NEW OPENING: Marriott's game changer

The new JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai is already bringing in the groups and creating a new conventions buzz in the emirate. Just two months into opening and Hotelier pays a visit to find out why this is not your average new launch

It’s not often you walk into a new luxury hotel to find guests bustling in the lobby, occupying various corners of the executive lounge and filling close to 350 seats in the all-day dining room.

But then, the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai is not your average new opening. Backed by owner Emirates Airline, which invested AED 2.2 billion (US $0.6 billion) in the two-tower building, the hotel is billed as the new icon for Dubai, officially recognised as the tallest hotel in the world, standing proud at 335 metres, and with 1608 rooms, 14 restaurants and 5100m2 of event space, it is already tempting a new coveted MICE market to the emirate.

While Emirates Airline ensured no detail was spared in the hardware, Marriott invested heavily in the software, bringing some of its best people in for the opening, which becomes the 58th JW Marriott hotel worldwide.

The hotel opened tower one last November, beating its friendly rivals Fairmont The Palm, Dubai and Conrad Dubai, also targeting a Q4 2012 launch. Considering the scale of the behemoth, how did the JW Marriott Marquis team hit the finish line on time?

According to the hotel’s general manager, this was partly attributable to determined leadership and a clear vision.

“I always say I love being a GM because you can be the master of your own destiny,” Rupprecht Queitsch tells me as we relax in the property’s executive lounge — which spans an entire floor.

“That’s easier said than done obviously, especially in the Middle East maybe because as you know some hotels didn’t open on time, but I think even when you are managing a construction site, it goes back to leadership and people skills to really bring the different trades together and see that there is a certain date. It also helped that I put some pressure on there and booked a large piece of business,” he says.

Naturally, Emirates Airline was eager to open the hotel, far better than having to deal with constant delays imposed by an owner, where the hotel team risks “losing a little bit of that steam”, says Queitsch.

Ultimately though, he says the pre-opening was driven through tenacious team work. “There’s nothing that can be done by the GM alone. I never want to claim that this is a one man or a small leadership team; you hire the right people,” he says.

“I love to surround myself with experts who are smarter maybe, I like to be challenged, I like to learn, I thrive on that, I can learn every day, every minute. But I also have the end in mind. I love Stephen Covey, a leadership guru, he has seven principles.

One is ‘have the end in mind’ and I think as a leader you’ve got to have a vision, you’ve got to see where you want to be or where the goal is and obviously you’ve got to get everybody aligned in one direction.”

Again, this is easier said than done, but Queitsch says once he’d hired his senior leadership team, the vision filtered down to the teams — recruited because of their “individual know-how and character”.

“I love to serve, I answer my phone or if I’m not there, [I call back] within the hour. I expect the same thing from everybody. [Everyone has] a point to contribute and if one of them fails, the whole chain starts to crack a little bit,” he says.

Under operation
Despite the bold November target, Queitsch says “we always like to have a plan B”, admitting that the hotel “didn’t put a lot of business on the books for the end of the year”.

News of visits from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai and HH Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, chairman and chief executive of Emirates Airline and Group, soon spread through the city, however, “kick starting” interest, while popular press conferences for bodies such as the Indian Film Council soon “sent the word out there”.

However, it was on New Year’s Eve that the hotel peaked for the first time, with all the rooms, restaurants and banquet space booked out, bringing 2500-3000 people to the hotel.

Ensuring the hotel could cope with this influx of guests again came down to the recruitment of a quality team, says hotel manager Bill Keffer.

“We did a tremendous amount of training in the opening and pre-opening phase and we went out and recruited really strong managers and supervisors. We have a lot of people in this hotel that are working in jobs that some people would consider a step backwards. I look at myself — I was a GM, I’m now a hotel manager.

I’ve got directors of operations that are now single discipline heads like F&B and rooms. I’ve got people that were director of rooms who’ve gone back to front office operations — because of the size and scope of the building we had to hire a particular type of person that could handle that volume,” Keffer explains.

