The Role of Special Events in Branding Egypt as a Tourist Destination: A case Study of EXPO 2020 Dubai

Abstract

Egypt is one of the world’s most ancient and historically richest countries in the world, boasting a wealthy heritage of cultural treasures. In the 21st century, with the wave of modernity and the country’s great potential, Egypt can offer a lot more than just sightseeing. Special events are one of the main components of tourist product and they play an immensely vital role in marketing the tourist destination and creating a powerful image. Egypt can make use of the special events industry in promoting and branding its tourist product. In order to improve the special events industry in Egypt, the benchmarking method can be applied. The Dubai model can be followed as a benchmark due to its significantly impressive and global contribution to the sector of MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) tourism. Dubai is a significant destination for hosting all-year-round various special events such as conferences, exhibitions, festivals and trade shows. In November 2013, Dubai won the grid to organize the world EXPO 2020 that is considered one of the most important mega cosmopolitan events. EXPO 2020 will be held in Dubai – United Arab Emirates (UAE) from 20th October 2020 to 10th April 2021. Its importance stems from the fact that EXPO 2020 Dubai is the first World Expo to be staged in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (MENASA) with expected 25 million of visitors, 190 country participants and supporting 94,400 job opportunities including 51,100 job opportunities in the tourism sector. The main purpose of this study is to highlight and summarize the expected economic, sociocultural and tourist impacts of EXPO 2020 on Dubai’s tourist Marzouki, S ـ ـــــــــ ــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 224 brand to become the “Global Beacon” for travel and tourism and how to use that as a benchmark to develop the special events industry in Egypt. The study is based on a solid theoretical framework by reviewing literature on special events and its importance in branding Egypt as a top tourist destination. The framework is then tested by using EXPO 2020 Dubai as a model case study. The Major findings indicate that Expo 2020 is expected to deliver great value to the UAE economy both directly and indirectly and will contribute to shape the future of Dubai as well as that of UAE. The study, therefore recommends to develop the Egyptian special events calendar and support MICE tourism in Egypt.