From left: Sarah Walker-Kerr, Katerina Dixon, Derryn French, Sarah Omolewu, Vivienne Gan and Shona Mac Sweeney.
How has regional unrest affected your hotels?
KD: We are just looking at relocating guests in Dubai hotels. If you’re an FIT traveller wanting to travel to Egypt you may change and come to Dubai. We’ve seen some bookings from Bahrain coming through.
DF: I think it will impact both ways. Certainly we will have an impact in terms of people that were travelling to those regions, but we are very wary, depending on how it escalates, on the impact it will have on people that term the Middle East [as one]. People aren’t geographically educated.
As soon as anything happens in the Middle East you do tend to be packaged within the bracket so people are a bit nervous about travelling here.
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We haven’t had a huge impact but I think you’re definitely seeing your forward bookings are not as strong as we were looking at and there have been a number of cancellations as well. If anyone’s not watching it, they should be.
SO: It should definitely be taken into consideration. We’re mainly GCC; 75% of our guests are from this region. People that were planning on going to Egypt are coming to Dubai instead and they are staying at Raffles because it’s a brand they’re familiar with.
We’re not as much affected by the unrest, if anything it will be a little bit more beneficial for us because we don’t get a lot of travellers from the west and Europe and US.
SMS: We’re pretty much the same, if anything we’ve seen the GCC travellers coming in sooner. It’s spiked a bit which is great for business.
SWK: I think that our GCC market business will carry us through the next few months.
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