Special Report: Conrad Dubai one year on

After 12 months in operation, Conrad Dubai has established a solid business base. As the team celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, they reveal plans to grow MICE business, increase the number of corporate accounts and attract more local custom to the F&B venues - all part and parcel of also bringing the property into TripAdvisor’s ranking of the top 10 hotels in Dubai

Conrad Dubai opened this time last year, bringing 555 new rooms to Sheikh Zayed Road, along with more than 4000m2 of meetings and conference space, a luxury spa and seven restaurants and bars. The hotel, led at the time by GM Mario Ferraro, was long delayed, having originally been expected to open in 2011.

After a series of construction-related hold-ups, the hotel opened on September 18 2013, marking the debut of Hilton Worldwide’s luxury Conrad brand in the GCC.

The long pre-opening served to create anticipation in the market, with hoteliers clamouring to work at the Conrad — a reported 5100 people attended a recruitment open day — and the industry wondering if the hotel would live up to its claim of offering dining venues to rival those in popular DIFC.

A year on, and there has been a significant change at the top. Ferraro left in December to head up the opening of JW Marriott Venice in his native Italy and was replaced by Austrian national Andreas Jersabeck, general manager at Hilton Doha since April 2013, following roles with Hilton in Ukraine and Croatia.

Other than that, the executive committee remains largely the same and its approach has been one of gradual evolution and improvements to fit with ever-changing market needs, rather than any drastic changes or shifts in strategy.

Jersabeck says that overall, he’s “pretty satisfied with the results we have achieved”. The team won’t reveal numbers, but director of business development Sanjay Nair, who started at the hotel just two days after it opened, says Conrad Dubai is sitting in line with its Sheikh Zayed Road competitors for occupancy.

“If you look at any of the STR Benchmarks, year to date they are close to 80% and we are around that benchmark,” says Nair, attributing success in the first few months to the buoyancy of the trading climate in Dubai, business from big groups, the festive period, and Saudi holidays.

The room inventory means Conrad Dubai can take a group needing 300-350 rooms for a four- to five-day period relatively easily, putting it into a pool of six or seven hotels in the city able to do that, reports Nair. Conference groups have formed the lion’s share of business, but incentive groups from international markets are growing, and the hotel also capitalises on big events at Dubai World Trade Centre.

“The key source markets are basically what feed into Dubai. The GCC is big for us, Western Europe, the US because they are more corporate focused markets,” continues Nair.

Jersabeck has already identified the need to “grow even more” into the MICE market during the second year of operations, as well as increase the number of wedding bookings and corporate accounts.

“Don’t forget, MICE business is booked 12-18 months in advance so obviously we couldn’t take too much advantage of that this year. Although we had some, I think next year you will see the results of everything we have done to put ourselves in the market internationally and locally, and we will see this growing very fast next year. We use agencies, we have our international sales offices in Frankfurt, in Paris, in London, and basically we are in regular touch with them to tell them what facilities we have,” says Jersabeck.

“There are two ballrooms, 4000m2 of meetings space, so that is unique and that will give us a big advantage over our competitors that don’t have those facilities,” he says.

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“MICE business is something we are intending to grow, also weddings is one area where we had a very good start but we want to grow and develop this further. We have held a couple of wedding fairs.

“And now corporate, because we get the opportunity to get into the contracting season so we will see more corporate companies, which we couldn’t do last year because we were new, so those are the three markets we continue to grow. One of the biggest areas is conference and events, because we have such great facilities so that will take care of a lot of other things,” Jersabeck asserts.

The two ballrooms, separated by one floor, enable two entirely separate functions to take place at the same time — rare in any market and surely I ask, great for sales but a nightmare for operations?

“It requires a lot of planning, a lot of organisation, a lot of discipline and dedicated team members, which we have. They have been well trained and they continue to get training,” says Jersabeck.

“The market in Dubai is changing so fast — it’s about ongoing improvement, ongoing changes, and we keep on adjusting our offers. We keep on fine tuning — who is your customer, who is your client, what do they want, it’s not about us telling them.”

Executive chef Terry Styles has also become heavily involved with conference pitches, tailoring menus for groups.

“It’s good to step away from the buffets for a conference and I think Sanjay’s team was quite surprised to do gala dinners when I said ‘let’s do plated dinners, let’s go for it, rather than buffets’. You can put so much more emphasis and unique style into something that’s plated than doing something on a buffet,” says Styles.

Arguably, this is what clients expect at a luxury level, but director of F&B Andreas Senn says the service element has also boosted positive feedback.

“In a buffet set up there’s not much interaction, but with this different approach to set up, you also get more personalised service. It has been very successful,” reports Senn.

Meeting planners are also swayed in their bookings by the wealth of other facilities at the hotel, from dining and entertainment offerings to leisure and spa options. The Conrad Concierge app offers added benefits too; the hotel can target everyone booked on the group rate with reminders of functions and facilities, or the group leader can use it to notify the Conrad team of last minute changes in their schedule or requests for amends.

It’s the extensive range of amenities at Conrad, from the 3000m2 urban pool club, Purobeach to the signature celebrity chef restaurant Marco Pierre White Grill, that open the hotel to other markets, namely leisure guests and the local resident base.

“There is about 20-22% leisure business, especially during the holiday periods,” says Nair. “What this hotel has unique in its offering for leisure guests is it gives a very viable alternative to a beach property and that’s because you are close to all the entertainment and city attractions; you have Purobeach, which is a beach club in the heart of Sheikh Zayed Road.