“I have to tell you, an 800-plus room hotel is very different to a 300-400 room hotel in operations,” he adds. “You just come down to something like elevators.

When you’re trying to move on New Year’s Eve 2000 people through a building, all the way from a valet parking piece to a housekeeping piece to a room service piece, in just elevator traffic it is a very different animal from a smaller hotel.”

In total, Keffer estimates that they probably interviewed “between 10,000 and 12,000 people” for the hotel.

“We really went out and hired some of the best people in the company, from our director of culinary who was number two for Marriott corporate, to my director of F&B, who has fantastic global experience.

“I honestly believe that helped us transition into opening without these major catastrophes that a lot of people would have had or could have had,” reflects Keffer.

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People power
Tasked with delivering this massive recruitment drive was director of human resources Yasmin Akhtar, who admits that there were numerous challenges to overcome.

Standards were high and needs specific, in order to meet JW Marriott brand values of authenticity, especially on the culinary side, as well as building a diverse front of house team to cater to Dubai’s international traveller.

Another challenge arose from the immigration laws in markets Marriott was trying to tap into, says Akhtar.

“There have been changes in terms of exit requirements and many countries are now stating a minimum wage requirement. So before anyone could fly for example from Thailand they had to meet a minimum wage requirement, so that meant we needed to re-strategise.”

On the other hand, targeting the local Dubai market proved very successful, with an open recruitment day in June last year attracting 5500 job seekers.

“It gave us a good opportunity to evaluate what was out there in the market,” says Akhtar. “We shortlisted 700, of which about 50% of those were hired.”

“Our greatest success for recruitment actually came from online portals; other than Marriott we actually relied on online recruitment portals such as Catererglobal, Bayt.com and a small percentage of agencies.

I think roughly 10% of our associates came from agencies, which shows how powerful online portals are — more than 70% of our associates applied online,” says Akhtar.

The male to female ratio, meanwhile, is 75:25, while there are just eight Emiratis on board. Akhtar says one of the Emiratis on her team has been tasked with growing the percentage of nationals, while she has a personal goal to recruit more women.

“At Marriott we are a strong proponent for women in management. Right now it’s 25%, I’d like to see this number go to 40%. I’m the only lady on the executive committee; in my previous property [in Singapore] there was at least a 50% presence,” she says.

Stat attack

13km Height all the glasses in the hotel would reach if stacked on top of each other
3.5 million ft2 Space the hotel covers in total
55m2 Standard room
200,000 Pieces of flatware
4507 Pillows in Tower One’s 804 bedrooms
5100m2 Events space
247 Mirrors in La Farinebakery, because it is open 24/7
1326 Rainbow coloured bottles in The Lounge

The road ahead
The investment in people was all aimed at meeting the “key purpose and vision” of the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai, which was “really to add the convention dimension to the Dubai market scene”, says Queitsch.

The hotel has already made steps in the right direction — with the GM even potentially lining up groups for the notoriously quiet period of July and August — and he’s confident they will continue to grow this market, despite the typical rumbles of concerns about upcoming supply.

“Marriott has been in the convention business for many years; we have a convention network called Innovation. So we know a lot of the biggest buyers already. Sales equals relationships for me,” he says.

“You have to have a vision, you have to have a target, people always say ‘aren’t you worried about 12,000 rooms, 20,000 rooms coming up?’ It doesn’t really worry me that much because you have to know your target, you have to know your customer, and I always say you have to know how to fish in the right lake or the right sea.

There’s a lot of fishermen that go up and throw the thing out there and get a little tiny fish and they’re all disappointed. Or they get a big fish which they can’t take out because it’s too heavy. You have to know where you’re fishing, where your market is, where your positioning is and then you go after it. So I think there’s a purpose for everything. You’ve just got to go after that.”

The desire to prove themselves and excel in the market is a trait common to all the management Hotelier spoke with.

