Al Shalal club aspires to global standards

It’s not enough to benchmark against Dubai standards, according to GM of Fairmont’s new beach club

The new Al Shalal Beach Club on Palm Jumeirah, which is managed by the yet-to-open Fairmont Palm Hotel & Resort, will benchmark itself against international standards rather than Dubai standards, revealed the hotel’s general manager Darrell Scheaffer.

“It’s called Al Shalal Beach Club operated by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, so I think it’s a little bit understated but I think people will recognise, hopefully through the attention to detail and personalisation, that whoever runs this place knows what they’re doing and they’ll get the sense very quickly that we’re an international company,” said Scheaffer.

“What I tell the staff throughout, and they know it very clearly, is we are looking to be the best of our genre in Dubai but we don’t measure ourselves strictly on Dubai standards — we measure ourselves on international standards,” he said.

Sheaffer explained that this was because the residents of the two buildings that the club services — Shoreline Apartment Buildings Al Nabat and Al Haseer — also travel to or have homes in places like London, Paris and New York.

“They judge us both in terms of the physical facility and the service based on other fine places that they either own or stay or live in elsewhere, so we have to constantly remind ourselves that that is the benchmark and that’s the measurement that people are using. Just to be as good or better than anything in Dubai might not make us good enough, so we have to work hard at that.”

He added: “As a Fairmont operation I want to really make it first class, but not stuffy or intimidating”.

Al Shalal Beach Club features a Technogym health club, which Scheaffer estimates could accommodate 50 to 60 people, a beach, heated infinity pool and the adjacent Gusto restaurant. It will offer kids’ programmes, such as martial arts, and will bring in “experts that are on the cutting edge of health and diet, focusing on the wellbeing aspect because that’s what we are all about,” said Scheaffer.

The pool and beach will be immediately accessible to residents of the two shoreline buildings, but there will also be three dif levels of gym membership for residents and three levels for non-residents.

For example, a single membership for a resident costs AED 7000 (US $1906) and a single membership for an outside member is priced at AED 14,000 ($3813).

“Our goal is about 200 members, we don’t want to overpopulate or become too crowded — we want it to be welcoming,” said Scheaffer.