Dubai Aviation Club, Premier Club in Dubai

Dubai Aviation Club is owned and managed by Dubai Duty Free and it was opened in 1921 under the patronage of His Highness General Sheikh Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Can you tell us more about the history of the club?

Originally, the Dubai Aviation Club was not conceived to be a private members club, it was supposed to be part of the Aviation College complex, which is our close neighbor. The club and the college were built all at the same time very quickly, immediately after the first Gulf War, and it became apparent to their Highnesses that this facility was probably being created to a standard that was higher than the requirements that you would need for a college environment with students. So it was decided at that time to make the section a private members club, which is how it was developed. The college and the club are now two completely separate institutes. The club has evolved over time; it was managed originally as its own entity under the Department of Civil Aviation and then, shortly after opening, it was taken over by Dubai Duty Free or, more accurately, Dubai Duty Free were given the responsibility of managing the club. The Aviation Club name comes from the fact that it was then owned by the Department of Civil Aviation and, technically, that is still the case, although the Department of Civil Aviation has now changed its name to Dubai Airforce. That’s something that’s happening at the moment, it’s been more segmented. Effectively, for all practical purposes, we’re owned by Dubai Duty Free and it’s been very useful for us to have such a powerful parent company. Dubai Duty Free is doing over a billion dollars of turnover this year and it’s great to have that protective arm around a club such as ourselves. But we have expanded the business here; starting with what was essentially a very private members club, which was the norm at the time. It was one of the first clubs in Dubai, it preceded the Creek Golf and Yacht Club, and the Emirates Golf Club. It was the first real international standard quality club environment when it opened and we try to maintain that all the way through, though the emphasis has changed from excluding people to trying to include people as we’ve progressed. So the club has moved with the times, has moved with what’s happening in Dubai and has evolved to what it is today. We’ve got the Health and Leisure Club, and attached to that the spa business, which is the Akaru Spa, which we opened three years ago. Then, we’ve got the food and beverage business, which includes the Irish Village. That is world famous at this stage because Newsweek magazine voted us one of the world’s great meeting places a number of years ago and it’s been very busy, and very successful. A lot of people now know us as the Irish Village, it’s supposed to be the Aviation Club but in actual fact it’s the other way round. Then, continuing with the food and beverage side, we’ve got the restaurant and bar collection, which has been very successful. We then go on to the Century Village, which is another part of our food and beverage expansion with 12 food and beverage outlets. This is operated in a slightly different way; we have developed the area and concept as an evolution of the requirements for the tennis stadium. We have a tennis stadium; it was designed specifically for tennis and it’s very good for tennis, we’ll come back to that later, and we started doing concerts there. As a matter of fact, the day I started work we had a Shaggy concert, which was in October 1996. My introduction to the Aviation Club and the tennis stadium and the Irish Village was the Shaggy concert in October 1996. We had this event and it became very clear that we didn’t have enough catering to service that event at that time so that’s where the idea for Century Village came from. We thought about putting in some kiosks, we then expanded that idea saying “why would we put in kiosks that’ll only be used for the events, why don’t we make it a little bit more permanent and use it all year round?” That’s where the idea of having all these restaurants and bars came from. So what you see today in Century Village is an evolution of that idea from 1996, that’s as far back as you might say it goes. Since then we’ve done a lot of concerts in the tennis stadium, which is the other part of business. Also, we’ve got the sports side of the tennis stadium, which is its reason for existing. It’s one of the best tennis stadiums in existence today, it is ideal for the purpose for which it was built. It seats 5000 people and we do the Dubai Tennis Championships annually, which includes the WTA, which is the women’s and men’s, followed by the ATP, the men’s event. Both of them, back to back, usually take place from the last week of February to the first week of March. This event is owned by Dubai Duty Free but we are the ground operator for that. We do a lot of the logistics on the ground. It’s been very exciting to have these types of events; between the sporting events, such as the tennis, the concerts and the food and beverage business it has been an eruption of a lot of success. Each event has cast its own positive shadow over all the things that are happening, and they’re all feeding off each other so it’s been very exciting for us here.

