Marriott International commissioned a study on F&B trends in the Middle East and Africa region to understand customer needs and build concepts around those.
In an interview, Marriott president Middle East and Africa Alex Kyriakidis acknowledged the importance of food and beverage in the Middle East and Africa region. “Last year, pre-merger, we invested in conducting a significant amount of research in ‘what’s driving the consumer’s taste in restaurants and bars now and into the future’.
“Given the specific demographics of the UAE, from an inbound tourism perspective and a resident perspective, [the study addressed] how we manage to turn that into a successful restaurant and bar strategy for the types of concepts that we need to launch in our pipeline hotels. And also use that data to refresh some of the existing concepts at our hotels,” said Kyriakidis about the F&B scene and reveals the operator has 1000 restaurants and bars across its properties in the Middle East and Africa region.
He added: “Due to unique operating structure of hotels in the Middle East and Africa, what you find is the GOP margin from F&B is contributing nearly half of the total GOP margin of our hotels.
“So it’s pretty close to half of the revenue and it delivers half of the margin. F&B is hence, hugely important to our owners, guests and Marriott.”
He also revealed the findings from the recent board of directors meeting in the United States. “I made the observation at the board of directors meeting in Miami in February, where I was presenting an update to the board. I made the point that we are into two businesses, we are not just in the hospitality accommodation business, but we are also in the F&B business,” he said.
“F&B business today is almost as large as our room’s revenue, this ratio is unique to Middle East and Africa and the Asian Pacific region. The scenario differs in Europe and the Americas – where the ratio is considerably greater in favour of rooms as versus F&B.” Kyriakidis added.
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