Having been with Millennium Airport Hotel in Dubai for the last 15 years, general manager Simon Moore has watched as the property has more than tripled its room inventory. This year, he’s adding leisure and MICE facilities and looking forward to finally running a "complete" hotel.
Having come to Dubai in 1998 as the manager of what was at the time, the 123-room Airport Hotel, which had a further 150 rooms dedicated to Emirates Airline, Simon Moore has tended to the property as it has grown and changed with the times.
Today, Moore oversees 341 rooms in the Millennium Airport hotel and 600 rooms for Emirates in the Copthorne Airport Hotel — a total of 942 rooms under his management.
| Advertisement |
An ongoing expansion project has seen the addition of 150 superior rooms, 54 club rooms and 21 suites, which opened last year along with new leisure facilities, including a swimming pool area with landscaped gardens and a children’s play area.
Furthermore, new food and beverage facilities will add to longstanding favourites, Biggles English pub, Cactus Jack’s tex mex and Da Vinci’s Italian.
The new additions comprise an all-day dining restaurant with open kitchen and food staging areas, a cocktail and wine lounge offering tapas, and a seafood bar and grill featuring ice tables for oysters, ceviche and sushi. The renovations continue next year with a new gym and spa.
In addition to a range of leisure features, the hotel will add a MICE offering in the second quarter of the year — something the property has never seen before.
This will comprise a 600m² ballroom accommodating up to 500 guests, a pre-function area of around 350m² and five meeting rooms, ranging in size to host 100 – 120 people.
Commenting on the renovations, Moore says: “Finally we will have a complete hotel. It’s really an ongoing project; people want to see changes, they want to see something new all the time. We thought rather than opening the hotel all in one go, we would do it in stages”.
So with the added facilities operating by the end of this year, Moore is optimistic that the increased inventory can be easily filled.
Article continues on next page ...
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
