The lucrative world of events

Conference, banqueting and events managers reveal their key sources of business and the challenges the meetings sector still needs to overcome.

The UAE is home to a variety of events destinations: Dubai Festival City, Dubai Media City and Yas Island Abu Dhabi for example.

One of the newest additions to this collection is the Grandstand at The Meydan in Dubai, which offers 70,000m² space inside and 25,000m² area outside and recently hosted 81,000 guests at the Dubai World Cup 2011.

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It thus fit the bill perfectly for Hotelier’s events managers’ roundtable, which was held at the sumptuous Prime steakhouse.

The roundtable brought together experts in event sales, operations and F&B, who debated the challenges and trends in their business — and picked each other’s brains on several pressing issues.

Do you want to know what the most lucrative events are? Or are you wondering whether to invest in video conferencing? Read on to find out the tips from our experts…

Events managers are tricky to pin down, and job titles and responsibilities vary greatly. Tell us about your role and your hotel’s events facilities?

Theresa S. Dommett: I’m director of business development with the grandstand at The Meydan, selling mostly events, concerts and conferences. We are set up similar to a hotel sales team so that our team is very proactive — we go out, we get business, we make sales calls and when we get it and get the contract tied, we hand it over to our events team.

The reason for that is we are aggressively trying to sell the grandstand and we know we need people out there constantly knocking on doors, seeing customers and selling.

We have an incredible venue, it’s only been open a year January. It was originally just for racing last year, we did a few events but now that we’ve got racing under our belt and we know how the venue works, we decided to put a sales team in which started in December.

The grandstand was actually built to do more than just racing because it’s a year-round venue — we have an Imax theatre, a gallery space, 72 breakouts, so it’s incredible what we can do in terms of small conferences.

We’ve done concerts, most of them in conjunction with our racing. Last year we had Sting, Elton John and Santana and this year we had Super Thursday Sound on Super Thursday, we had Jesse J on World Cup day and then we had the Here and Now concert in early April.

Thomas Inasu: I’m fairly new to the events side of things. I have my master who’s been there forever, Hector Mendonca, he’s always been in events and he’s moved on to restaurants so he’s the guiding force.

He’s been there and done it all — the hotel’s been there for 16 years [Mendonca started in 1993]. How the hierarchy works there is I’m the banquet manager, I report to the director of F&B in charge of all the operation, and we’re looking at hiring a director of event sales who reports to the director of sales.

We’ve got about 31,000ft² of space with 22 meeting rooms and we do a lot of outside catering, be it desert safaris or dhow cruises, and we also have quite a good record of doing concerts, from the last Usher concert to Santana and Cirque du Soleil a couple of years ago.

We do a lot of outside catering and, looking at the business, that is certainly one aspect where we are looking at growing, because a lot of your outside catering becomes destination specific, for example The Meydan, Festival City, so we need to look at other options for these big events.

The tag ‘eventsbyjw’ is something that we kicked off at this property about five years ago and Hector was actually instrumental in doing that. They’ve started implementing this across the board, but it’s gradual.