EXPLORING SENSORY EXPERIENCE OF THE DUBAI CREEK

Abstract

Tourism is the fastest growing sector of the global economy and one of the key driving force of growth and development of the country. Current tourism literature highlights the sensory aspects of destinations is crucial to facilitate positive and memorable tourist experiences. The paper aims to investigate how tourists perceive, sense, think, and record their particular destination and also to understand how their feelings about that particular place have elicited in the form of emotional expressions and create positive memories. The objective is to investigate whether the Khor Dubai (Dubai Creek in English) acts as cultural heritage landscapes and an integral component of city and whether it offers sensory based memorable experiences. The results suggest that Dubai Creek has a lot of emotions to offer: the photos and sensory terms used in the actual survey brings the sensorial emotional appeal, and its history offers nostalgia-laced place-making specific spots like the Old Town, Souq (Souk) Al Bahar which offers the tourists sense of exhilaration and a deep sense of enjoyment and reinforce positive memories able to retain tourists for ages. This study describes the novel method of not only measuring the tourist experience, but also helps to develop branding initiative and to build a unique destination identity to Dubai.