A warm welcome to Pullman

General manager Laurent Chaudet explains why restructuring hotel roles and focusing on e-commerce has got business at Pullman Dubai Mall of the Emirates off to a flying start.

Laurent Chaudet is one of the most expressive and energetic people I’ve met, not to mention possibly the smiliest GM in the business. And his role at the helm of the first Pullman hotel in the Middle East is one he is evidently very proud of.

Located at the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, the Pullman — which is Accor’s upscale, four-star brand — has been operational for six months now.

From the meeting floor to the executive lounge, the superior room to the suites, and the sleek wine bar Vantage to trendy café Soda Box, Chaudet is eager to give Hotelier a full tour of the property and an update on business so far — and he is more than happy to pose for some photos on the way.

Pullman Dubai Mall of the Emirates has been open six months now. How has business been going?
It went and is going very well for a hotel opening of that size. We have 481 rooms including 91 suites and obviously you don’t bring so many rooms on the market easily, particularly when we were starting to get out of the crisis.

But the pre-opening, the promotion plan and the marketing that we did positioned the hotel pretty well on the local market, and on the regional and international markets, thanks to the Accor network.

When we opened on September 7, 2010 we had 300 rooms, everything was under operation — the executive floor, the swimming pool, the spa, the gym — everything was absolutely ready.

So we did not disappoint our guests, we did not have a real soft opening, all the MEP worked well and we didn’t have any problems. Fortunately the day we opened was in the last days of Ramadan and then it was Eid and we had 150 or 200 rooms booked, mainly coming from the GCC countries — that’s better than any advertising.

So October, November, December we were at 50-55% occupancy, which was the maximum capacity at the time because we had only 250 rooms.

In January, again we were at 50-55%, in February we had 90% occupancy, with at least 10 days fully booked with all 481 rooms. We’re closing March at 71% occupancy, so we’re very happy with that. The occupancy is there; now we have to increase the price.

Pullman is an upscale, four-star hotel joining the five-star luxury Kempinski at Mall of the Emirates. What’s the difference in pricing?
There’s 15-20% difference between the hotels.

In terms of clientele, the Pullman is pretty good for leisure as well as business.

We have [the GCC guests coming for shopping weekends] but we don’t just want to stick with this because this market fluctuates a lot.

We must be very careful to grab segments which are consistent all along the year and from various markets as well. If not, you are too dependent on one market.

What markets are you targeting?
In terms of leisure, the GCC remains our main target because we have a hotel and service that is adapted to this market. It’s important to understand how these people are working, functioning and living in a hotel and you must have the corresponding service if you want to keep them.

We look very much at other leisure markets as well — Europe of course, which for Accor is a main market. We are very well positioned; there are six Pullmans in Paris for instance so people know the brand and consequently, we are very present in this market through the net.

We are targeting North America, and then Brazil, which has a direct line from Emirates Airline. We try to see where Emirates is working — when they opened Madrid direct for example.

Accor is also very present in South East Asia and in Australia, so that is a good support to promote our hotel.

Concerning business, we are quite fortunate as well. We are very fortunate with our meeting rooms — we have 850m² on one full floor dedicated to meeting rooms.

We don’t have a huge ballroom but we are focusing on what makes 80% of the MICE market in the world, which is meetings for 30-60 people. We opened the hotel with a group and we had 70-80% occupancy in our nine meeting rooms, which is a great success.

With individual businessmen, it’s our job here to have about 400 corporate companies under contract with us, plus some uncontracted companies.

These companies are not necessarily looking for expensive luxury, but neither something too casual, so we really fit this niche in the market.

How important are online hotel bookings to Pullman?
We have another market in this hotel which is absolutely crucial and it’s nice because we don’t need any sales people to do it; it’s the e-commerce.

To attract the corporate business you need a group of five to seven staff, when you work with the net you have an e-distribution manager and the director of sales and marketing will give direction, so it’s less expensive.

So 32-35% of our business is coming through our central reservation system, which for a hotel that opened five months ago is a performance. We have a very sophisticated system of central reservation and a lot of major players on the net were online with our CRS — expedia, booking.com and so on.

So when you advertise on your own site it’s spread around on all of these sites.

We do individual advertising on some sites such as google so we are present on the net when people search for ‘Dubai hotels’, ‘hotel malls’, ‘hotel MICE’.

It costs a lot of money but if you spend your money accurately and you have a clear vision for what you want to do, I think it can be extremely efficient. At the same time, our own advertising, the group Accor advertising, and the efficiency of CRS contributes to this result.

And we expect it to go further — it can go to 40-45% if we continue in that direction.

For a big hotel, the public spaces seem quite limited. How do you cope with this?
That’s an interesting point. If there is a weakness in there it’s that the public areas are reasonably small compared to the size of the hotel.
So we had to think about that and compensate that in the way we organise the service in this hotel.

If you look at where we welcome guests on the ground floor, it seems a bit limited in terms of space. It’s very nice, cosy, but effectively when there are 500 rooms it’s very small.

