Lessons Learned
Haddad is now responsible for 34 hotels in the region, plus six in the pipeline and a further 29 under master franchise or development agreements, largely in Saudi Arabia. But even now, he is first and foremost focused on people — the owners, colleagues and customers.

“It comes again from Eric; people are always at the centre of the relationship, our people are at the centre of everything we do whether it’s our associates or our owners; the people and the relationships are what we value the most,” he says.

And of all the lessons he’s learned over his 20 years in hospitality, Haddad says the main one has come from his time with Disney, where “you really learn how to deliver a magical experience for customers”.

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“Yann Caillère put me in charge of the soft opening of the Walt Disney Studios, a huge project, a team of 35 preparing for an amazing opening. There were a lot of challenging moments but it was very exciting. The opening – when you see your first guests and see them experience it, it’s absolutely magical.

“I think the story telling and delivering of this magical experience is probably the one thing that I keep now, operationally speaking. Disney was receiving 45,000, 50,000 customers a day. That’s massive. In terms of managing the masses it’s an unbelievable experience,” he adds.

Haddad’s second most important learning also came from Caillère.

“He said I have two responsibilities in life: ‘one is to run a successful company and second is to train talent and mentor talent’.

He was the first person to tell me something like that. Now I feel this responsibility; if I didn’t come across someone like him who took it seriously to develop my skills and put me forward etc, I wouldn’t be here.

It’s almost a responsibility for me now to do the same for other people. It’s true; I only recruit people who really want to kick me out of my seat as there’s no point in having laid-back people in the office,” he asserts.

No point indeed, when it seems that Wyndham Hotel Group has only tapped the surface of expansion in the Middle East.