You mentioned that now you’re trying to include all people in the membership. How does the membership work at the moment?T

The private memberships club is where you apply for the membership, its primary focus is in sports. So we’ve got an exceptional gymnasium, an aerobics studio, and a cycle studio. Right now, we’re doing up to 50 classes per week. We have a staff membership, which is separate from the main membership. We’ve got people whose interest in their own fitness regime is in gymnastics so they do 5 or 6 classes a week. It’s great and that’s their primary interest. Then, we have other members who are full club members who use the gymnasium, the squash courts, the tennis courts, the saunas, the steamers and Jacuzzis; they form the core of the club. When we talk about people joining here, we ask them where they live and where they work because one of the things we’ve discovered over the years is that if it’s not convenient you won’t use it. We don’t want the membership for the sake of membership, we want people who want to participate in the life of the club and to create that club atmosphere, and we’re very lucky that that has evolved over the years. Right now we’ve got 16 different nationalities amongst our membership, so it’s open to all nationalities. People who are members here do tend to be in executive level jobs, and they take their leisure time seriously. Normally, they bring their families here and it’s an extension of their home life. A lot of people who are members here will come here and spend the two days of the weekend here with their families, or they may come here in the week just to do work outs or something quicker. We’re open from 6.30 in the morning right through to 11 at night in the recreation department giving people the opportunity to come before work or after work. Because of the very hot weather in the middle of the day here in Dubai, we offer them the traditional system of a split day, so a lot of people start work in the morning, have a break in the afternoon then work again later in the day. We’ve got a peak of people coming in the morning before normal working hours, and then it quietens down later in the morning. Maybe a lot of mums come and that type of thing to use it while the kids are at school. Then, we’ve got a big busy period in the middle of the day 12-12.30, they come over here, stay with us until maybe 3 or 3.30 and they go back to their work again. So it’s part of their whole day and it works very well. Of course, the club has expanded over the years; the gymnasium we have today is not the gymnasium we had at the beginning and we have a continuous upgrade program involved. Every five years we completely refurbish the gymnasium, we completely change all of the equipment. In actual fact, we will be due for another refurbishment early next year. It’s a continuous cycle and it works quite well. It keeps the members confident that we’re taking care of them and looking out for their interests as well, and it’s keeping the club at the top level of competitiveness in the market. There are a lot of great places in Dubai, as you know, and you need to keep moving to stay up there with competition.

There are a lot of new city centers emerging with their own club, how do you compete with them?

I think there’s a key distinction between us and what is happening with the plethora of what you call commercial clubs that are opening around the city. They perform a function, and it’s a very well needed function, but they’re less clubs than functional places to do a work out. You’re not likely to be meeting and interacting with a lot of your fellow members there. They’re very large, and they’re very useful for a segment of the market that is not interested in having a more social interaction with their colleagues. However, the Aviation Club is a mixing place, it’s a meeting place, people network here all the time. You know the old story: you go on the golf course and have business done there. We find the same thing here at the Aviation club. A lot of our members who are working in executive positions tend to meet up here informally and a lot of business actually happens it that environment; it’s less pressurised than straight-forward meetings at offices. So, that is not something that is available in the more commercial clubs. We have the space for that, we have the setup for that. Many of our staff have been here since 1991, though we do bring in fresh people on a continuous basis. Some of them know all the members. I’m not much good at knowing people’s names myself; I know the faces and it’s great to recognise the same people year in, year out. But I know some of my colleagues here who can read off the names of all the members going back to 1991, although, of course, a lot of them aren’t the same members. Also, we’re not trying to be the same size as some of these commercial clubs. We have a ceiling on the number of memberships that are available and once we start reaching that ceiling, from time to time we have to say “sorry, we’re not taking any more people right now,” and this goes in waves. A lot of the time in Dubai, people in executive positions come maybe for a three year contract with their companies, in particular, large, international companies and then they get moved to somewhere else. What we have been looking at is that, even when they’ve left and moved on to go somewhere else, when they revisit Dubai, they revisit the Aviation Club, and it’s great to see them coming back and telling us where they are now and what they’re doing. So it really is more of an extended family feel than the more commercial clubs. But I think there’s a place for both and, as the city expands, there’s plenty of business for all: the commercial clubs as well as ourselves. A lot residential and office buildings have their own club facilities but they have a specific function. They’re a gym, or you want to get in and out very quickly. You can do that here at the Aviation Club and, as I say, a lot of the executive members tend to do that a little bit during the week, but then when it comes to the weekend their whole focus changes. They might bring their wife or girlfriend, or their boyfriends; it’s not necessarily just for men. The club is a mixed club with an international focus. Over the week it’s more for business, and as we move into the weekend it becomes more relaxed. It’s great. We see children growing up here, although we don’t have a lot of children because a lot of the schools now seem to have very full programmes so the kids are very much occupied. Usually in the weekend we see more of the kids. We’ve seen kids growing up here who have left, gone to university in the States or in Europe and now they’re coming back to work in Dubai and they’re picking up their old memberships at the Aviation Club. It’s a great evolution to see how it moves forward. Of course, that means we’re effectively breeding our own future members, which is great! We don’t really need to do a hard sell in terms of what we’re trying to do. People do come and go; usually it ties in with their work cycle, if they’re being posted abroad and then we have a new group of people. Usually the people who come to replace them in those international companies will also join the club. There’s continuity in terms of the corporate membership side of things as well. So, it’s actually very good and makes people integrate easier; they don’t have to work as hard to find out where their feet are in Dubai when they arrive here. There’s a big welcome here, we already know the companies that they work for, and they spend some time with their colleagues who have probably told them about us. It’s a whole handover thing, it’s a continuous chain and it works very well. Of course, that’s the best type of business to have, it’s a repeat type business and it’s self-generating, which is very good.

