Seasonal work

Related to this is the idea of “seasons” in the industry. In other areas of the world, bar industry hopefuls and seasoned professionals do a few months at a venue in another part of the world. However, due to visa restrictions in this region, it’s not very easy.

McGregor said sometimes venues recruit almost exclusively outside of Dubai, which results in most of them thinking it’s a holiday or a season, and then leave. Gillgren said seasonal work is becoming more and more of a trend. McGregor added: “The bureaucracy in that is still really difficult because there’s no real visa structure in place for seasonal work. Is Dubai set up to cope with this shift?”

The panel unanimously agreed that if there was a provision for “seasonal visas” for perhaps October to April every year, it would help the industry tremendously, with the ability of attracting international skills and knowledge sharing.

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Social media and marketing

The bar industry in this region is unique in the sense that, unlike other parts of the world, it is not allowed to market directly to the consumer.

It is commonplace to read or hear ads that talk about “hops” or “grape” or “bubbly”. In that case, the industry has taken to social media and various websites to reach their target market.

While the panellists did not think being ranked very high on websites like TripAdvisor directly led to substantiated profits, they did agree it was of importance to their owners. Gillgren said it was important to take TripAdvisor reviews with a pinch of salt. Heathcliff added that while owners want profits they also want to see positive comments on social media, which they use as a method of benchmarking.

He further said that since there’s no direct ROI from social media, his opinion was that it’s “better to invest in the staff training because training brings better results — good and constant service will end up pleasing both social media and revenue”.

McGregor said he would question the reach of social media. He explained: “If I’m going out I’m not trolling Facebook to see what everyone’s doing in terms of promotions. I see more value in traditional media. There’s so much access to digital media now, it’s almost diluting itself. We do it because we think that having a presence is worthwhile but would I put so much stock in it that I use it in place of traditional advertising? No I wouldn’t.”

Gillgren agreed to a degree but pointed to Whissle Group’s restaurant Claw, which saw footfall coming through after user–generated content on platforms like Instagram.

Mullins agreed that word-of-mouth is still important in the current market.