FOH INTERVIEW:The H Hotel's Nathalie Cockayne

When The Monarch Dubai rebranded to The H Hotel, it was down to director of operations Nathalie Cockayne to bring the new identity to life through delivering training and facilities

When did you join H Hotel?
I joined the H Hotel in May 2012, just prior to the launch of the new brand. My background is rooms division in a variety of five-star luxury hotels, starting from my first job at the Burj Al Arab, then on to The Setai in Miami, The Savoy in London, Fairmont Beijing, and Island Shangri-La Hong Kong.

The hotel recently rebranded; what was your role in this?
I was brought on board to help direct (from an operational point of view) the existing Monarch team, and help them understand and bring to life the vision of the new H brand through their service behaviours and product offerings.

What challenges did you have to overcome during the rebrand?
The first big hurdle was getting the taxi drivers to know who we were! New road signs helped, but habits die hard — and everyone still referred to us by the old name.

We are fortunate to have Charles Ferrer as our chief concierge. He is a well connected man, being president of Les Clef’s D’Or for the UAE, and he arranged a few well crafted events that brought us to the important level of recognition pretty quickly.

Rebranding while still managing a full hotel operation is a bit like driving a car and repairing the engine at the same time, challenging but very rewarding!

How are you planning to market the property in 2013?
We will be utilising all channels online and offline. We will continue working with our trusted and reliable existing travel partners and explore opportunities to work with newer ones.

Communications is vital especially with a rebrand, and we will make sure we are constantly keeping our business partners, the media, our end guests updated on all the positive changes being made.

Social media will play a very important part in staying connected to our community and engage with the people who “talk” to us on this channel. We have just launched our new Club Lounge product and think it will work very well for our corporate clients for instance.

Why was the new club lounge introduced?
Although we are only a small hotel compared to the Dubai standard, we wanted to be able to provide our guests with that extra level of service. It is more intimate and exclusive than other executive lounges in Dubai. We wanted it to feel like a residential living room, where guests feel comfortable to relax and not worry about who is watching them or what they are doing.

Only guests from 30 of our rooms will be able to have access, so it really will be a small and special environment. Other hotels tend to use the executive lounge as a way to drive their average room rate higher.

This is not the aim of our Club Lounge. Our aim is to really make those guests feel at home and make sure they are taken extremely good care of throughout their stay.

As an independent brand, how do you recognise and reward guest loyalty?
Firstly, we are proud to be a member of the Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) family which enables us to be part of their loyalty programme, the Leaders Club.

This membership rewards guests who stay at any LHW, with discounts and free nights, the typical rewards other corporate chain hotels offer. On hotel level, we track the history of all of our guests, and have created a personalised reward and recognition programme within the hotel.

What can we expect from the H Hotel in 2013?
I can’t give away too much at this stage, but I can promise that there will be some significant changes to the public areas of the hotel that will be amazing.