Le Meridien Al Aqah, Fujairah Top Hotel

Abu Dhabi has developed a particular cultural identity and Dubai is one of the best city brands in the world. How does Fujairah differ from the other emirates?

Fujairah is an emirate that has taken its time to develop. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have all the resources that create wealth, whereas Fujairah is on the east coast of the UAE and has limited entries. However, Fujairah has a big wealth with regards to natural resources, such as the mountains, the Indian Ocean, and the availability of strategically positioned on the east coast for the ports. Fujairah has moved a lot in the last 3 years. When the Meridien Al Aqah arrived 5 years ago, not many people knew Fujairah. However, today it’s a different story. There’s new developments coming, there’re now industries coming, there’s a lot more hotels coming. I was there 6 years ago when I arrived. Today we have 3 neighbors and another 4 projects being built.

How do you see Fujairah, in 5 years down the road?

In 5 years time, Fujairah will probably have doubled its capacity, if not more. We are looking at at least doubling of its hotel room capacities. We are looking at new industries joining. I believe the airport is being developed as well. The seaport has already been doubled and they’re talking about extending that even further, because the country as a whole is now looking at it as the only port on the east coast, therefore it is strategically located to cut down on the shipping routes. There is so much happening that in the next 5 years I think Fujairah will be unrecognizable compared to what it is today.

One of the other major developments is the construction of a major freeway that is to connect Dubai and Fujairah in less than 30 minutes. How will this impact Fujairah?

In the long term it’s going to impact Fujairah in a pretty serious way. Already in the short term, it’s not even built and already people are talking about moving their houses from Dubai to Fujairah because of the differences in rent. If you imagine people arriving here to this hotel, at the Meridien Al Aqah, they have to come through the Dibba side and that takes about an hour and a half time. If they come through on this new highway that’s another half an hour from here to Fujairah, that’s an hour. So we’ve reduced the time even more for the touristic part of Fujairah, so that’s going to be fantastic. Also, with regards to traffic, the general traffic bringing of merchandise and goods, etc., it’s going to be amazing.

How ready is Fujairah for such an influx of people, investment and everything else that comes along with it?

It’s ready for the investment; it’s ready to be developed. Is it ready for the influx today? It certainly needs a bit more work, it certainly needs a bit more strategic planning to make sure that the influx arrives and is planned for, and is not chaos.

What can be done to further facilitate your operations in the hospitality sector in Fujairah?

There is a lot of things that can be done. We can spend hours talking about this, planning and strategizing, etc., and I know that the government is already doing a lot of background work preparing for all this development. His Highness is always our role model in making sure that we are ready for things. I even remember a conversation with him when we were the only hotel, and we were pushing them to advertise Fujairah more. And he said, “Patrick, have you thought what would happen if we advertise it, the tourists wanted to come here, and would not find the rooms, or would not find the space to stay in? We would lose them straight away. So he’s a great guy with great vision, and I’m sure his team is putting together everything to make sure that when the influx does arrive, we’re ready for it.

The hotel sector in Fujairah has been expanding fast and presumably it is becoming price competitive. How does Le Meridien differ from other hotel chains and international competitors?

Price sensitivities are very delicate to deal with, and you have two ways of going in. Either you differentiate yourself or you enter into a price war. Meridien Al Aqah decided to differentiate themselves; we’re not going into a price war. There are 3 new competitors, they’re all new, they’re wanting to get into the market. There is space for everybody in the market, but there is space for everybody who differentiates themselves from the others. If we’re all going for the same piece of the cake, then we’ll all end up begging or eating crumbs. But if everyone has his own cake, he will eat it and feel comfortable. So what we’ve done is that we’ve kept ourselves separate from the pack. We’ve identified, if you want, we are the premier hotel in the region, we’ve been established for 5 years, we know the area. We’re not trying to be cocky and say we are the best. But if you look at the awards we’ve been receiving recently, the World Travel award, the DEPA awards, and the MENA travel awards, in all 3 awards we have won, whether it’s best hotel, best resort, or best beach resort category, in the last 5 years. Some people say at the beginning there was no other competitor. Maybe, but we were competing with people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah. Now we do have competitors and we’re still winning the awards. Within Meridien’s scoring system, we are the 8^th best hotel around the world, as reported by the customer. So you can see it is not something we say, it is what our guest says. On the contrary, I welcome the competitors because it gets me out of a sleeping mode, thinking we’re the best because we’re the only ones around. So now I have to make sure we stay ahead of the competition or make sure we stay ahead of the game. If we want to charge a premium, we have to deliver a premium as well.

What kind of particular competency or ability makes you perform better than anyone else?

