More expert Salary Survey opinion

With years of experience in the hospitality recruitment industry, Swiss-based Hospitality Graduate Recruitment MD Jeff Ross was the ideal candidate to take a look at and analyse our results.

“On the topic of salary increases, I think the general global feeling is that salary increase is not a concern at all amongst managers and employees, and generally people are very happy simply to be employed.

“This is certainly the case based upon the large number of global employees and employers that I talk to on a monthly basis.”

However, he added that high levels of optimism in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – 83% and 94% respectively expected a payrise over the next year – was consistent with his own suppositions.

“For sure, in the stronger emerging destinations there will be greater confidence and expectations amongst employees for a salary increase, although my gut feeling would be that if they were surveyed, the majority would accept no increase in 2010 if their jobs were declared secure in the event of a downturn affecting those destinations,” said Ross.

If many of the results tied in with exactly what our expert anticipated, several findings were harder to predict.

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“It is very interesting to see the salary variants for GMs in the different locations,” continued Ross. 

“One could perhaps argue that it is tougher to run a hotel in Kuwait that it is in the UAE; therefore, the salaries are not 'fair'. It is surprising that the variants are so large between these destinations, although is also likely there are many more highly-paid five-star GMs in the UAE than in Kuwait, of course.”

The Salary Survey revealed that levels of seniority within sales and marketing made a massive difference on earnings, with gap between assistant management and management equating to a rise of 59%, while sales and marketing directors or senior managers could expect to earn 120% more than they did as managers.

‘This is a really interesting one, sitting quite high in relative terms (sales and marketing directors, for example, have salaries higher than the average Kuwait-based GM!) and goes to show that there is still a huge undersupply of quality sales candidates in the marketplace. Hence, the 'good' ones can command very high packages.”