We are just back from a great trip to Dubai for the Deal Show 2016. It’s our first time at the show and we took a small stand, which was very busy throughout the whole time the exhibition ran.

The first visit of the trip was at Blooloop Live, their first in Dubai and this was useful and interesting, but it also gave us some amazing insights into the market thinking. The first speaker was Amina Ahmed Mohammed, Director, Dubai Accreditation Department, Dubai Municipality and she essentially gave us six things to concentrate on in order to do business in Dubai. Quality, Quality, Quality, Safety, Safety, Safety.

As these are words that are straight out of our quality standards operation manual, We knew we were going to enjoy the rest of the visit – and we weren’t disappointed at all.

We also showed our new short film on the stand, produced for us by the extraordinarily talented Graham English and Company. It’s a brief overview of what we do and what we are planning. Graham and his team are working on the films for rides for us and they are already looking great. Here’s a preview.

[vc_video link=’https://vimeo.com/164101699′]

The next day saw the opening of the Deal Show proper. It was hosted at the Zabeel Halls, Dubai World Trade Centre, UAE on April 19th – 21st and whilst it wasn’t as completely mad busy as some of the other world shows, the quality of the visitors was very high.

Our very good friends at the Themed Entertainment Association organised a visit to the Global Village for a full behind the scenes tour. These are always interesting and insightful, but this one was particularly good.

We were welcomed to the park by the COO Viviane Mazot who gave us all sorts of insights, but the numbers they are talking about are just staggering. in Just five months, they have welcomed 5.5 million visitors through their gates which puts it straight into the worlds top 50 in less than half a years trading. Wow!

The scale of the place is surprising as it is not as huge as you may imagine. In fact it feels quite modest in size. I can only imagine how busy it gets on the bigger days.

Overall, it was a great trip with some real insights to the market, we met some great people and have lots of projects to follow up on. Bring on the next trip.

We got some of the pictures from Paul Kent of Electrosonic. Thanks Paul.