Hotel general managers in Doha said the city’s tourism and hospitality offering needed to be more diverse, authentic and integrated in order to attract sought-after leisure travellers during yesterday’s Hotelier Middle East Qatar GM Debate.
Speaking on the opening panel of the conference, which was held at Grand Hyatt Doha on April 10, hoteliers including Four Seasons Doha regional VP and GM Simon Casson and Grand Hyatt Doha GM Christoph Franzen lamented the lack of attractions on offer in the city.
“We need to do more. What can we do?” said Casson. “A destination with one golf course trying to attract leisure business, [we need] a water park, we have one which is an hour and half out of town, so [we need] things that are central to the destination, [we need to] develop assets that are already there, we have a great race track for the Moto GP but no infrastructure around it to make it a place people want to visit, so it’s leveraging existing infrastructure as well as building new.”
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Casson continued: “Do we do enough to attract the other GCC markets?”No we don’t. But we have to be diverse and we have to be more authentic. At a Qatari hoteliers forum, there are one or two Qataris, I think we have to work harder to figure out how we become more integrated and how we attract more locals into the business to give us authenticity”
Franzen said Doha needed to be more “family-friendly”, while Century Hotel GM Hany Maroun said more beaches were needed and more areas like Souk Waqif.
The GMs also said hotels needed more support from Qatar Tourism Authority to develop the destination.
“It’s a joint responsibility, it’s the hoteliers, but if you look at the hotels represented here, you have a fairly good cross section, but I think we need more engagement, a more tactical as well as strategic plan to drive the leisure business. I think Qatar is a very different proposition to Dubai,” said Casson.
“A lot of our outside presence and awareness is driven by Qatar Airways advertisement, i think that they do such a great job at promoting the destination, but I think we need to partner more with the tourism authority and I think there needs to be a much more strategic plan for how Qatar is going to grow,” asserted Casson.
The Hotelier Middle East Qatar GM Debate attracted 100 hotel GMs, hotel managers and F&B directors from across Doha.
For a full review, see the May issue of Hotelier.
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