“It’s not just about us aggressively looking at markets, but also the opportunities that our owners give us. And that’s one of my main responsibilities — to ensure that our owners are taken on as long-term partners, because for us it’s important to deliver what we promised in terms of service level and top line and market penetration,” he asserts.
“Because we are doubling our footprint with all these hotels, it’s also about getting them off to a good start with ramp ups and so on. The mission is sustained growth by increasing the demand and penetrating the occupancy and average rate at a high level. The strategy comes from focusing on the GCC in order to ensure the brand is strongly recognised,” he adds.
Another part of the strategy, to ensure return on investment, is a continued focus on mixed-use developments. Almost all of FRHI’s properties, Baudin reveals, offer a residential component.
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“We don’t do standalone; we always combine residential when we have a hotel. The resorts are very rarely standalone today — most of them have residential components in the form of villas and apartments — it helps a lot with the rate of return for the projects, and helps to ease the financing of the project.”
However, Baudin is quick to point out a fair bit of research goes into each property before deciding how much of it will comprise residential units.
“You have to be careful and make sure the inventory is sold properly, that there is demand. It needs to be consistent with the positioning of the hotel as well because you want to have the same kind of customers on both sides of the business.
“Also it’s important to make sure it’s not a speculative project where you would sell a residential project to fund the development of the hotel, which we saw during 2006 to 2008 before the crisis, where everyone was developing a hotel as an amenity to residential. We don’t want to do that — we want there to be a balance,” he explains.
Savoye employs a similar approach when working on the sales strategy for the region. He reveals the team is currently working on overhauling its Arabic messaging, given the fact that the Middle East is a key target market for the group.
He says: “What we are doing slightly different from the past is our resource deployment to ensure visibility within the market, especially targeting the key markets we are focusing on. For example, developing our content in Arabic is key and the content we display to those guests is relevant and clearly explains the brands and the experiences they deliver to them; that is key I believe.
“In Makkah I believe we should ensure that our clients should have as much of the information they need in their own language to make the experience better. The Arabic content was already there, but we are just adding more.”
The group is also working more closely with the travel trade, and launched agent reward programme, ‘Famous Agents’ last year to encourage more bookings.
“Famous Agents is an incentive for travel agents booking our hotels around the world. It has been quite well received — we have seen double-digit growth year on year since last year.
“We are really trying to ensure they enjoy doing business with us and are being rewarded in return. We give them the opportunity to redeem their points through an online shopping mall, which gives them access to about 1000 different products and luxury brands such as Tiffany & Co., Coach, Bose, and more,” Savoye explains.
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