Arabian Hospitality meets German efficiency
With the opening of Jumeirah Frankfurt, the first hotel for Jumeirah Group in mainland Europe, general manager Dagma Woodward explains how she brought the ‘Stay Different’ philosophy to Germany.
Hire the right people
“The most difficult part of our approach was to get the right people. Jumeirah is not that known in Germany. We did a lot of promotions, we organised ads, interviews, we printed cards for distribution.
We did career launches. We would invite people every Wednesday to our offices — and we would have a food and beverage table, rooms division table, sales and marketing table, and people could just come and enquire as to what the hotel was all about. It was a great success as we received a lot of interested people through these career days.”
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Introduce the brands
“We have a small spa — only five treatment rooms. We are a business hotel so people wouldn’t go to the spa like they would at Jumeirah Zabeel Saray. We need to get the local women here. We will also do special deals for men because more and more men do spa treatments now. It’s a Talise urban spa — for Frankfurt, it’s super.”
Understand your market
The Germans are very ecologically-minded. So looking after the environment is very important. If we were to fly in food, that would be bad for the environment, so everything is sourced locally from farmers in the local mountains, where the animals are free and where we can go and have a look.The whole product, everything that we use in the hotel is really ecological. It’s very important in this country.”
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