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.
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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.
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