After three decades of fast growth, Dubai needs to shift its reputation toward a more authentic and culturally-infused destination experience, using local and visitor crowdsourced content.
This is the first installment for our Future Cities series, where we look at how inventive development projects, ambitious tourism goals, and smart city initiatives are paving the way for Dubai to build the city of the future.
Tomorrow's Dubai Airport will still be huge, but it's more reasonable to break it up into nodes instead of fitting those millions of people in a single structure.
Dubai might not offer meetings and convention attendees the culture of Tokyo or the cuisine of New York, but its location, growing room and space inventory, and desire to bring in more events will drive its growth beyond the 2020 Expo.
With these awards passengers help prove larger and busier airports are capable of providing great service but smaller airports definitely have an advantage because they can often do a better job at serving less passengers more efficiently and seem to make up the majority of these awards.
The #MyDubai initiative was a first step towards telling a more human story about the city, but Dubai's challenge moving forward will be making the city relevant outside of its iconic buildings so that visitors will travel far to visit and have reason to come back after the bucket list items are ticked.
While there is a still a time and place for "white glove" service, even today's highest spending guests are looking for a more curated, personalized version that uses technology to inform better stays.