The winner of the Arabian Hotel Investment Conference’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Nasser Al Nowais, attributes Rotana’s success to date to the calibre of its team — but says there is still a lot he wants to achieve in his role as the group’s chairman.
The Arabian Hotel Investment Conference (AHIC) has awarded Rotana chairman Nasser Al Nowais with its Lifetime Achievement Award — an accolade that gets Hotelier Middle East’s seal of approval.
Al Nowais is known throughout the industry for co-founding Rotana in 1993 with his friend and business partner Selim El Zyr, the group’s president and CEO. He is one of the sector’s strongest advocates of the potential of Arab nationals and Arab companies to succeed at an international level in the hotel business.
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Prior to forming Rotana, Al Nowais spent 14 years as the chairman of Abu Dhabi National Hotels (ADNH), during which time he began his mission to build a calibre of Arabic-speaking professional hoteliers working in the properties that would be better prepared to deliver Abu Dhabi’s hospitality as a leading business centre and tourist destination in the Arab world.
“I noticed immediately that the operating companies had many foreigners who did not speak Arabic and so I pushed them to recruit Arabic speakers and to invest in training and experience for their Arab staff.
I am proud to say that many of our first Arab employees are now managers and general managers of significant hotels around the region and the world,” he says.
It was this achievement that helped guide Al Nowais in the establishment of Rotana Hotel Management Corporation, which makes no secret of the fact that its people are the “key asset”.
“I had spent so much time with the people I had dealt with in the hotels company, training them, looking after them, and recognising their achievements,” says Al Nowais.
“I knew that they were capable of running the whole show and at that time there was no Arab company that was set up to manage and operate hotels — and so we set up Rotana.”
Since then, Rotana has grown from two employees to 10,000 — with projections of reaching 17,000 in the next few years as the hotel portfolio grows to 70 properties.
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