Dubai Tourism have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Airbnb in a partnership to promote responsible hosting following introduction of updated regulations.
It follows the introduction of enhanced regulations last month that make obtaining a ‘holiday home’ license more streamlined for individual tenants and homeowners who want to rent their homes to guests.
Bolstering the collaboration between the two parties, the MoU will help enhance and diversify the emirate’s holiday home sector, boosting competition through a safe and transparent holiday home segment.
The agreement will ensure that Airbnb will cooperate with Dubai Tourism on preventing breaches of the regulation by informing all host members of the Dubai Tourism regulations via its website and through email reminders of the rules.
Both parties will also explore joint marketing and promotional activations for Dubai as a tourism destination.
Airbnb is an increasingly popular way for guests from around the world to experience Dubai by staying with local hosts. There are almost 3,500 Airbnb listings in Dubai. This number and the number of guests choosing Airbnb when traveling to Dubai has doubled since last year.
His Excellency Helal Saeed Almarri, Director General, Dubai Tourism, said “in keeping with global demand trends and a highly digitised market place for key enablers of tourism infrastructure, we are pleased to partner with Airbnb, a pioneer in this space, to help promote diverse accommodation options to our visitors in a safe, secure and controlled manner. This not only lets us be more competitive as a tourism destination but also speaks to our ability as government to drive demand led policy making and embrace innovation to further our proposition. Ultimately visitor experience is at the heart of initiatives undertaken by Dubai Tourism and this is one such example of how we continue to partner with the private and public sector to deliver against our destination promise.”