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Markets trading well for us, which you wouldn’t normally say pick up so well, are Australia, South Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent. Conrad has a good brand perception but mostly it is the location of the hotel, it’s the value of the service and also a lot of this business is the stopover business that stays for three or four days; we manage to get that share working with our partners.”

The local Dubai population is also a critical market for the team to tap into, particularly on the F&B front.
“The whole idea at the beginning was for every single venue to have its own personality,” says Senn, who wants the restaurants to be known separately from the hotel and expects each restaurant manager to have a “sense of proprietorship”.

“If you look at the way F&B in Dubai develops, it is more like what is already happening in Europe in the big cities, where you have a lot of venues that are not really classic hotel restaurants or classic hotel bars. Cave is a wine bar, it’s just at the Conrad building. People should go to Cave, which is at the Conrad, not go to the Conrad to go to Cave. It is a perception. The market is very competitive and the independent market is growing. It started off with DIFC, now there is Pier 7 in Dubai Marina. There are a lot more free zones. You need to adapt,” asserts Senn.

Authenticity and longevity were key considerations when developing the concepts, says Jersabeck, and Styles adds that quality of product and service have been vital in establishing the reputation.

“We were looking to be the authentic number one, and also to have longevity, because many of those restaurants open up with a lot of hype and then six months later they are gone, as we have seen many times,” says Jersabeck.

“Looking at longevity and I think it would be fair to say over the past 12 months we have nicely developed and established what Cave is, what Puro is, what Marco Pierre White is. Purobeach for example is becoming extremely popular, as is Izel. I think there is a niche for each of the restaurants and I think it would be fair to say that each of them has established themselves nicely on the market.”

Styles says: “I’d like to have the chefs and the restaurant managers actually know the guests and to be part of that — to identify that personal touch of what they want and what they are looking for and to always make sure we have good quality and not to jeopardise that.

It’s important to me that we are always empowering our people to do better and to get out there and be part of the outlet,” he explains, with brunch in Ballarò a prime example as live cooking stations replace traditional chafing dishes and the chefs are expected to be front of house.

“The chefs and service work so well together during the brunch time, it just clicks like a machine,” says Styles. “It’s always about involving them and making sure that person has a development plan of where they want to go. You need to keep them engaged, motivated and you need to make sure they don’t get bored.”

Jersabeck is also a big advocate of empowerment and of promoting people, even if it means they leave his hotel for another Hilton Worldwide property.

“We have promoted a few people already since the opening. We have some being promoted to senior roles within the Hilton group, some being transferred to other Conrad hotels. We have a list of high potential employees which we identify for certain training because we groom them, so there’s a development programme for everyone.

I always say to young people — ‘the sky’s the limit’. We’ve got such a big development pipeline. Next year we require about 40 general managers, that means about 40 executive chefs, directors of business development etc.

So we need to grow this, we spend a lot of time and money on developing those people, not necessarily for this hotel but for the company. If after two years they want to move on and see something new, we actually train them and gear them up for other hotels. Other hotels do it and they join us. So there is a lot of work done in learning and development,” explains Jersabeck.

With staff training ongoing, the goal for 2015 at Conrad is simple; to build up a strong base and grow the business. Continuing at a quality level, and encouraging people to talk about this, is also important, says Jersabeck, unveiling a graph that tracks the hotel’s performance on TripAdvisor.

“On TripAdvisor at the beginning of the year we were number 95, now we are number 21. That for us is a very good indication of how people perceive our services. They are not biased. There are people who actually come here and give you their feedback good or bad, it’s transparent so that’s a good indicator,” says Jersabeck, who reveals the hotel invites guests to write reviews via a flyer presented at check-out, as well as including this option in the Hilton SALT, (Service and Loyalty Tracking) post-stay review sent to guests.

“In terms of TripAdvisor, we also monitor the restaurants. We started Ballarò with number 2000 in January, now we are 198. Izel we started from 1500, we are now 190. Puro we started with 1000, we are now 640. Cave we started with 982, we are now number 90 and Marco Pierre White Grill, we started with 800, we are now 400.

I’ve got the results every month, I can see. I think in the next two weeks the hotel will get into the 20s; we want to be in the top 10 by the end of the year,” he asserts. Jersabeck was right; at the time of going to press, Conrad Dubai had hit the top 20.

It’s a bold claim to reach number 10 and one that will be achieved through the team effort exerted so far. All four executives agree that “everybody” is competition, not just any one hotel or area of Dubai.

“You have to constantly do new things to remind people you are there,” says Jersabeck. “We want to be positioned as a luxury five-star property. Conference and events is just one big segment of the market; we want to be for corporates, for meetings, and as far as lifestyle dining venues are concerned, we want to be recognised for good quality service and food and to be available for the residents.”

Nair sums up the hotel’s strategy going forward in three words: “penetrate, expand and protect”.

“So you penetrate the market, you make sure you stand out and expand, that’s new segmentation and growing your business, and you protect your business, and that comes down to the service aspect, and what makes that guest loyal,” says Nair.

“In our 11th month we have close to 16% of our guests that are return guests and that’s pretty good. Considering that groups don’t come back all of a sudden, if we take out the group business, it’s a much higher percentage. That’s how a hotel survives and grows actually — that’s our aim here,” he concludes.