As Keffer recalls after New Year, “the hotel opened up in TripAdvisor at 66 out of 450 hotels in a hotel that sold out for its first time ever in the first 30 days”.

Now, their goal is to maintain this first-mover advantage. And while, Queitsch is the first to admit that they “are not perfect”, he can’t help but also drop into the conversation that he’s heard people refer to the hotel as a “game changer”. Perhaps we’ve been speaking to the same people, for when it comes to the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai, more than a few little birds have told Hotelier Middle East the same.

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Managers' Favourites

Rupprecht Queitsch, GM
1. The enormous size yet the personalised service: For example, the guest room floors are laid out with seven rooms on one side and seven on the other. So we have 800 rooms but as a room attendant you can still have a good relation with the guest. To bring the size to a personalised service — I think we’ve found many good team members who can do that.

2. My Team: At the end of the day what satisfies me most is to see naturally smiling staff. I look them in the eyes and I know they’re happy or I know they’re sad.

What I really like here, like I said we are not perfect by any means, but how you make up for it and how when you drop the ball, you pick it up and how you learn, we have some staff members here who really would go through fire for you. They’re really highly engaged. And that’s so motivating. The hardware is nice but the software is really want gives the experience.

3. The Onyx Reception Wall: I love the wall when you come in, the onyx wall behind the front desk. The onyx is from Mexico, then they put it together in Portugal and brought it here.

Bill Keffer, Hotel manager
1. The design of the building itself : [the shape of the two towers is inspired by a date palm tree]. Opening this hotel and getting recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the tallest hotel is quite a statement.

It’s been open two months and it already is an icon of the city from the skyline. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it; I thought it really was one of the coolest designs and it really exemplified this part of the world.

2. Our penthouses are fantastic: They are 660m², two floors, with magnificent views, fully automated control throughout, they have their own massage room, steam shower, the list of amenities could go on and on. We have two in this tower and we will have two in the second tower as well. They have been booked out already.

3. The Ballroom: A ballroom is just usually a box but I think this one, with the thought process behind the technology and just from a design perspective and the ability to do what most people have to pay and work for — to have people come in and change the colour of the ballroom and hang lighting and all that — we can do with the touch of an iPad. I think that’s very unique and a great selling point.

Anthony Tuttle, Director of F&B
1. The diversity of our company and our staff: We’ve got more than 60 different nationalities that work here. And I’m lucky because working with Marriott I’ve been able to see the world so I’ve seen a lot of things that I feel fortunate about.

I’m always interested in the cultures, because I feel that a lot of people are blinded by, and cast opinions on things, that they haven’t experienced.

2. Izakaya:is a little special to my heart. I was the one that came up with the Izakaya wasabi girl concept — a server dressed up with a big green wig that grates fresh wasabi for guests that order sushi — so I’m going to have to give that restaurant a little extra love to make sure that’s a success because if not then I’m going to be the one they ask ‘what were you thinking?’ And it’s fun too and there’s a lot of stuff that we’ll be doing there to make it special.

3. The quality of a hotel from a technology perspective: For example, our ballroom where we can adjust the lights to more than 1000 different colours via iPads.

Or the virtual catwalk that we have in our wine bar where models wear a bracelet which controls the lights. Even being able to play videos in the lifts. And being a big fan of Apple and iPad products, that’s something I’m very proud of.

Yasmin Akhtar, Director of HR
1. The room size: Our bathrooms are lovely, the amenities are great.
2. Spa facilities: Once its fully open, I think that will be a wow in the market.
3. Restaurants: I love food so I enjoy the wide spectrum of cuisines that we have from Indian to Italian to Japanese. I believe the quality that we have in the outlets is very high.

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Restaurants at a glance

La Farine: Open 24 hours a day, this ‘boulangerie’ features a bakery and coffee counter offering pastries, breads and drinks to go, as well as a casual bistro style menu.

