We have Raffles at the high end, which is larger rooms, smaller properties, more residential in feel.
Then you have Fairmont which is a more typical, larger luxury hotel, which can do a lot of group business, has a lot of food and beverage, a very experiential type of product.
And then you have Swiss hotel, which is another great brand, much more orientated around fast, friendly, efficient type service.
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So I think the three brands meet different customer needs first of all and then we set up an organisational structure where we have a vice president who will be in Makkah looking after all three properties and the properties are also all owned by one ownership group.
It’s in their best interest and our best interests to maximise the potential of the three combined.
You took over as president in 2008 – an interesting time?
Yes, my timing could have been better! When I think about Fairmont, this is the best of times and this is the worst of times. I don’t think that as an industry, at least in my career, we’ve experienced a downturn of this magnitude this quickly.
And so we’ve all had to work very hard to survive and perform in that environment.
However, at the end of the day, once you’ve built a multi-million dollar hotel, it’s not going to be repurposed into something else very quickly and what it really comes down to is – can we operate these better than any of our competitors.
So as I look at the situation that we’ve found ourselves in for the past 18 months, it’s really what are the things we can do as a brand and as a management company that can continue to try to create value for owners – and that’s managing costs more aggressively, obviously focusing on our mix of business to maximise whatever revenues we can get.
But you can’t step away from the fact that we still need to be growing the brand over time, because that growth and those brands bring in new customers and those customers benefit everybody in the system.
So the reason I say it’s the best of times is because we have a world class brand. We probably have, my feeling is, the best culture in the hotel business for our 30,000 colleagues.
We have great shareholders and the world is our oyster is some ways. We’ve got the opportunity to leverage all those things and go to new emerging markets, whether its here in the Middle east or India, or Asia or Eastern Europe.
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