A boost in visitors from China helped push up the number of international overnight visitors to the city Dubai has an ambitious goal to attract 20 million visitors a year by 2020, double the number it welcomed in 2012 LONDON: Dubai attracted 4.75 million international visitors in the first quarter of 2019, a slight rise on last year’s numbers, according to the UAE state news agency WAM. A boost in visitors from China helped push up the number of international overnight visitors to the city, which saw an overall 2 percent rise compared with the first quarter of 2018, according to data from Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing. Dubai has an ambitious goal to attract 20 million visitors a year by 2020, double the number it welcomed in 2012.There was a 13 percent rise in Chinese visitors to the emirate in the first quarter of 2019, with China now placed as the fourth largest feeder market to Dubai. The top feeder market was India, followed by Saudi Arabia and the UK. “Tourism as a sector continues to be one of the most interconnected, and consequently highly diversified pillars of Dubai’s GDP, making our economic contribution imperative for collective growth,” said Helal Saeed Almarri, director-general of Dubai Tourism. “Our first quarter is an encouraging reflection of the success of our various ongoing initiatives and the efforts of all our industry partners — not just in our attraction of visitation through successful implementation of Dubai Tourism’s planned calendar of regional and global campaigns, but also through customised itinerary programming and most importantly, in-city ‘guest promise’ delivery.”