Dubai: With natural disasters of catastrophic proportions, airline fuel hikes and conflict, not to mention the still-weak economies, it seems there has never been less of an incentive to travel.
It's too early to gauge the impact the recent wave of unrest in the region has had on tourism during the first quarter. While Dubai and Abu Dhabi look likely to come out with relatively strong growth numbers, Bahrain and Egypt probably will not.
These details have not stopped one new media buying agency from emerging and — here's the catch — specialising in advertising prospects in the travel and hospitality sectors; providing hotels, airlines, leisure attractions and tourism bodies with a host of strategic media and marketing solutions.
Gaurav Sinha, the owner of Insignia Travel Media Group, believes the timing of the launch is not off-kilter.
"When times are hard it amplifies the need to continue to invest in one's business," Sinha said. "From our perspective we have to promote local hotels and destinations to key feeder markets across the UK, Europe, Asia and beyond — this will continue, even though with modest momentum.
"However, hotels and international brands also want to be promoted in the Middle East as these countries are key feeder markets with outbound tourism. Let's not lose sight of the fact that people will always travel… eventually."
Beyond that, Sinha is obviously out to leverage the fact that he is already an industry insider, being the owner of Insignia, a brand communications agency that has been in existence for eight years.
"The agency has been providing brand marketing and creative strategies to travel and luxury brands for a long time, but this was never quite packaged to stand apart from the agency's mainstream service offering," he said. "Insignia Travel Media Group comes due to an existing base of travel brands seeking deeper intelligence in media planning and partnering with organisations such as ourselves."
Since the second half of last year, the travel and hospitality sectors in the region were spending more on high-profile advertising and marketing campaigns.
destination management company dubai 
