Qatar Creates to further boost country’s tourism

Qatar Creates’ all-new format is expected to attract more foreign visitors, further boosting the country's tourism sector, Qatar Tourism COO Berthold Trenkel has said.Speaking on the sidelines of Qatar Creates launch on Monday, Trenkel said that such initiative is popular in markets like Europe where people are typical visitors of museums and known to be highly culturally oriented.“Qatar Creates is a great initiative and we are doing a lot of collaboration. We’ve fully integrated it like all the calendars from the museums (to be) a part of the Qatar Calendar, which is the big umbrella, which covers anything whether it is a sports event, exhibition, and etc,” he said.Qatar Creates’ new edition, now a year-round celebration of art, fashion, design, culture and architecture, features a wide range of cultural and artistic offerings across the country leading up to the FIFA World Cup 2022. According to Qatar Museum (QM), Qatar Creates 2022 will be the first year to witness two editions of the celebration as it welcomes visitors during the prestigious football tournament in the country. It will also introduce QM’s upcoming museums and galleries, including the Art Mill Museum, Qatar Auto Museum and Lusail Museum.Qatar Tourism is also set to ramp up its efforts to entice more travellers from neighbouring GCC countries during the summer, Trenkel said.“Obviously the GCC region is the easier one because it is where the neighbours live, it is hot here and you don’t have that perception challenge (since people are more used to the weather).“So that is the primary target and then I am hoping the Indian subcontinent will open up but that will still depend on the Ministry of Public Health rules, once these rules relax… then we can also target this market,” he added.Trenkel added that the country witnessed a surge in the number of visitors from other GCC countries during the Eid al-Fitr holidays, many of whom travelled by car.Qatar Tourism, he noted, also saw a strong recovery during the cruise season (which typically starts in November and ends in April), which substantially helped Qatar’ tourism sector.Trenkel said that further relaxations of Covid-19 restrictions in Qatar and other countries will enable them to unlock other markets in different regions.“It depends also what is the situation in other countries like China, where parts of it are still in lockdown and people cannot travel. So for us the Chinese market is not accessible or it is not accessible to anyone right now.“But once that changes, then we will also go after these markets. Right now the focus is largely North America and Europe because these markets are way relaxed in terms of travel restrictions and everything, and people are travelling,” Trenkel pointed out.While the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 is expected to draw large crowds, he said the tourism team is exerting efforts to capitalise on the winter peak and the first quarter of 2023.Trenkel said Qatar Tourism will also launch a programme next month aimed at attracting transit passengers at Hamad International Airport.“We will launch a campaign that we are working on and it should go live in key markets like Australia and the UK because that is where the transit traffic comes from, so that is a big thing,” he said. “It’s our ‘Stopover Campaign’ trying to capitalise on all the air capacity that obviously Qatar Airways has.”