No Payne, No Gain

The GM of One&Only The Palm, Michael R. Payne, discusses the demands of managing a luxury boutique hotel.

One&Only The Palm, Dubai has received a rapturous response since its official opening on November 15 last year. The property has achieved occupancies in the 80s, attracted a stronger GCC following than expected — which should help bolster occupancy rates during the summer months — and scored rave reviews for its restaurants.

Alongside sister property Atlantis and neighbouring resort Jumeriah Zabeel Saray, One&Only can be credited with defining The Palm as a new luxury beach destination for Dubai, while the boutique nature of the 90-key property adds something different to the emirate for returning luxury travellers.

The success so far has been achieved by a team of 325 staff, overseen by general manager Michael R. Payne, who returned to Dubai to take up the Palm post following nearly four years at the helm of world-renowned One&Only Reethi Rah in the Maldives.

Having survived four years of island life — where “your office is the entire island” and “you have no private life at all” — Payne says he was excited to come back to Dubai, where he was previously working as the resident manager at One&Only Royal Mirage.

“It’s like coming home in a way,” he says of the city in which he met his wife. “Dubai gives you a form of a city lifestyle with hotels that have very high standards, compared with the standards that you get in Asia.... a benchmark of the top hotels when it comes to services.”

With 13 years in Asia under his belt — including the pre-opening of Park Hyatt Tokyo —plus a stint in Europe, Payne has experienced two sides of hotel management and says that as a result of the seasons, Dubai combines both approaches.

“There are certain standards which require a certain amount of staff. Unfortunately in Europe your standards are perhaps compromised slightly because you just cannot afford it,” observes Payne.

His hotel has a high staff to guest ratio for example, but in Europe the ratio would be 1:1 or in Australia, 1:0.8, meaning a property like One&Only The Palm would have just 70-80 staff.

“We are still I would say in a fortunate position here in Dubai where, although you have two markets, the summer being the low season — so now for the next four to five months operationally-wise you take on a European or Australian approach — for the other seasons you are able to really go for your top five-star service,” says Payne.

“I think in Dubai we are aware that your hotel has to adapt itself to the market in summer,” he asserts.

Art of Adaptability
So, in what ways will One&Only adapt to maintain its performance thus far, despite the August drought everyone is anticipating?

Payne explains that the focuses will be on re-energising staff, analysing processes to ensure service ease and consistency, and targeting families and the GCC market.

“Your staff during the high seasons sometimes are short of time to rest and so on, therefore [summer is] very aggressive on holiday leave for our staff and we use the time to analyse, especially as this hotel has just opened, a lot of things that we said we were going to do one way, [when] we’ve noticed that operationally things have to be changed slightly for guest experience, guest satisfaction and also ease of service delivery,” says Payne.

Helping staff to achieve “better consistency” is crucial, he adds, as “consistency is a big key to success”.

“The team’s done an amazing job and my belief is service delivery and successful service delivery is directly linked to both the tools and the way in which we have shown our staff to do a specific task,” asserts Payne.

“My focus over the next three or four months is to go back and look at every basic service standard and service delivery element to our guest to make sure that it’s the right way of doing it [and] the easiest way for our staff.”

Taking the resort’s six mansions — each incorporating eight to 10 suites — as an example, Payne says he is analysing the best ways of servicing them from a housekeeping and room service perspective, aiming to avoid a “convoy of buggies” and ensure staff are comfortable.

“We don’t want the staff coming into the villa perspiring so we’ve got to ask ‘have we given the right tools, have we got the right set up?’.”

The aim, he explains, is to achieve even more through reduced effort.

“We need to deliver the same and more, however, the output from the staff has to become less, otherwise they are going to wear out, so it’s all about making it easier for them and that’s where our responsibility comes,” says Payne.

Acknowledging that August will be a “very tough month”, he says there will be “some snagging work”.

During Ramadan in August, therefore, 101 — the over-water restaurant created under the guidance of the property’s consultant chef, three Michelin-starred Yannick Alléno — will close for “a bit of work that we didn’t perhaps have time to do because of the very tight finishing of that restaurant”.

Summer strategy
Software and hardware aside, the sales and marketing strategy over the summer period is also obviously key. There has been high demand from Europe, UK, Germany, Switzerland and France, as well as the high-end Russian market, with GCC travellers sometimes taking second place behind Europe.

“The GCC market has really come very strong, there are times when it has been number two, number three. If you add Dubai, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, all the GCC [countries], they at times make up number two market share for the month,” says Payne.

“We do believe that the acknowledgment of our property by the GCC market will definitely help us in the low seasons and we’ve seen even last weekend [May 26-28], we went up to the mid-high 70s, nearly 80% over the weekend, with suites and even villas being of a high request. It’s short stay but that’s what the GCC market is about”.

To help support this market and that of One&Only’s key European feeder markets over the summer months, the resort launched a summer package called Families Travelling in Style on June 15. Running until September 30, guests that book a room for two adults will receive a second room at 50% off the room rate for a maximum of three children or teenagers, when staying three nights or more.

“We mustn’t forget if someone goes on holiday they don’t want to go to a hotel where they’re getting less than what they have at home.

“I don’t believe parents have their kids sitting in the same room at home, so why would they come on holiday at a top-end boutique hotel and camp children on rollaway beds in the same room as mum and dad,” Payne observes.

Knowing me, knowing you
Understanding — and indeed knowing — the guests forms a major part of the One&Only philosophy and this is something Payne intends to build upon at The Palm.

“I always thought that I wanted to be a big hotel operator, I worked for a few Grand Hyatts, I did my time in big hotels and I got a real buzz out of it,” he recalls. “Then with time as I moved from hotel to hotel I began to realise that we never really...we didn’t honestly know our guests.”

Managing a boutique property, he says enables “more of an impact on the guest experience”.

“In a boutique hotel the guest expectation is that he is not just someone checking in and checking out. This person is coming to our home and this is what I tell all our staff — this hotel is our home and the people that come here are our guests coming to our home.

“These guests expect personalised recognition, personalised contact and I would say that working in and managing a 90-room hotel is a lot more intense, a lot more demanding — if you really want to push the bar at the top — than a 300-, 400-, 500-room hotel. Everybody has to stand and be accounted for on a service side and every employee is going to make an impact and a difference with the guest because we are so small. You create relationships with your guests and that is what is the difference,” says Payne.

One&Only, therefore, does not run a loyalty programme, he explains, with the GM and the team building “more of a personal loyalty” with guests, achieved partly through the personal entertaining that formed such a huge part of Payne’s role as GM at Reethi Rah.

“I’ll be very honest. I haven’t unfortunately done as much as I’d like to so far because of the work of setting the hotel up, but I know that once we start into the high season I want to be doing a lot more and it’s about being out there with your guests. In two, three months time, everybody here will know exactly what they have to do so I will spend my entire time with the guests,” explains Payne.

GM’s Favourites
The interior concept of One&Only The Palm — created by WA International — combines the history and culture of Andalusia with a modern twist. Highlights for Payne include the dramatic and decadent backdrop of signature restaurant Stay by Yannick Alléno and the free-flowing feel from lobby to ocean.

Overall though, he says: “I love the way the hotel at night is a totally different hotel”. This is partly because it’s not only the rooms that are turned down at One&Only The Palm; the entire hotel is treated the same way.

“When the hotel is turned down at 7-7.30 in the evening and all the candles are lit, there’s a beautiful place where you walk past the spa and you’ve got these beautiful fireballs and a fountain,” says Payne. “To be quite honest sitting on the terraces in the evening, you actually don’t feel as if you’re in Dubai,” he adds.