He said Visit Oman is also a strategic partner to the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism (MHT) and, as a Business-to-Business (B2B) booking Engine, works in source markets in partnership with the national airlines Oman Air and Salam Air.
"What we do is we provide our trade partners, the buyers, a fully fledged booking engine that gives them well over 200 products, 100 hotels, many transportation providers, among others. These trade partners can pick and choose from these products, buy them, and then resell them to the end consumer, the tourists. We're trying to make booking easy for anyone interested. But we're working with trade partners."
On plans for Business to Customer (B2C), he said that it would require some years and also big investment. We feel the B2B strategy is faster and more reliable. Since its inception, the B2B platform has grown to 30 source markets and around 220 trade partners that use our technology in the GCC, India, China, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe, and a couple of them in North America, South America, the Far East, and Australia. We're very much focused on the region, India, and Europe, and we're expanding to Russia and China.
Al Mamaari said, "All of our products are quality assured, which is very important. It's not anyone who can become part of the platform. Also, we provide travel insurance to all to cover all of our experiences, which is a must for the European traveller. They like to know if they send someone experience that they bought and resold to a consumer, covered by insurance. If there is an accident, if something bad happens, they need that. We provide it. That gives a lot of our users comfort, and also the fact that this is a state-owned company guarantees a level of trust."
Apart from Oman Air and SalamAir, Visit Oman is also connected to 80-plus airlines. Not all of these airlines come directly to the Sultanate of Oman, and some of them come here via codeshare partners."
On the revenue model, Visit Oman offers free services to clients, suppliers, and trade partners. It doesn't cost them anything, but we take a commission if there is a transaction. So we do the business development on behalf of our suppliers. We have well over 100 small and medium enterprises, and 80 percent of our suppliers are small and medium enterprises."
PLANS
"Last year, we launched a new technology that gave us Business-to-Business-to-Consumer (B2B2C), which means business relationships in which two companies partner to offer services to clients. Now, we can push more products on the platform of choice. Let's say you don't know much about Visit Oman and need time to trust and understand the products. So what happens? You go to Expedia, you go to Trip.com, you go to the platform of choice. We're connecting to those platforms. This gave us a competitive advantage to reach a wider audience. Now, we jumped from 30 to 175 markets and from 220 trade partners to around 500 million users. These are not our users. These are the users of the likes of the biggest apps in the world. But now, because of technology, we're pushing that content and we're providing that content to many users," he said.
On competing with big names such as Visit Saudi Arabia or Visit Qatar that do large-scale promotions, Al Mamaari said it's not about scale in terms of competing with the big brands. "We're more specialised in the B2B digital sphere and destination marketing comes under Experienced Oman."
CHALLENGES:
"We have a lot of competition in the region, and what we're trying to do is specialise and complement instead of competing with each other. We also look for niche products and different experiences such as scuba diving, swimming with whales. You don't do that anywhere in the world. Kite surfing was introduced by Omran, besides deep dive fishing, which we want to promote on a global scale."
2022 © All right reserved for Oman Establishment for Press, Publication and Advertising (OEPPA) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
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