Mickey Mouse meets the Middle East in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi has now joined an exclusive club of world class tourist destinations. The UAE’s capital city joins Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, Orlando and Los Angeles as the only metropolitan areas in the world to host a Disney theme park.

Disney leads the world in theme parks, drawing more than 140 million visitors a year and holding eight of the top 10 spots among the world’s most visited parks. 

A Disney theme park transforms a community’s position in the world tourism market. Abu Dhabi will be no exception when Disney Abu Dhabi opens – whenever that might be. Disney has not committed publicly to a timeline for the resort’s development.

The first steps toward that opening will require the hiring of thousands of workers to design and build the new park and its infrastructure support.

Disney partnered with Abu Dhabi’s Miral for this project in part due to the existing infrastructure on Yas Island and the company’s expertise in developing leading attractions.

Miral’s Warner Bros World Abu Dhabi won our readers’ Theme Park Insider Award as the world’s best theme park after it opened in 2018. It remains a popular destination among theme park fans around the world, becoming the first park in the Middle East to appear in the top 20 of the industry’s respected TEA/AECOM Theme Index attendance report for the Emea region.

The prospect of Miral developing a park with Disney seems like the formation of a development dream team for theme park fans.

Disney has partnered with other companies for theme park development before. In the 1980s, Disney licensed its intellectual property to the Oriental Land Co in Japan for Tokyo Disneyland. 

OLC followed with a second theme park, Tokyo DisneySea, which opened in 2001. The company has also commissioned a Disney Cruise Line ship to begin sailing from Japan by 2029.

As good as Disney is in designing and running theme parks, it can be even better when it works with the right partner. With Miral on board, Disney Abu Dhabi has the potential to become one of the world’s top parks when it debuts.

While Disney has not announced which of its characters and franchises the Abu Dhabi park will feature, company leaders have promised it will be the company’s most technologically advanced.

Disney wants to push the current state of interactive entertainment technology with this park. That suggests the resort will create abundant employment and contractual opportunities for developers and engineers, in the US and the UAE, during its planning. 

Those developers will not disappear after Disney Abu Dhabi opens. Each time Disney has created a new resort, its legacy has been the creation of new companies in themed entertainment and technology design, as Disney’s contractors set off to work on other projects. 

With the proper support and leadership from government and business community leaders, Disney Abu Dhabi provides an opportunity to make the UAE the creative design leader in the Middle East and beyond.

That, in turn, lays a foundation for developing even more advanced and enticing attractions in the UAE. 

The new park creates opportunities, and challenges, for attractions already operating in the UAE. The new consumer spending that Disney brings to a market raises the tide that can lift all boats – but only if they are seaworthy.

Disney’s entry into a market can overwhelm and sink businesses that are not prepared to take advantage of this opportunity to enjoy the attention of the world.

Abu Dhabi today has plenty of excellent attractions to offer, including its F1 race, SeaWorld, teamLab Phenomena and the Louvre.

More are on the way, including the Guggenheim and Zayed National Museum. 

• Disney to open theme park in Abu Dhabi
• Middle East on a roll as fastest growing theme park market
• Arab Disneyland and Da Vinci: Saudi Arabia’s two great hopes

Enticing Disney visitors to extend their stay to visit these other local attractions will become the challenge and opportunity facing everyone in Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s tourism sectors once the park opens.

Disney Abu Dhabi is a huge win for Abu Dhabi and the UAE. But it also will be a win for millions of theme park fans and other visitors who will enjoy Abu Dhabi’s expansion as a tourist destination, thanks to Disney’s arrival.

Robert Niles is the editor of ThemeParkInsider.com, which covers the global themed entertainment industry