Qatar-based Le Mirage Hospitality Management, part of General Trading Group, has recently completed a brand identity uplift.
The company, which owns and operates four properties in Qatar in the serviced apartments and four-star segments, has spent two years improving its service standards and developing its brand image and website.
Le Mirage Hospitality CEO Vatche Yergatian, who has spearheaded the brand initiative, told Hotelier Middle East: “First of all, [the focus] was the service deliverables — focus on the customer appreciation, customer contact, targeting customers we lost and we try to gain back, upgrading our services, training our staff [to overcome] challenges they had before. My focus was to look at the services that were wrongly handed and arrange training.
| Advertisement |
The brand’s target market covers expatriate individuals and families on long-stays in Doha and long and short-stay visitors to the city, all in the high income group.
As a result, Yergatian said his priority was his “customers’ comfort”: “You want to treat or give service to people the way that you like to be accommodated”.
Yergatian said that already occupancy had increased at the hotels, which include Le Mirage Village, Le Mirage Executive Apartments and Le Mirage Suites — largely down to word of mouth.
“You can write anything you want on a website or in an article but people’s experience for me is what you want to see – that happened, occupancy went up by average of 5-10%.”
He added that the improvements were aimed at building volume, not the rate.
“The rate is not the focus, it’s not that you improve and then increase the rate because you have to be competitive with the market, that’s what I believe — increasing the volume is the priority, increasing room nights, that’s my goal. Increasing the rate is not the solution,” asserted Yergatian.
General Trading Group (GTG), headed by chairman H.E. Sheikh Abdullah Bin Ahmad Al Thani, also owns the upcoming Amari Doha, a four-star hotel which will be operated by Thailand-based Onyx Hospitality.
It is the first time GTG has appointed another operator to run one of its properties in the Le Mirage Hospitality portfolio and will mark Onyx Hospitality’s Middle East debut.
Amari Doha is scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