What we do, it’s an overall package, it’s not anything specific. First of all we look at the product. The product itself is the best product around. We’ve got the largest rooms on the east coast; they’re each measuring in at 48 square meters. We’ve got the tallest hotel, we’ve got the largest swimming pool, we’ve got most of the facilities a traveler or a holidaymaker would want to have. The quality of the finishes, etc. But that’s not enough; there’s plenty of beautiful hotels, Dubai is full of beautiful hotels and so is the whole region. The difference is with regards to the quality of service, the type of service. We have a very simple philosophy in the hotel: ensure that every guest has to leave happy. It doesn’t mean that we don’t make mistakes, but it means that we fix our mistakes, we rectify our mistakes. We have to ensure that the guest, when he leaves, he remembers the experience, not just the room he stayed in. That’s what makes the difference.

What are the new developments or additions to your existing portfolio? I know that you are adding, some spas? What have been the newest additions to your portfolio?

I can’t say there is anything new, but we are renewing all the time. We’re just spending 2 million dollars refurbishing the beach. We’re spending a further 2.5 million dollars renovating our outdoor restaurants. We’re spending a further similar amount of money building a new spa. We do have a small spa that is very efficient and very loved by our guests. However, we decided that to reward our guests, and because most of them keep requesting more and more, we have reached our capacity, so we have to expand our rooms; from having 6 spa rooms, we’re going up to 12 spa rooms. So we’re redeveloping the whole of the basement area. In 2 years’ time, we’re starting our refurbishment of all our bedrooms. In probably 3 years time we will be totally renovated again. So, the hotel, by the time it reaches 10 years, will have been totally refurbished again, and it looks like brand new again.

Given that Fujairah is relatively less-known internationally, what kind of travelers is Le Meridien attracting? What is the profile of tourists coming here?

Mostly international. Most of our tourists come from Germany and the German-speaking countries, from Russia, from England, from the Scandinavian countries. We can say that, yes, we might not be known by the masses, but the experienced traveler, the traveler who has come to the UAE before, who has traveled to this region, finds out about Fujairah, he gets to know about Fujairah. And because of the beauty, the scenic, also the less-developed if you want, the less noisy environment, they will want to come and spend their week holiday here rather than some of the more developed, noisier, and busier places; where it might be interesting, there might be a lot of shopping, there might be a lot of things to do, but there’s also traffic jams, there’s also noise, there’s these things that keep your mind awake, rather than relaxed. So that we find is that guests are happy coming here to spend 1 or 2 weeks, and within this 1 or 2 weeks they will go down to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, take a little tour, and then come back to their oasis of peace and quiet to relax.

Are you are positioning yourself as being complementary to Dubai?

I think most cities around here position themselves to be complementary to Dubai. Dubai is the pioneer in marketing the UAE worldwide, so if I was to tell you that, no, we’re doing our own work, I wouldn’t be very honest. The honesty is that, yes, Dubai has done a great job, and we’re piggybacking on it like most other people are doing.

With the massive growth in the tourism sector, one of the biggest challenges is staffing and recruitment. Is this a challenge to you?

Like everybody else, yes. You know, all of a sudden it’s the biggest expansion that hotels have ever seen worldwide, so the pool of qualified staff is getting less and less, is reducing, and it is getting more difficult to get by. The nice twist about this is that the salaries of the hotel associates had to be revised. Because now, rather than the employee looking for a job, it’s the employer looking for an employee. So in order to attract people, you have to have a bit more attractive salary; you have to have more attractive benefits; you have to promise people development in life and not just put them in the pots washer and forget about them. So it has a positive twist to it, which means that the hotel industry as an employer has to wake up, it has to reassess what it’s doing and has to catch up in its times. So eventually the good employers will get the crème de la crème, and those who are lagging behind might have to do their own training.

What are some of the other major challenges you are encountering on a day-to-day basis?

The challenges are transportation. Because of the Dubai airport being an hour and a half away; it’s always a bit of a challenge to get our guests all the way here, even though we have, like our competitors, a very organized, very efficient system of doing so, so that the guest himself doesn’t feel it. The other thing is getting supplies here. Even though we are only an hour and a half away from Dubai, our suppliers find this like having to travel to a foreign country. Having to get a mason or a carpenter, a skilled one, a good one, for half a day, is nearly impossible. So all these things are a good challenge, and it keeps life interesting.

As a part of a hotel-wide global greening initiative committed to reduce its waste, minimizing energy consumption, and promoting recycling, Le Meridien has taken steps to ensure a more environmentally-friendly approach. How do you address corporate social responsibility at Le Meridien?

