We’ve spent the past two days with about 50 people from around the world working on our opening plan for the Makkah property and all the details of that from across the different disciplines.
Think about how hard this is, we’re going to be opening a multi brand integrated hotel, one of the largest in the world in a place that only Muslims can go to and we have to source about 2600 employees over the course of the next nine months, they all have to be Muslim, they all have to understand hospitality, they have to fit our culture and we have to do it without ever going to the site.
Only Muslims can go to Makkah. So we’re actually operating and running this whole thing out of Jeddah. If you think about the complexity of pulling this off, it’s unbelievable.
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Have you got someone in the know with a video camera and live link-up?
What we’ve done is we’ve hired a vice president – Mohammed Arkobi who is our man on the ground who’s actually acting as the conduit for everything he knows about the Muslim community and everything he’s done in the past.
So it is a major coordination and undertaking, but very exciting
Is there not an element of regret that you’re working on this incredible project and you’re never going to step foot inside it?
As I understand it, and we’ll see how this happens, but you can get a special dispensation from the king to go there.
You have to apply and it’s a whole big deal and you can only be there for three to four hours.
You can’t spend the night there, you go in, you have a very specific agenda, there are places you can go and things you can do and then you go out, so our hope is that once we get all these things open we’ll at least get to go there once.
And the reason is not so much to pat myself on my back, but so that I can have a frame of reference so I can try to manage this going forward.
You can have all the picture you want but until you see the scale of it and until you drive the roads to go there and until you see the logistics of its is very hard to understand how to manage it.
The only projects of this magnitude that are going on around the world right now are gaming projects and all those gaming projects have a totally different agenda, they all been driven by gaming and that’s the fundamental underpinning – here what we have is a religious icon.
They couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. If you think about for us the challenge and the fun of it all you’re opening the Savoy in London, you’re opening Makkah and then we’re also opening the Peace hotel in shanghai, arguably the single most famous hotel in all of Asia, so put the Raffles in there and they’re our hotels.
So I sit there and look at that and to be able to pull that off, being as small as we are, really has to put a premium on the quality of the people and that’s what I like – it’s a bit of a David and Goliath.
How do you unwind when you are responsible for so many properties in such a challenging time?
I guess I deal with stress very well. Honestly in this company I don’t worry about a lot of things because I know there’s a lot of people constantly trying to do the right thing and its one of the reasons why I find it hard to imagine working for another hotel company.
I’ve worked for Marriott, Hilton and Carlson companies and what makes this company different is everybody believes it’s their job to try to solve whatever problems they’re encountering.
There are not a lot of politics – that is unique, not just in the hotel business, but in any industry.
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