UAE travel is back with a vengeance, says visa service provider VFS

Gulf News

UAE travel is back with a vengeance, says a senior official at VFS Global.  In an exclusive interview with Gulf News, Monaz Billimoria, Deputy Regional Head - UAE & Qatar, VFS Global, said that while the pandemic put a pause in travel owing to border restrictions, people are now fed up and want to go on a holiday.  VFS Global (Visa Facilitation Services Global) manages visa and passport issuance-related administrative and non-discretionary tasks for its client governments.  Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3JHq5hI  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #UAEnews #travel #VFS

Transcript

00:00Travel from UAE in 2022, our forecast is that we should have at least 75% of our business back with us.

00:10I worked for VFS Global for the last 10 years and have spent the last three of them being in Dubai.

00:17Prior to that, I worked in Mumbai and looked after the South Asia region.

00:20The journey has been extremely exciting and one with a lot of learning.

00:27I did not expect the pandemic to hit us when it did.

00:30When I came in 2019, we've had a wonderful year of very flourishing operation and a very challenging one with different kinds of challenges.

00:39The pandemic time taught us mainly to be agile and resilient.

00:46And as an organization, we are an extremely agile one, so we quickly adapted.

00:50We enhanced a few things and we tried to move towards more digital processes.

00:57So we used our time to improve our digital journey.

01:01We also used our time to be involved with our personnel.

01:06And we spent a lot of time with learning and development activities, online learning courses, health and well-being and mental awareness courses.

01:16Just to keep our team well motivated and guided through this very difficult time.

01:21Then we came to a restart and the restart wasn't all at once.

01:26We had slow restarts with some client governments opening borders in early 2020 June and majority of them started in June 2021.

01:38That was a harder and a larger restart.

01:41And we saw close to 50-60% of our business of 2019 coming back very quickly.

01:48We ended the year in 21 with close to 60% of our business being revived.

01:53Revenge tourism was seen very clearly as a trend early on.

01:58People just want to get out and get going.

02:01Now it's not so difficult.

02:03Most of the borders are open.

02:05People are planning their travels for summer.

02:07And we find 2022 to be a more positive and optimistic environment.

02:14Yes, travel is not going to come back completely till the end of 2024.

02:18Having said that, travel from UAE in 2022, our forecast is that we should have at least 75% of our business back with us.

02:27Some trends did change as well with the pandemic.

02:31A very consistent trend that we saw early on was the fact that people were more excited and happy to use our visa at your doorstep service.

02:41Now this service means they don't come to us to make a visa application.

02:46We take our kids and go to them to make a visa application.

02:50And we go to their homes or offices.

02:53And I think the fact that health and safety has always been at the forefront for us.

02:58The fact that people were still not completely clear about where they wanted to step out and where not.

03:07This sort of was a trend that increased.

03:10And visa at your doorstep as a service has been very popular and remains to be popular in the UAE.

03:28For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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