You mentioned that you have a lot of executive members, so how difficult is it to get membership?

It depends on the way that things are going. We’ve got a cap on our overall membership. We feel that it’s important that when you take membership at a club like this, it’s not a question of filling it up with bodies, it’s a question of making sure that we can deliver the certain standards and facilities to people when they come here. So, for example, maybe in January we might have 20 people who have been transferred abroad by their companies, therefore we can take in 20 more people. Very often they will be people who are replacing the people who’ve just gone abroad from the same companies, but it’s not always the case. There’s always an opportunity, we do put people on the waiting list and we get back to them very quickly and keep them informed about what the status is. We enjoy bringing in new people and we encourage new people to apply for membership but again, if there’s no room, there’s no room. But that said, there may be no room today but there may be room in three weeks time. It may just be a question of we’re expecting people to move on and we usually know quite well in advance if people aren’t intending to renew. We basically know that Mr X is going to be moving to Thailand in three months time because that is the relationship we have with our members; they talk to us, we talk to them, we know what they’re doing and they know what we’re doing. Actually, they know more about what we’re doing than they should know a lot of the time! It’s an ongoing thing. If somebody comes to us today and asks for a membership, we’re pretty clear, it does need to go through the committee but it’s not an odorous process and we’re able to say “there are openings right now” and usually it’s pretty straightforward. Occasionally, if we’ve got a full house then we’ll need more time, it’s very easy to keep taking people but then you kill the goose that laid the golden egg because the members that are here will become uncomfortable and it’ll become overcrowded. We have extended our facility over the years so we have been able to take in more people but we don’t see it evolving to the point where we’re opening up as one would do in a shopping mall or something like that.

Tennis is one of the core sports supported by Dubai Sports City and once it is completed in 2009 they will try to attract tennis events. Could this pose a threat to your tennis championships?

