Hotelier Middle East rounded up the brains behind Hilton’s regional F&B operation at BiCE, Hilton Dubai Jumeirah, to grill them on ambitious expansion plans, menu engineering and tackling fraud

How much of your Middle East hotels revenue comes from F&B?
Simon Lazarus: As an area it is 35%, but we have some hotels that make more in food and beverage revenue than rooms revenue; some substantially so. It depends just on the size of the hotels, the number of F&B outlets and the attractiveness.

How have you seen that ratio of revenue from rooms to F&B revenue change over the years?
SL: Revenue from food and beverage has grown year-on-year, not only because of openings, it has grown organically. But it’s really the conversion — profitability — we look at and we’ve just launched a new initiative called ‘menu pricing strategy’.

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This involves doing a lot more deep-diving into menu engineering utilising Micros technology. Hotels and restaurants traditionally do a cost-plus pricing method, so if something costs AED 250 (US $68) you’ll mark it up to achieve a certain percent [margin], but we’re shifting entirely now to market-driven pricing where the customers tell us what they want.

You can analyse quite easily to see what the customer wants and we’ve changed the price now in line with the economic situation. We have started to offer more value-conscious meals to give people that option and allow them to choose their price point.

We are moving towards being able to change our menu prices due to demand. We are changing it more frequently, moving towards reacting, being able to put specials and promotions on very quickly, capitalising on seasonality and moving to more menu printing in-house for that flexibility.

How is technology helping you to effectively engineer menus?
SL: Micros gives you all the sales figures so you can extract everything, have complete visibility and look at prices. It’s good for the food and beverage manager and the chef, and it’s all about knowledge of what moves and what doesn’t.

We look at how trends develop monthly, if it’s not a seller it comes off the menu and if it sells we put a value on that.

This approach is now mandated throughout the hotels, we had a focus on it previously, but now there’s a big push.

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