The opening of the Jumeirah Messilah Beach Hotel & Spa in Kuwait marks Jumeirah Group’s first GCC property outside the UAE
In May 2013, Jumeirah Group soft-opened the 408-key Jumeirah Messilah Beach Hotel & Spa in Kuwait, a market less used to luxury hotels than the operator’s Dubai stronghold.
Looking back on the hotel’s opening period, general manager Mark Griffiths recalls how market interest was so high that people were queuing around the block to come and see the hotel and try its various restaurants.
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“The opening was an exceptionally busy period. We expected around 11,000 visitors to our restaurants during the first three weeks and we actually welcomed double that,” says Griffiths.
“We were of course very grateful about the level of attention we received, but we just weren’t able to accommodate everyone that wanted to come. So we had teams of people stationed outside thanking people for coming but asking them to please make a reservation and come back another time.”
The level of excitement in the local market can partly be attributed to the fact that the hotel was Jumeirah’s first GCC property outside the UAE, and also, as Griffiths explains, because the local Kuwaiti market is familiar with the region’s luxury hotels through extensive business and leisure travel.
“The Jumeirah name is very well known and respected across the Gulf, and it is a great benefit for us to be able to leverage that. I also believe that local Kuwaitis were very proud to see another five-star hotel open in the country, and that helped our first few months be very successful for us.
Although it has been the summer season, which is traditionally quieter, we have done very well with the local market with about 80% of our business being Kuwaiti driven,” he explains.
Kuwaiti Culture Clash
Another reason for the levels of interest in the local market could be simple curiosity to see what Jumeirah had done to one of the city’s hospitality icons. Dating back to the mid-1970s, the original hotel was one of the first resorts in the Gulf and, with the owning family the same, the new hotel had a lot to live up to.
However, as Griffiths explains, Jumeirah came onboard the project “a little late into the development process, with the owners having already done a lot of the design and construction work”.
He adds: “So we weren’t as involved as you normally would be with the designers of the hotel, and were just tweaking little areas and adjusting them where we could”.
Arriving at the hotel in December 2011, having joined Jumeirah to be a part of the opening team, Griffiths found that his biggest focus was to work alongside the hotel owner’s project team and Jumeirah technical services (JTS), who were flying in from Dubai to ensure that the hotel opening went smoothly.
“I would say that it was a learning process for all of us,” admits Griffiths. “Kuwait is not as structured as Dubai, where Jumeirah has most of its experience, so the biggest challenge was finding out how things work in Kuwait, and we found that this information wasn’t always readily available.
“The other learning curve for me was that things tend to take a little more time here, and I had to learn to have a little more patience. For example, we were used to working with suppliers in Dubai and knowing how to bring things into that market, so this was a whole new area that we had to develop, and where we had to find suppliers that we were able to work with,’ he says.
When it came to the overall hospitality market the hotel was facing, Griffiths admits that there was also a surprise in store.
“Our market is predominantly made up with business guests, particularly with the government groups and conventions taking place here, but we’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the Kuwaiti leisure business,” says Griffiths.
“This has kept us very busy, particularly over the weekends and the summer holiday period, in addition to a sizeable leisure market coming in from the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia.”
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