Arne Silvis: The events or MICE business is certainly starting now under the Starwood umbrella, which we will push quite hard. It’s not something we used to do, but certainly something we’d like to develop.

Previously under Emirates [management], Al Maha resembled the peaceful, tranquil, desert, indigenous, Arabian, authentic experience, and we would like to make the resort more accessible. We’ve had a number of small groups for conferences, but we have a 500m² space, which is tiny.

The largest group I’ve ever handled there was 75 people, taking the entire resort.

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But I think what makes it special is we offer all the desert-based activities and field activities, and the conferences and events that we have held there have all been half-day conferencing and half-day team building, making use of our leisure desert facilities. On average we have about two MICE groups of between 30-50 people a month.

Mahmoud Abualsoud: We have a huge conference facility, we have the biggest ballroom on Sheikh Zayed Road, which is 1400m² called the Samaya ballroom.

We have eight meeting rooms in addition. Since the opening in January we have had back-to-back big events, either awards or gala dinners, big conferences, even weddings, we cater almost for everything.

Lucile Falguieres: We have an amazing floor actually, the 33rd floor events and conference centre. We have 18 meeting spaces, the largest meeting space can accommodate 200 people.

It’s a one-stop-shop, we have the business centre there, the restaurant, it’s very convenient as well for corporate events and meetings. If you want 10 break out rooms we have those, we also have small meeting rooms that can accommodate five people.

Chadi Melhem: At Emirates Palace we have a lot of venues, we have 43 conference rooms, we have a ballroom which can seat 2400 guests and we have an auditorium which can take up to 1090 people, plus a lot of outdoor areas where we do conferences, weddings and different events.

Natalie Kurz: The structure of the team is we have proactive sales and reactive sales.

So basically my part is overlooking the reactive sales, proactive of course gets the business in, reactive conference and events converts it, organises it and hands over to banquet operations, so I would say pretty much the classic example of the structure. At Ibn Battuta Gate, we have 11 meetings rooms and a ballroom plus our grand hall Al Bahou, which can cater for up to 1200 guests.

How have clients’ demands changed in recent years?

TD: Technology is a huge part of venue programming nowadays; what AV you have in house, what AV they have to get, what’s your Wi-Fi capability etc.

We’re lucky at the grandstand because we telecast the races live internationally, so we have a lot of that built in. We have free Wi-Fi throughout the entire grandstand so that’s a big thing for clients.

We find more clients look online nowadays before they call or send an email to see what you have and the internet is really important.

MA: People now have very high expectations regarding being contactable. People have their Blackberrys, they are always very contactable. Guests now expect you to respond 24/7.

AS: In early February, we had a large pharmaceutical group from Europe take the entire resort for three days — but on the condition that we upgrade our AV and sound systems.

So they sent their technicians out ahead and had a look at it and we had to spend in excess of AED 100,000 (US $27,224) to bring it up to the level which they wanted. They said we will not confirm the booking unless you actually do that, so we forked out the money and they stayed and they had a fantastic time.

Has video conferencing been as big a business as many predicted at the start of the recession?

LF: During the recession we said that companies will have less budget for travel, let’s purchase video conferencing equipment — we purchased this and it did work well.

However, we have one limitation and I just want to see if the rest of you have the same one. In Dubai they offer the ISDN line connection. In Europe, for example, the line sometimes is IP and they don’t connect and you can’t do any video conferencing if you have this different connection.