The Problem: Dubai Needs to Know Its Visitors Better Than Any Other Destination
According to the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism (DET), the emirate hosted 19.59 million international overnight visitors in 2025, the highest annual total ever recorded, a third consecutive year of record-setting growth. Behind that number is a strategic ambition that goes far beyond headcounts: Dubai wants to know who those visitors are, where they came from, what else they did on their global travel journeys, and how to reach more of them before they choose somewhere else.
His Excellency Issam Kazim, CEO of the Dubai Corporation for Tourism and Commerce Marketing, has described Dubai’s market strategy as built on “bespoke and diversified campaigns” that have been “pivotal in showcasing Dubai’s diverse tourism offerings to the world.” Bespoke campaigns require bespoke intelligence. You cannot personalise outreach to a traveller in Warsaw, São Paulo, or Seoul if you only know they arrived at DXB and checked into a hotel.
That is the structural problem that traditional tourism statistics cannot solve.
Most destination management organisations still rely on a fragmented reporting model: impression reports that show how many people saw an ad without knowing if any visited; tax data that arrives months after a campaign ends; and anecdotal feedback from local businesses as the primary proof of success. These are lagging, aggregated, and narrow by design. They tell you what happened, not who drove it, from where, or why.
Without a complete view of visitor activity, it becomes difficult to understand actual demand, monitor performance, or respond quickly to market shifts. For a destination like Dubai running simultaneous campaigns across more than 100 countries, managing relationships with over 3,000 international partners, and targeting source markets as different as Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa this intelligence gap is not a minor inconvenience. It is a strategic liability.
What Dubai Is Actually Managing: A Multi-Source, Multi-Region Targeting Problem
To understand what Factori is solving, it helps to see the full scope of what DET is managing.
According to DET’s full-year data, Western Europe was Dubai’s largest source market in 2025, contributing 4.1 million visitors (21%), followed by CIS and Eastern Europe (2.89 million; 15%), South Asia (2.89 million; 15%), GCC (2.99 million; 15%), MENA excluding GCC (2.17 million; 11%), North East and South East Asia (1.85 million; 9%), the Americas (1.40 million; 7%), Africa (897,000; 5%) and Australasia (401,000; 2%). Dubai Media Office
Each of these source markets represents a distinct traveller profile: different income segments, different travel motivations, different preferred channels, different competitive alternatives. A UK leisure traveller evaluating Dubai against Maldives requires a completely different message from an Indian business traveller considering Dubai as a stopover on a longer itinerary.
Dubai’s tourism is described as “data-led, globally distributed, and constantly optimised” running tourism offices in London, Paris, New York, Shanghai, Riyadh, and Mumbai, and deploying campaigns designed and executed by Brand Dubai, DET, Digital Dubai and the Media Council. Operating at that scale, across that geographic complexity, requires more than survey results and hotel check-in data. It requires a consumer-level picture of who visitors actually are.
The Solution: Factori’s People Data as a Source-of-Truth Visitor Intelligence Layer
Factori licenses its People Data (Consumer Graph) to Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism as an annual database of international visitors. The dataset covers visitor home country, demographic and behavioural attributes, and cross-destination travel behaviour: where visitors came from, what other destinations they travelled to, and how Dubai fits into their broader global travel journeys.
This is the category of data that traditional tourism statistics structurally cannot produce. An immigration arrival card tells you nationality. A hotel booking tells you nights stayed. Neither tells you whether that visitor also travelled to Singapore, what their household income is, what categories of experience they prioritise, or whether they are a first-time visitor or a repeat traveller building a pattern.
Factori’s Consumer Graph fills this gap. Built on behavioural and demographic signals processed across billions of data points daily, profiling users across multiple markets, collected through direct partnerships with premium publishers, data providers, and aggregators, and built on consent and privacy compliance as foundational requirements it gives DET’s research and marketing teams a working picture of the actual human beings behind the arrival statistics.
The data is used across two primary functions within DET.
Research and market intelligence. DET’s research teams use the dataset to generate insights into visitor origin composition, cross-destination travel behaviour, and audience characteristics by source market. This work feeds into the annual visitor reports, internal planning processes, and the strategic frameworks that guide where and how DET allocates its global marketing investment.