KITCHEN 6: With 350 seats, this is the all-day dining room, offering open kitchens with Asian woks, Middle Eastern grills, European breads and pizzas and Indian tandoors. It is ideal for the big groups booking events and will be the venue for Friday brunch.

RANG mahal by atul kochhar: Celebrity Michelin star chef Atul Kochhar likes to push the boundaries of Indian Cuisine with a contemporary style at this
167-capacity restauarant.

PRIME 68: On the 68th floor, this steakhouse offers fine dining with a wide choice of quality steaks.

Positano: This Italian restaurant, still to open, promises simple Italian flavours from the Amalfi coastline with friendly and knowledgeable service.

Tong thai: The beautiful Thai restaurant, staffed only by Thai females, will offer familiar Thai street food and authentic dishes rather than Royal
Thai dining.

Izakaya: Designed as a multifaceted outlet combining Japanese noodles, robatayaki and teppanyaki along with sushi, Izakaya is upbeat, casual and slightly edgy, just as its tagline ‘Social Sushi’ suggests.
the vault: Located on the 71st and 72nd floors, this bar targets the “see and be seen” and offers vodka and other premium spirits as well as some of the best views in Dubai.

Velocity: Described as an entertainment lounge rather than a sports bar, this brightly decorated two-storey venue will feature live sports and live DJs.
kork: As the pillows on its sofas suggest, Kork is the hotel’s two-floor wine bar, also offering an open kitchen and tasting room to complement the tapas style menu.

vip room: The international nightclub brand famous for being frequented by A-list stars spas two levels and includes 37 tables and an outdoor terrace.
aqua lounge: Adjacent to the pool, Aqua Lounge offers light fair by day and the perfect destination to relax poolside in the evening.

the lounge: The lobby lounge, housing 1326 multi-coloured bottles on a feature wall, offers zones to enable guests to meet, work or relax.

LEVANT: A Middle Eastern restaurant, with the operator to be confirmed.

Top 10 Technology Highlights
In a hotel seeking to be the next icon for Dubai, the implementation of ultra- modern technology ranks up there with the architecture, design and scale of the building. Hotel manager Bill Keffer says: “Rupprecht and I had the conversation about this very early on.

We wanted this hotel to be as technologically advanced as possible because we were going to be focusing on a corporate group business base that demands good IT infrastructure”.

Highlights include:
1: “Outstanding” wi-fi coverage from anywhere in the building.

2: A good bandwidth which means the internet is quick, with capabilities to pipe in bigger bandwidth for groups.

3: Room management system – controls temperature, lights, calling of maid service etc through a hand held device. In suites, one button can set the bathroom lighting to “spa mood”, creating a soft pink glow. “From the planning stages of the hotel that took a tremendous amount of work to get the programming correct,” recalls Keffer.

4: Integrated Vingcard key system – it’s not new to the market but it has given us a lot of flexibility, says Keffer.

5: “One of the best cctv camera coverage systems probably in the world” — more than 1300 cameras in tower one.

6: From a ballroom perspective, we took care to make sure we have good access points in the floors to avoid cabling and extra wires.

7: Fully integrated LED ballroom — lighting of all of the chandeliers and wall panels, even in the foyer, can be controlled through an iPad with over 1000 different scene variations.

8: The world’s largest LED screen in the ballroom which is 7m by 4m — a “very big hit”.

9: Digitally enabled elevators —“We can run promotional videos in our restaurant elevators. We have different advertising pieces such as LED screens built into the floor of the elevators, which is very interesting,” says Keffer.

10: Even the swimming pool has underwater speakers.

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F&B Focus
With a total of 14 outlets, it’s fair to say that F&B is a significant focus for the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel Dubai. In total, the restaurants can seat 2743 people.

To attract people and encourage all-important word-of-mouth marketing, director of F&B Anthony Tuttle says that when bringing the concepts already decided by Marriott’s corporate teams to fruition, creating “stories” was a key part of his focus.

“People always talk story,” says Tuttle. “When you get home from work and your spouse asks how your day was, you talk about some event that happened. So we want to create stories at our restaurants that people will talk about —hopefully positive stories that people will pass on.”

