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.
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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.
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