Corporate rate competition concerns GMs in Doha

Qatar hotels are competing in a damaging ‘race to the bottom’ as increasing numbers of hotels compete for existing corporate business by lowering rates.

 This was the conclusion of a panel discussion at Hotelier Middle East’s Qatar GM Debate 2013 on the current state of Qatar’s hospitality market. Hotel GMs also bemoaned a lack of market segmentation that was allowing corporate customers to get luxury and midscale hotels to compete for the same business.

Shangri-La and Traders Hotel Doha general manager Coen Masselin said: “I’m very concerned like everyone else that corporate rates are being driven down. We have to understand that whenever we make concessions on corporate rates it has a long term impact. Dropping corporate rates now is not going to attract anymore corporate business to the city, only lower revenue.”

This view was mirrored by Four Seasons Doha regional vice president and general manager Simon Casson who described how clever corporate customers were getting hotels to bid against each other for business to an extent that is quickly becoming “unsustainable for a small market such as Doha.”

“We need to get smarter on rates. At the moment there is a free market that is causing rates to fall and we need to come up with a more collective rate strategy for the market,” he concluded.