For example, at Thai restaurant Tong Thai, Tuttle decided to hire “not only just Thais but also only ladies”.

“In the Middle East, I thought it would be a nice gesture to show that this restaurant can be very successful run only by women.”

In Japanese restaurant Izakaya, he came up with the idea of having a ”wasabi girl”. “All she does is go around and grate fresh wasabi for when people order sushi. The whole concept is very fun and funky.

Japan is known, especially the younger generation, to have a funkiness about them. So we really wanted to drive that in Izakaya, and to make it a fun place,” says Tuttle.

“You have to try and create atmosphere before there’s people even in it, before you see what it is,” he says.

Another important decision was that of pricing, which Tuttle says is aimed at offering good value, again, so that people return. He says that prices were set following comparison to competitor outlets in the city.

“A lot of hotels make the misconception of always looking at other hotel restaurants, but we wanted to look at ‘who are the busiest restaurants? Why are they busy?’ especially if there are ones that are similar.

For example, there's Okku and Zuma. They’re not exactly like Izakaya, but they’re two that we benchmarked and looked at why they’re busy.

It could be location, it could be that their price points are good, because while it may be pricey you know what you’re getting, and you’re getting good food, good service and a great ambience.”

“We look at more free-standing restaurants, because we don’t want to only compete with hotel restaurants, we want to compete with the best restaurants.
And even on the marketing side we’re creating individual websites for our restaurants so that they’re not only associated with the JW Marriott Marquis hotel.

Obviously, it’ll be linked back there but we really want to give each outlet its own identity. And in doing that we have to make sure that we have a great price point but also give [guests] an experience they’ll come back for.”

At Vault for example, the bar on the 71st and 72nd floors, Tuttle says he was keen not to over-price, even though it offers premium spirits — including an AED 23,000 bottle of vodka —and views of “Burj Khalifa on one side and the Burj al Arab on the other”.

“We don’t want it to be a destination bar. Because if it’s a destination and bar and people think that they can only afford to go there on their birthday and anniversary, then we’re not going to fill it and we want to keep our restaurants full. Because it is such a competitive city and we want to make it so that when people come here, no matter what level, they’ll think they got good value.”

Another important focus area for Tuttle is his banqueting department, but interestingly, it’s the smaller groups he’s bothered about.

“When we have a big group in, they’re the easy groups, because they’re so big that the focus is already there,” says Tuttle. “So what I tell my team is that we need to live or die by the smaller groups.

Having worked in other big Marriott hotels — I opened up the 1300-room hotel in Beijing four days before the start of the Olympics — I learned that a lot of time the smaller groups, those groups of around 30-50 people that take up the smaller meeting rooms, have the tendency to be cast aside.

“And I really want to make sure that even if they’re a group of 15 people we want to treat them like IBM because they’re the ones that are going to be coming back month after month, time after time. And there are lots of them around here, and that’s what’s going to really make us successful, and keep us busy during the non-peak times.”

Through all of this, Tuttle will be focused on consistency — and proving any naysayers wrong — by “a relentless pursuit” of making sure JW Marriott standards are in place.

“I think in Dubai everyone has great hardware; great restaurants, great looks, fantastic hotels. But here I think it’s tough to get the three components together on an f&b scale. The looks are there, but great service and great food are often tough to be consistent at here in Dubai,”he observes.

“So one of the things we’re focusing on and trying to drive is that we have a consistent product when it comes to the quality of our food, and also on the service piece. And at such a large hotel a lot of people said that it couldn’t be done, but we wanted to prove that it could.”

Staff by the numbers

• Total: 1000
• Culinary: 480
• F&B front of house: 420
• Male to female ratio: 75:25
• Number of Emiratis: 8
• Nationalities: 64
• % recruited from Dubai: 30%
• % recruited from Marriott: 20%
• % applied online: 70%
• No. at Recruitment open day: 5500