Global campaign strategy. DET’s marketing teams use visitor intelligence to inform how campaigns are targeted, segmented, and tailored by source market. Understanding that a Western European visitor who comes to Dubai typically also travels to other long-haul leisure destinations changes how you position Dubai’s competitive proposition. Understanding that South Asian visitors include a substantial business travel segment alongside leisure travellers changes which channels and messages you deploy in Mumbai versus Delhi.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Consider a DET marketing team preparing a campaign targeting travellers in a Central European market one that sends meaningful but underanalysed visitor volumes to Dubai. Traditional statistics show the number. They do not show the profile.
With Factori’s Consumer Graph, the team can understand the demographic and behavioural composition of recent visitors from that market: what income segments they belong to, what types of experiences dominated their stay, what other destinations they considered or visited. That intelligence shapes the campaign which experiences to lead with, which channels to prioritise, which competitive frame to adopt. It moves the brief from “reach Central European travellers” to “reach the specific segment of Central European travellers most likely to convert, with the message most likely to land.”
DET’s partnership model with data providers is built on this principle. As DET demonstrated through its extended relationship with Amadeus, the goal is to “measure success and gain further insights into traveller intention and patterns” with data enabling the delivery of custom, omnichannel marketing campaigns powered by comprehensive business intelligence. Factori’s Consumer Graph operates in the same logic: raw visitor intelligence converted into campaign precision.
The Multi-Year Renewal as a Quality Signal
Factori has served as a trusted consumer intelligence source for DET across multiple renewal cycles. In a market where point-in-time data purchases are common, a multi-year relationship carries a specific meaning: the data held up under scrutiny. Research teams ran it against other sources. Marketing teams built campaigns on it. The relationship renewed.
DET’s approach to data partnerships is grounded in a consistent principle: partnerships must enable informed decisions on campaigns and initiatives that will help drive more international tourist inflow to Dubai. Factori’s continued role in that ecosystem reflects data that meets that bar accurate enough to inform strategic decisions, privacy-compliant enough to meet the standards of a government body, and globally scaled enough to cover the source market diversity that Dubai’s tourism strategy demands.
DET’s Director General, His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri, has framed Dubai’s tourism success in terms of “careful planning and dynamic, agile policy implementation” describing growth as “a foundational pillar of Dubai’s diversified growth strategy, one that fuels interconnected D33 objectives spanning talent acquisition, FDI inflow, and the global competitiveness of businesses operating within Dubai’s ecosystem.” Consumer intelligence that informs global marketing is part of what makes that planning possible.
On Stakeholder Quotes
No public statement from a named DET representative specifically referencing Factori was found at the time of writing. If a direct quote exists from an internal review, a partnership discussion, or a co-presented research context, it should be obtained and added here. A single attributed line from a DET contact would be the single highest-leverage addition to this case study.
Result
Improved visibility into visitor origins and travel patterns giving DET’s research teams a consumer-level picture of who visits Dubai, where they come from, and how Dubai fits into their broader global travel journeys, beyond what traditional arrival statistics can reveal.
Faster, data-driven research and reporting enabling internal teams to generate market insights from a structured, annually refreshed dataset rather than relying on slower survey-based or aggregated official data sources.
More precisely targeted global marketing campaigns allowing DET’s campaign teams to tailor outreach by source market based on actual visitor characteristics, not just nationality and headcount.
Multi-year renewal as a trusted intelligence partner reflecting data that has been validated by DET’s research and marketing teams across multiple cycles and continues to inform strategic decisions.
Why This Matters for Tourism Boards, DMOs, and Destination Marketers
If your organisation is responsible for growing international visitation and you are still building strategy on aggregated arrival data, survey samples, and hotel occupancy rates you are making decisions about complex, multi-market audiences with incomplete information.
Factori’s Consumer Graph gives destination marketing organisations the consumer-level intelligence layer that turns arrival data into audience understanding: who your visitors are, where else they travel, what drives their choices, and how to reach more of them before they choose a competitor destination.
About Factori
Factori is a partner-powered real-world data platform offering 13 standardized, enterprise-ready datasets including:
Mobility | Places | People | Audiences | Identity | Retail | Market | Economic | Events | Property | Business I Geo.
Each dataset is governed, privacy-safe, and designed to join cleanly with your existing data stack, whether you’re working in SQL, a data warehouse, a BI tool, or an ML pipeline. No black boxes, no mystery sources, just real-world signals about how people move, shop, work, and live, delivered the way your team works: via API, raw data, app, MCPs, or agentic workflows. Explore datasets suitable for your use case and available for your market.
Talk to an Expert Get Started
