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.
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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.
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