I’ll let you judge on that question. We’ll go back 4 years ago. December 5^th is the anniversary of the hotel, and we used to have big parties to celebrate this. Then one year, the country suffered the loss of its president, and we didn’t think it was adequate to have a party during this mourning time. So this woke us up. I must admit this is when I started thinking about corporate social responsibility, where we started looking at what would make sense rather than having a big party. So we invited here orphans, old people’s homes, people who don’t have the means of utilizing such big hotels. So instead of having a big party, we were inviting these people, showing them around, having a little function for them, offering them dinner, letting them use the facilities. And we saw that this created real happiness and honest smiles, and the environment- even the local people when we were inviting them to come and meet with these people found this amazing. So we thought we’d develop this. So now every year we don’t have a big party any more, we have that. Other things we do every year, we have cleanup campaigns on the beaches and on the corals. This year there was the Environment Day, the World Environment Day and then the World Environment Week, and the year, was it the Year of the Reef? All of these things we are very, very involved in. We do that all the time. Any time there is an opportunity, a new opportunity, to be able to display our commitment to the environment, we do so. On the hotel side, if we are talking about things that are unspoken, like everybody else we look at ways of reducing our energy costs, our consumption of water, etc. But one step that we took that not many people take is that we decided to recycle all the condensation water coming out of our air conditioning systems. And there’s consultants who charge huge amounts of money to tell you that. But we decided to try, do a little trial. We spent a few thousand dirhams connecting all the pipes together. We thought that maybe we’d have a few square meters a day, a few square meters of water a day. We ended up with a hefty amount of cubic meters a day, and to the point that all that water is now irrigating: some of it is irrigating our gardens, and most of it is going to our fountains and all the water features around the hotel, so we don’t need to waste any potable water for this anymore. And we keep on looking for things like this. We’re now looking into alternative energy. We’re seriously studying windmills, to generate electricity. We are also looking at reverse osmosis to utilize the wealth of the sea next to us, to get some more water. Some of them are not necessarily cheaper than what we’re getting now, but they’re greener. Starwood as a company had started a green room campaign a long time ago, where, like in most other hotel groups, other companies, we have a card saying if you don’t want your towel, you know, throw it on the floor; if you want it changed, keep it up. Well, we are now removing the cards, because it’s going to become part of our way of life. We aren’t going to ask people any more, we are just going to do it. The only thing we’re going to ask people is if they want their bed changed every day. In a 5-star, traditionally, we change a bed every day, put pristine, crispy clean sheets. But again, the question is ‘Does everybody want this?’ We’ll let the customer decide. Of course, we’ll provide them with a very clean bed, very neat. They will not realize, really, the sheet has not been changed, but it’s up to them to tell us whether they want it or not. So it’s interactive with our guests whether they want us to be more green or not.

You have been lauded with numerous accolades. Can you tell us more of how you have achieved them and what are they?

If I summarize them, because we’ve had quite a few over the years, most of them are based on quality delivery, quality service delivery. We’ve also been awarded marketing campaigns for the out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-the-box campaigns we’ve done for our summer campaigns over the last 4 years. The best accolade we can have is the one voted by the guest. If you go in Germany there’s a website, it’s the equivalent of Trip Advisor, it’s called Holiday Check. They’ve voted us as part of the top 100 hotels around the world. They have over 15000 hotels in that webbing. QI has voted again us one of the top 100 hotels. We have another 2 tour operators who voted us there, plus the Meridien voting system, plus all these. So for me, the best accolades are the ones where the guest is telling us what they think rather than us applying for an award. Because some people, you know, when they know that people have applied for it, and implied that, oh, you’ve paid for it, it’s not kosher and all these things. But when you as a guest vote via the internet or via a letter that you have to send back to a third party, then I don’t think there is any room for discussion. So that’s great.

You mentioned information technologies and the internet in particular. How important are these technologies now days in the hotel operations?

I don’t think a hotel can live without them, to be honest. Whether it’s on the distribution fronts or whether it’s on the marketing fronts or whether it’s on the day-to-day operation of the unit. To the extent that after 5 years we’re changing our property system. We’re going to the latest- it’s a totally new system for property management, which is web-based, which facilitates, which allows the integration of all sorts of things. So when you find your favorite website, traveling website, and you look for the availability of the hotel you will see in real time what the availability is and whether you can book a room at that rate or not. So, unfortunately today we have to load the rates, we have to go in, we have to show what’s available, and so it’s not real time. By the time you’ve looked and by the time you’ve come to book, it could have changed. But with the new system we’re getting, you look online, you find the availability, you book it online, and the reservation comes into the hotel system. Whereas now there’s probably 3 or 4, if not more, processes to get that.