Dubai’s hotel catering and conference specialists explain how their roles are evolving into full-service events management positions and debate the issues and opportunities this poses.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU: HOTELIER’S EXPERT PANEL

Suresh Mathews
Catering operations manager
Renaissance Dubai Hotel
Suresh Mathews began his career in India and has been with Marriott for 10 years. Prior to moving to Dubai he was on the pre-opening team at Renaissance Mumbai. He has recently been promoted to the role of catering operations manager from banquets manager.

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Lama Semaan
Director of catering and sales events
Mina Seyahi Complex, Dubai
Lama Semaan says she started in the F&B industry as a kid, working her way up from “busboy position”. She started her career in the catering industry and then previous hotel roles include Al Murooj Rotana in Dubai and W Doha in Qatar, where she was director of conventions. Semaan joined Mina Seyahi at the end of 2009 and says the Starwood events department is more of a convention /MICE department, dealing with groups as well as events.

Corinna Erken
Director of conferences and events
Raffles Dubai
Corinna Erken joined Raffles in November 2009 having previously worked at Atlantis The Palm and Madinat Jumeirah, where she worked for four years after the pre-opening. Prior to entering the hotel sector, Erken started her career on the client side with a conference agency in Germany.

Russell Nazareth
Conference & banquet manager
Radisson Blu Hotel, Dubai Deira Creek
Describing himself as “hardcore banqueting”, Russell Nazareth started his career with the Hyatt Regency in Delhi, where one of his roles was as DJ. He has since worked for a catering company in Oman, Carnival Cruises in Miami and InterContinental in Abu Dhabi. From here, he moved to InterContinental in Duabi remaining with the property when it was taken over by Radisson.

 

Why should a client choose your hotel for their conference or event?

Lama Semaan: We are a complex so we have Westin and Le Méridien. We have two products in one; you can access facilities in both hotels. We have greenery and a really large spread of beach – the largest private beach so far. We have a lot of space outside; we can have up to 3000 people or more depending on whether you want it as one section.

What we do is a bit different from other hotels as we have an activities department. We do team building activities in house, it’s really good for incentive trips. We have a lot of facilities, from an Italian restaurant to Asian cuisine to international to a pizzeria, and we have the golf carts going around the beach with beverages — you have luxury coming to you. And it’s quite important whether on a business or leisure trip to have the possibility to relax and enjoy your time.

Russell Nazareth: The property was the first five-star hotel in Dubai when it opened on March 15, 1975 — this March is the 25th anniversary. The building is almost a heritage site. Most of the meeting rooms have daylight and stunning views of the creek and now Burj Khalifa. We have two major ballrooms, eight more small meeting rooms and free internet in all meeting rooms and guest rooms. Our main USP in terms of banqueting is we have 13 restaurants, three bars and a dhow, which is all done by Radisson, plus Chef Uwe Micheel, president of Emirates Culinary Guild. In outdoor catering we are quite famous — we’ve done massive events, such as the Phil Collins concert with 18,000 people in attendance at the Dubai Autodrome.

Being a very old property people know us and they come to us on recommendations. We deal with a lot of event management companies — do one event and they swear by us. Then we are the official caterers for Tecom, which gives us almost AED 3.4 million to AED 4 million (US $ 0.9 to $1 million) a year in business from them. We do lots of corporates as well; it’s very diverse.

Suresh Mathews: We renovated our banquet hall in 2008; we have got 11 banquet spaces which can accommodate from 15 to 600 people. We invested a lot of money in the audiovisual sector keeping in mind the meetings and the conferences. We have the LCD projector mounted on the ceiling itself and all the rooms are equipped with ceiling speakers so this means we can take our set up much nearer to the stage — we saved a lot of space and can accommodate more people. We also do outside catering, including a dhow cruise every day on the creek, and are the official caterers for Dubai Autodrome with Courtyard Marriott.

We have done events for1000 people during Dubai Shopping Festival and we do outdoor catering at individual villas — a lot currently at The Palm, Jumeirah.

Corinna Erken: Raffles is one of the most beautiful properties I’ve worked in — that’s the advantage.

We have one of the most beautiful ballrooms, it caters for maximum 500 people, and on the same floor we have nine meeting rooms, the majority with daylight. The ballroom is decorated in very neutral colours, which is rare in Dubai because most of them are very highly themed.

We sit in the heart of the city but we have a hectare of outside space — the botanical garden. We are just expanding on that and trying to elaborate on it to make it a bit more attractive — we’d like to attract incentive groups as well. The city is slightly more lower priced than the beach so if customers are looking for outside activities we can cater for them as well.

We do have a lot of repeat corporate business, we are very close to Dubai Healthcare City so we have a lot of clients from there. When we quote for groups our rooms are the largest in the city – we have got 70m² for our standard rooms — we also have wireless for the guests available and I think that’s very much appreciated because other properties charge AED 120 ($33); ours is free.

On top of that we’ve got beautiful restaurants. On the 17th floor we have our Chinese restaurant the Noble House, which has won loads of awards and has a great outdoor terrace on the 17th floor. And then we are just redoing the 18th and 19th floors, which used to be China Moon Champagne Bar and New Asia bar — it’s been outsourced now to a club operator [Crystal group from Beirut] and it’s going to reopen with a bang and be really nice.

We’ve got the 17th 18th and 19th floors in the tip of the pyramid, which is all glass. Noble House is so successful that we’re going to expand it and what was Asiana is going to become more of a lounge to blend in with the concept and to utilise the terraces more. We haven’t utilised them really. We’ve realised that everybody goes up there and says ‘wow’ because the views are just stunning. You can go and have your drink on the 17th floor, your dinner and then you can go up to the club. It’s going to be a great concept. We’ve got one event that will be a fashion show in the ballroom and then we’ve got the after party upstairs, so it’s the kind of business we want to attract as Raffles.
We’ve got suites as well where we do smaller product launches for luxury brands and that’s the side of business we do.