Competition heats up
A recurring question throughout the GM Debate was, as you would expect, how to stay ahead of the competition. The answer arising most often was by continually evolving the product and planning ahead.
As Jumeirah Zabeel Saray GM Stephan Schupbach said in the panel discussion entitled ‘Attracting guests from across rising markets’, it is irrelevant if you have decided upon the F&B concepts for your hotel, you must look at what your competitors are doing also, and “plan for constant change”.
Schupbach revealed he has at least a five-year plan for the hotel, with a steakhouse to launch in the next 12 months, along with the introduction of a new Italian theme at the beach, and a Japanese component in one of its bars. “You have to constantly review and look at numbers.”
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Even at Burj Al Arab in Dubai, general manager Heinrich Morio said it was necessary to create new concepts. “We are going into our 15th year in December, and we have created new concepts at the right time with Jin Sui just before the Chinese market started to develop nicely and have further solidified the concepts that we had in the hotel,” he said.
With regard to further targeting the all-important Chinese market, Morio also shared his expertise on the need to adapt and evolve products to their needs.
“It is a market that you have to work hard at, but I don’t need to tell anybody here that the Chinese market is ‘it’. It is what we are all after and it is where the biggest growth is going to come from,” added Morio.
“However, there are, for lack of a better word, frictions for a hotel with having many Asian guests compared to other nationalities. For example the Asian market uses the hotel’s facilities completely differently to other groups, and are less prone to use the pool or the beaches. We therefore had to learn very quickly what our Chinese guests like.”
Morio also said it was important to focus on all emerging markets, later backed up by HE Helal Saeed Al Marri, who said Dubai’s DTCM was targeting 20 emerging markets as part of Vision 2020.
“However, other markets that we find that are on the rise are Africa as a whole; and within Africa the standout market is Nigeria,” commented Morio.
“It is a hugely interesting market and for the first time in July this year, it became one of the Burj Al Arab’s top five performing markets,” he revealed.
“It is quite interesting what is happening in that part of the world and you realise that Nigeria is one of the top 10 countries in the world utilising the internet, and how much easier that makes it to go into that market via digital marketing for example.”
Also speaking on the panel was Stewart Selbie, general manager of the Mina Seyahi Complex in Dubai, who pointed to the rise of the middle classes around the world as one of the big drivers for growth in the worldwide hospitality market.
“I think that consumers are changing faster than ever before. In the emerging markets, the significant thing is the emergence of the middle classes. Half the world’s population is now considered middle class I believe, and that presents a huge opportunity going forward,” commented Selbie.
“We were focused for a long time on the product, but are now starting to focus instead on the experience. And for the emerging markets, especially the middle class, it is the experience that is really important to them. And that is affecting how we go about structuring loyalty programmes, as people move away from reward more towards recognition,” he explained.
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