2012 Forecast: Fairmont's Henning Fries

As we enter 2012, Henning Fries, regional vice president & general manager at Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, outlines the company's growth strategy for the year and tells Hotelier Middle East his views on the top trends.

What will be Fairmont’s priorities in 2012?

From a regional perspective, our priorities include the successful opening of properties in the pipeline, such as the widely anticipated Fairmont Palm Jumeirah in Q3 2012, followed by the Fairmont Fujairah. Maintaining a robust pipeline continues to be key.

Moreover, as a company we have invested a lot of time in 2011 developing the Fairmont President’s Club for members in the Middle East region - collecting information on what our members are most passionate about has helped us speak to them in ways that are relevant and important to them and also allows our hotels to cater to them on-property providing them with an extension of their lifestyle and passion while on the road. Fairmont is delivering on this mindset by tailoring a series of benefits and services under self-identified passions designed to relate to guests in a more personal way. Experiences and rewards are delivered through Fairmont Presidents Club and are tailored around guests’ personal passions, which range from Art, Culture, Leadership, Philanthropy and more - arts, sports and health and wellness have been identified as being of key interest to guests

Lastly, the company celebrates over 20 years of environmental stewardship, and one of the major initiatives is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% as part of WWF’s Climate Savers program by 2013 below 2006 levels. We were the world’s first luxury hotel group to commit to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). So far, we’ve made demonstrable strides in this area by cutting CO2 output by 8.4 percent so far.

What challenges facing the industry in 2011 do you think will continue into 2012?

The year 2011 saw dramatic shifts in power globally, rebounding economies and social awareness and action. Although the focus of last year was on the sobering effects of the 2008 recession, several and unexplained positive indicators emerged, including the political unrest in the region during the first two quarters of 2011, which affected large tourist destination such as Egypt and Bahrain and brought a surge of travel to the city, as a result. The challenge remains the long term implications of this.

2012 will draw in the unknown factor, including the long term effects of the region’s political instability on non GCC markets, the continued pace of new hotel projects in the final stages of completion, with over 5700 new rooms to come on stream by the end of 2012, and the potential onset of a secondary ‘double dip’ recession with the Euro debt crisis.

Whatthree top trendswill dominate the Middle East hotel industry in 2012?

1. Further growth of OTA’s (online travel agents), booking.com to dominate the market.
2. Outsourcing food and beverage outlets to regional brands and more widely recognizable names.
3. The continuation of increased infrastructure growth and development that will bolster the industry.

Some argue that too much emphasis is being placed on social media as a marketing tool whereas for others it should be at the forefront of hotel/tourism marketing activity. What are your feelings on this?

Social media affords the opportunity to instantaneously reach to guests with a very short lead time that does rival traditional communication vehicles such as advertising and public relations. It also lends itself very well with guest recovery on sites such as TripAdvisor, where we have the opportunity to directly address issues and concerns on a public platform.

And the numbers definitely point to the prevalence of social media today. One report stated that approximately 7 billion mobile apps were downloaded in 2009, with forecasts that this will increase to almost 50 billion by 2012.

However, this also needs to be couched within the communications role, to include more traditional mechanism as mentioned earlier. When you have marketing, PR and social media being used effectively within the industry, you’ll see various and complementary demographics being reached out to, and that is the end goal.

An example of where social media worked for us and a prime case study was the Fairmont Dubai’s adoption of a Hawsbill Sea Turtle as part of the EWS-WWF program to monitor and learn about these species in the Gulf. The hotel ran a viral competition to name the adopted turtle and received hundreds of responses via FaceBook and Twitter. It’s a great example of how our guests and residents in a community really rallied behind one of our environmental initiatives. In the end the winning name that was selected was Amal, meaning hope in Arabic.

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Guests are now looking for automation, smart rooms and self check-in/check-out. Do you agree or disagree?

I certainly agree but the question becomes larger than this in that we need to look at how today’s guests want to interact with a hotel. As a hotelier, we need to be prepared to offer both – at Fairmont, we offer guests recognition through our Fairmont President Club’s program that offers a specialized service offerings for guests wanting that added interaction, which also includes curbside check-in that we have introduced at the Fairmont Bab Al Bahr in Abu Dhabi, to respecting a guest’s preference for automation and little guest interaction during the check-in process.

Can you outline your digital marketing strategy?

Digital marketing remains at the forefront and we allocated approximately 40% towards this. Additionally, we’ve placed a renewed emphasis on IMM channels and with the creation of a dedicated e-commerce specialist, will refresh online products in addition to booking.com (which experienced a growth of over 200% this year), to include brand.com and SEO SEM platforms

What about your mobile booking strategy? The growth in mobile bookings in one of Euromonitor’s top eight trends for tourism in 2012 – how important is it to you?

Our strategy for this medium follows our overall marketing communications plan that covers traditional communication routes as well as social media. And that strategy is to concentrate on three vital business components which summarizes the core values of the brand and reinforces the hotel’s commitment to its customers. The three key areas are as follows — loyalty, retention and recognition. Mobile booking is another tool, that when use correctly, has tremendous reach.

What emerging markets are you targeting for inbound tourism to the Middle East and how?

China, India and Russia. In relation to the first two markets, Fairmont as a global hospitality company has built up commanding presence in these locations and with dedicated global sellers and infrastructure in these markets to promote the region’s destinations, we’ll continue to see an influx of travellers.