Myanmar is seeking tourism markets in the Middle East, striving to promote the country as a travel destination, a local press reported in Monday's issue pre-published Sunday afternoon.

A delegation of the Myanmar Marketing Committee under the Myanmar Tourism Promotion Board is due to arrive in Dubai Sunday to attend for the first time a three-day Middle East travel show, the Arabian Travel Mart, scheduled to open at the Dubai World Trade Center on Tuesday, said the Myanmar Times. Comprising representatives from the Myanmar Airways International (MAI), the country's national flag carrier, and three leading travel agencies, the delegation will participate in the show which a large number of European tour operators and top worldwide travel industry buyers used to attend, the committee said. Myanmar's joining of the event came three months after the launching of the direct flight to Yangon by the Qatar Airways, a Middle east airline. The introduction of the flight is reported to have created the region's interest in Myanmar as a travel destination.

Visitors from the Middle East previously had to travel to Myanmar via Bangkok. Official statistics show that tourist arrivals in Myanmar rose by 5 percent to over 814,000 in the fiscal year of 2004-05 ending in March compared with the previous fiscal year.

In its bid to boost tourist arrivals, Myanmar has launched tourism promotional campaigns in some Asian nations including Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and India, and a special water festival activities involving participants from five other member countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) -- China, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam -- was held last month in Myanmar's second largest city of Mandalay.

Meanwhile, a tourism forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), set to be hosted by Myanmar in January 2006,will provide better chance for the country to promote its tourism in the region.

Myanmar now has 570 hotels with more than 17,200 rooms, involving an investment of about 583 million US dollars plus 33 billion kyats (about 41.2 million dollars), according to official figures.

Contracted foreign investment in the sector of hotels and tourism has so far amounted to 1.06 billion US dollars since Myanmar started to open to such investment in late 1988. Of the investment, over 580 million dollars has been injected into hotel projects, official figures indicate.