So we have another check-in counter at level five. We have a group of people called welcomers who are very attentive in order to lead people there. We also have another level for the four executive floors where those guests can check in as well.

On the subject of check-in, Pullman is the first hotel in Dubai to have self-service kiosks. Why, and how does it meet Dubai’s security standards?
It’s a brand standard for Pullman, we are supposed to have up to four kiosks in each hotel. The guest comes with or without a reservation, scans his passport, puts his credit card there and the key comes.

When he leaves he does the same, the kiosks ask about mini bar consumption, and the receipt comes out there. But this machine must be interfaced with the international payment system of the hotel.

The police agreed to let us use this on one condition — we must control that the passport corresponds to the person checking in. We have a code to enter in the kiosk, so in order to be sure, we have a welcomer who can check that the passport corresponds to the person and then enters this code.

You will find kiosks in some budget hotels. But the object is not the same. In the budget hotel it’s primarily to save on staffing. But it has been proven that if you don’t do 50% of your check-in on the kiosk, you don’t save any staff.

But in Pullman it’s a completely different approach; we want to give an alternative to the guest. But we must be clear that if we don’t invite the guest to use the kiosk, naturally he won’t go until he is used to it. In Paris, for the six Pullmans, 20% of the guests use kiosks. Among this 20%, 80% is for check out.

What are Pullman’s unique selling points in terms of service?
When you bring a new chain into the market, it’s not only a new building or location, you have to bring something else, something different. When Accor decide to relaunch Pullman [as an upscale brand following Sofitel by Accor’s rebranding as a luxury chain several years ago], they did a lot of research and development into HR.

I’m very HR-oriented so I was very interested in this experience and we put into practice what they theorised three or four years before. The main change is effectively the modification of the organisation chart at the reception area.

In a hotel, typically you have a front office manager, assistant front office manager, a group of supervisors and the receptionist, you have a group of concierges and a group of guest relation officers, against whom I have a certain reaction because it usually means young pretty ladies doing nothing — sometimes smiling at you, but not always.

We decided at Pullman to regroup these three groups and we created a hospitality team called welcomers. The front office manager is called a welcomer manager and their staff is multifunctional.

They have been trained and recruited for that purpose. They should be able to talk about the city, checking in, changing money, checking out, etc.

The idea of the welcomer is not to always be behind the desk. When you come to a hotel and you have four girls behind the desk and they are behind their computers, I never know what they are doing.

So the idea is to have them physically in front of the counter. This way, you give guests the impression that you are really welcoming them and that makes the difference.

You have to put that in the mind of your staff, especially when you recruit a concierge who was at the Ritz-Carlton and say now you are ‘a welcomer’; you have to explain what it means. It’s a new attitude hotel for business travellers.

What other new staff positions have you created at Pullman Dubai Mall of the Emirates?
We have created a quality and attitude manager. Usually in hotels, you read the guest comments and you take some action accordingly. What we are doing at Pullman is not to follow up the guests comments, but to monitor the quality. So this person reports to the GM at the same level as the heads of department and is involved in all the SOPs.

They have to interfere with the heads of departments and supervisors in the way that they lead their people to deliver the vision of the way we expect staff to work with our customers and between themselves.

We also have an IT solutions manager dedicated to the MICE offering. When you organise meetings, 50% of the time [your presentations] don’t work. In a classic hotel, when this happens first the trainer starts panicking, then the banquet manager calls the IT manager, and then the client waits. In Pullman, we said we could improve this.

So we decided to integrate the IT guys in the events team. They are here permanently not only to solve the problem but to anticipate the problem. I don’t understand why other hoteliers don’t think about it.

The commercial impact on our sales has been incredible. Automatically people feel reassured with their IT problem.

The event manager is also a new position in our organisation. At Pullman, we decided to create the event person systematically, whatever the size of our MICE. We have two people who are events sales managers who are looking for the business outside — as soon as the guest decides to stay with us, the events manger will become the sole contact for the organiser.

She covers everything — connectivity, audiovisual, food, set-up. And once again, that’s working pretty well because the organiser only has one contact.

Who owns Pullman Moe?
Majid Al Futtaim Properties is a leading developer of shopping malls, hotels and mixed-use community projects across the Middle East and North Africa region. Accor has an existing relationship with Majid Al Futtaim Properties, which also owns some of its Ibis, Novotel and Suitehotel properties in Dubai.

Majid Al Futtaim Properties’ shopping malls portfolio consists of 10 operating malls totalling over 800,000m² of GLA including five malls in UAE, two in Egypt, two in Oman and one in Bahrain. By 2015, the company plans to add to its portfolio of malls 12 new developments covering more than 1.2 million m² of additional GLA in Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and the UAE.

Welcoming over 120 million customers a year, the shopping malls under the Majid Al Futtaim Properties portfolio have revolutionised the retail industry with breakthrough developments such as the Mall of the Emirates, which is also home to Ski Dubai as well as the Pullman.

The group’s hospitality business focuses on the development and asset management of hotels attached to shopping malls or within master-planned communities and stand-alone mid-scale and budget hotels.