“If you provide a great experience, if you provide great food and great service, you can literally charge no matter what the market says. But if you become mediocre and comparable to the rest, then you need to go with the flow.”
Sticking to his guns, Schneider says the team doesn’t believe in a ‘soft opening rate’, because it’s important to educate clientele on long-term rates rather than starting off with lower prices. And since the hotel is opening in a strong demand period, rates will start around AED 1,500-2,000 (US $410-545).
Schneider terms social media and digital strategy as “vital” and “essential” to the property. Assisting with that remit is Nikki Beach Resort & Spa, Dubai public relations & communications manager Claudia Olaru who on-boarded in November 2015 from Doha.
She has since been in charge for the marketing strategy for pre-opening and the media plan, booking advertisings, and securing editorial for the pre-opening. Since the beach club opened in March 2016, she has also been working extensively for marketing the events, and organising photoshoots on-site.
Discussing social media, she says: “We are focusing most of our digital marketing strategy on social media, online marketing, and SEM. With Instagram being super powerful, we will also continue focusing on Facebook and Snapchat. We launched Snapchat recently and we have received so many mentions on it from social media influencers and bloggers.”
Schneider continues: “Our entire marketing environment is upside down in a positive way right now. We can now create content that would have been too complex to share through classic media. But with things like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live feeds, we can create spontaneous and very human videos and contributions and share them across social media channels — we have been handed a golden opportunity to explain our brand much better.”
He is open to working with influencers as he believes their subjective opinions lend credibility to their followers.He shares an example: “For our Nikki Privé Ladies Night opening, we shot a Boomerang video sequence which, within 12 hours, received 15,000 likes. These are obviously things that also fit our brand. If I was in a super-conservative cookie-cutter brand with 10,000 hotels worldwide, would I have difficulties doing the same? Yes, because I don’t have this organic brand I can use.”
Schneider returns to his talent base as a key element of the property’s operations, and says he is confident they will lead the resort to success. He concludes: “We are in the people’s business and that will always remain — no matter how smart I make my TV, how fancy I make my check-in process. Look on Booking.com or TripAdvisor, you name it, what do people write about? Amazing interaction with amazing people, or amazing food, which is still produced by people.”
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