Regional opportunities
Wyndham Hotel Group International vice president, development Middle East and Africa Bani Haddad is responsible for making this focus on the Middle East turn into new signings and hotel openings.
It’s no easy task with more operators fighting for fewer opportunities. So where does he feel the opportunities for Wyndham exist?
“Doha is obviously one of the opportunities, the UAE remains high on the list and clearly Saudi Arabia,” Haddad explains.
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“The size of the country, religious tourism and domestic business tourism, makes it significant and there is a lot of our company to bring there.
We have the Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham, Super 8, we are bringing Wyndham, so there are still a lot of our products that we can bring over there.”
Haddad also feels there is room in the Saudi Arabian market for the branded, extended-stay product, a sector that he believes “is absent at the moment”.
“These are our big markets that we think will be the future in the next year or two,” he adds.
Danziger confirms “Bani has a target!”, but the company doesn’t want to claim ‘x’ amount of hotels by a certain date. “I don’t believe in that,” Danziger says.
“If you do a good job people want to be part of it, so why set a target that you could hopefully do better than? When you do such a good job people will say ‘I want to be Wyndham, I want to be Planet Hollywood, or Ramada, or Super 8, or can I have a Days Inn?’.
“There are 2000 Days Inns in the world, the Gulf states could have a 1000 — I don’t know, but the opportunity is huge, the market is ready for our kinds of brands, not just the top tier, although we have them in Wyndham Grand and Wyndham, and so it’s to our mutual benefit for owners, consumers and me to bring them here.”
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