With the holiday season fast approaching, hotels across the UAE are trying harder than ever to outdo each other, with some in danger of stepping over the line from impressive into excessive.
One can always tell when the holidays are approaching in the UAE, with giant Christmas trees going up in hotel lobbies, festive decorations hanging in the region’s shopping malls, and the Hotelier team’s inboxes filling up with emails from the region’s hotels showing off their Christmas and New Year events.
Every year it seems as if UAE hotels are competing against each other to host the most lavish or decadent Christmas or New Year’s event; and this is an industry hardly known for subtlety, with a steady stream of the biggest, tallest and most expensive world records being broken by the region’s hotels. However, in their eagerness to push boundaries, can the region’s hotels overstep the mark and come up with something that could quite literally leave a bad taste in the mouth?
| Advertisement |
For example, news recently came through from the Waldorf Astoria Ras Al Khaimah, the brand new luxury hotel in the UAE’s northern emirate, regarding the half tonne gingerbread house which had just been installed in the hotel’s lobby.
Constructed from 5700 pieces of hand baked gingerbread and decorated with 150kg of icing and sweets, the whole construction took the hotel’s team 240 hours to hand make and construct. According to the hotel it used 150kg of honey, 80kg of sugar, 20kg of eggs, 35 litres of milk, 3.5kg of sodium bicarbonate and 265kg to make the thing.
At a time when hotels are beginning to talk about sustainability and reducing waste, that is an awful lot of food to put towards a glorified Christmas decoration.
Having contacted the hotel to discover the gingerbread house’s fate when the holidays end, I was informed that the whole thing will be donated to the local Bedouin community to feed their goats; which while comforting is still not the most efficient use of resources.
The whole development brings to mind a previous stunt at Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel, which in 2010 erected a $11 million Christmas tree in the lobby covered in jewellery and gems. Later the hotel said that it regretted “attempts to overload the tradition” after a PR backlash.
However, the Waldorf Astoria Ras Al Khaimah is not the only example of seasonal excess, with Atlantis The Palm promising a New Year’s fireworks display that will be the “biggest fireworks display in the world”. To put that into context, when the hotel first opened in 2008, it used an estimated one million fireworks costing approximately US $3 million.
Now I love firework as much as the next person, but I also can’t help imagining what else that much money could be spent on, and provide benefits for that last considerably longer than a few minutes long, admittedly impressive, display.
So what’s the solution? I certainly don’t want the hotels to suddenly stop making an effort at this time of year, with Middle East hotels’ ability to amaze and raise standards being a constant source of inspiration of the industry.
However, it would be nice if hotels, rather trying to have the fanciest party, would instead try and outdo each other by hosting the most generous community campaign or charity event, and invested their marketing and events budget into a cause that could have a long-term positive impact.
However, I will be happy to be proved wrong and if your hotel is running a holiday charity event then please get in touch at the address below and show it off to the rest of the industry.
David Edgcumbe
Deputy Online Editor, HotelierMiddleEast.com
David.edgcumbe@itp.com
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
