You’ve touched on your target markets – who are you appealing to?
Pep: We will be targeting both leisure market and business. We have the beach in front of us and a huge kids club and we’re very successful with families and children coming from the UK and Germany because they will be our main markets for leisure.
We have a very good health club and a lot of facilities, so we will attract a lot of clientele during the weekends and we will have available health club family memberships. Another main market will be government — with Abu Dhabi National Hotels (ADNH) and Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (ADTCA) we are preparing a huge marketing plan to attract major businesses in Abu Dhabi and we have a lot of weddings already reserved.
The ballroom is very different, it has a feeling of a palace, very traditional, gold, silver, huge chandeliers, beautiful — the locals will really enjoy it. We have 85 villas, the resort is 57 acres of land, and this makes it very convenient for families — they come directly and go and check in and enjoy the villas on the weekend.
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Mario: Sheikh Zayed Road is traditionally serving the corporate market… and the MICE market segment. We are also targeting the MICE market, conferences, government events, social events, weddings, company conventions.
We will also position ourselves in the leisure market — we have a unique leisure component which is the pool deck which nobody else has on Sheikh Zayed Road. And we are focusing and targeting the local clientele with our f&b proposal. We are very strong in the US market and in Europe, so definitely we will have very diversified business mix from a geographical perspective. Obviously we are operating in the Middle East and GCC is one of our main markets.
Luigi: We have a very good mix between corporate business and leisure. On the corporate side of course being next to the financial centre of Abu Dhabi we feel we can attract a lot of the business travellers during the week days and then during the weekend, because of the dynamic of our restaurants, the spa and the shopping and all of that, we are attracting also some leisure guests. The medical centre I think is a new market for Abu Dhabi and this is brand new infrastructure – it has 400 beds — and we feel that could be a very good USP for us.
Martin: Fairmont is going to be predominately leisure business. Obviously going to the traditional core source markets that are bringing business onto the island, very large influx from CIS, Czech Republic, a lot of the ownership of houses on the island are actually people of those nationalities.
The source markets are Europe, predominately Switzerland, Germany which will continue to come here in droves at different times of the year, plus the English tourist market. Russia is still a very, very big market, GCC markets are going to be extremely important to us. We have good traction already in Saudi Arabia with our property at Makkah — we really have phenomenal visibility in that location.
We’re looking at an average length of stay of anywhere to about four to five days from these different markets. The remainder of the business is going to be topped up with the corporate business — with firm bookings already going into the new year for meetings. It’s going to lend itself I think very well to the GCC traveller market, with the kids club and the beaches and also proximity to shopping malls.
Rupprecht: We really want to work with Dubai Convention Bureau and all institutions to establish Dubai more on the convention landscape, MICE etc. It’s a huge business worldwide; it contributed $106 billion to GDP in the US.
Being at home in the US, [JW is] connected with big bookers from the US, not only there but also Europe. Really I took this on to compete with other cities and destinations rather than within Dubai.
We want the big business and I’m competing with Berlin and Lisbon and Madrid. We have a lot of interest from BRIC, it’s really the pharmaceutical, the consulting, the banking [industries].
[We have] two ballrooms, all the business facilities, we’re going to have some restaurants open 24 hours, we will cater to the international traveller. There’s a whole listing [of MICE destinations], if you take the top 20 or 25, Dubai doesn’t show up — it’s very small still but one third of the world’s population and also some businesses are within a five-six hour flight from Dubai.
There’s a huge potential to get business meetings here in Dubai, we’re also going to work with our colleagues here, we need large city wide conventions, we can house up to 1000-1200 room conventions which is what you have in Paris and London.
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