We don’t see Dubai Sports City as any threat at all. We think it will enhance the availability of sports and leisure facilities here in the city. The Dubai Tennis Stadium was built specifically for tennis and it is a spectacularly good venue for playing tennis. So much so that a lot of the players over the years have been coming here. The world’s top players have voted our tournament the best year after year after year. That has got to do with the tennis stadium itself, it’s got to do with the surroundings, it’s got to do with the club and the interaction of everything that’s happening here. That cannot be easily replicated in a new environment. Plus, the indoor venue is a multi-purpose venue as far as we understand it and it can work for tennis and I’m sure it will be used for some of the tennis events that happen, but the ATP and the WTA tournaments are owned by Dubai Duty Free and they’re property of Dubai. One of the best things about Dubai will be what we will do. Right now we don’t see a problem with the existing tennis stadium. It would be nice to have some more seating capacity and we are doing some studies on that at the moment but, as we understand it, Sports City doesn’t have a dedicated tennis environment right now. We’ve got a very exciting environment, we’ve got a dedicated tennis stadium, and we’ve got the advantages of having other facilities on our doorstep, like the Irish Village and Century Village. It would be very difficult to replicate that somewhere else without doing something brand new. That is always a possibility of course, there is always pressure on seating, we got by without the seats, but 5000 seats is 5000 seats, it’s not any more than that. We would like, ideally, to have a larger capacity, and we are working with some of the international sports and engineering consultants at the moment to examine ways that that might be done and how we might develop that possibility on site. In the event that it doesn’t work on site, being in the city centre there is a lot of pressure on space as you would appreciate, we may have to look at other sites, but if we do that it will be following the directives and strategy of the government. But we hope that either way we will be creating not a replacement but a complimentary venue. But we don’t think of Dubai Sports City as being a threat, we think it’s going to enhance what’s on offer in Dubai. It’s the old story of the more there is, the more there is; the more interest that is generated, more and more people coming into Dubai. When we opened Century Village, people questioned why we put so many outlets in there, the reality is that people come – they don’t think about what they’re going to do there – they come, they park – there’s plenty of parking inside – and they think “ok, which way shall we go?” We’ve got Italian, French, steakhouses, Iranian, Indian, Portuguese, etc and what we find is that the more you have, the more it attracts. Even to the extent of, in a city like Dubai, all sorts of things are happening all over the city, 2 and 2 is making 8, it’s not making 4. It’s all adding up to eight, and we think that will happen with Sports City, and it has happened here in terms of the evolution of the development of food and beverage in different parts of the city, the hubs of interest in different parts of the city. We’re not the only venue in this area, a lot of people come to this area and it’s constantly evolving. We’ve got Festival City opening on our doorstep and that is a very exciting project for this side of the city. The whole point is getting a balance so that things aren’t only on one side. But, you know, the pendulum swings and Festival City is regenerating the area, bringing a lot of activities into the area. There is also the development of the airport and we’re only five minutes from there. It makes for a very exciting and progressive environment. It’s all adding, and we don’t see it as a threat, we see it as an opportunity.

So what are the real challenges you are facing, with the expansion of your facilities?

Space is the biggest challenge. We currently are building a hotel on the site, which is eventually taking up a lot of the space. We do think we’ve been a little bit clever about it in that we’re putting in a lot of car parking underneath the ground and then we’re going to put gardens and landscaping right on top. It won’t look as big as it is. So, there’s a lot of it underground and what you see over ground is effectively 300 bedrooms. The site is our restriction. We’ve got very little scope, the tennis stadium is a very large building and we have 10 tennis courts in addition to that, which means that we can always sacrifice one or two things to make up for other things and we have done that all the way through. But we really feel that, once the hotel is built, the site will be at its capacity. Again, it’s in terms of good town planning and good design and architecture and our attitude to the club. We don’t want to pack people in like sardines. We want people to have a positive and quality experience with us, whether that is a dining experience or a sporting experience or an entertainment experience. We can hold up to 7500 people for concerts in the stadium. Of course, we use the floor of the stadium as well. Sting, for example, did two concerts in our stadium – sold out both nights. In an ideal world, if you’re having a Sting concert you want to do one night and have 15,000 people involved, but it’s different strokes for different folks. As the city has evolved, the need for larger facilities has grown as the population is growing. It amazes us, the number of people we have coming in from abroad specifically to see tennis for example, and that does put pressure on space. So, our big threat isn’t competition from outside, it’s our own ability to service, in terms of space, what we’re doing here. Again, I suppose in many ways we’re a victim of our own success because the stadium is full capacity most of the time for these events and there’s always somebody who can’t get a ticket. So, is it better if you have a venue of our scale that is busy all the time or a much larger venue that isn’t full? The reality is that, while Dubai is growing rapidly, we still don’t have enough real population to build huge venues on a continuous basis. There are so many things happening in town and it’s so exciting that people have been compartmentalized. So, when I came here 11 years ago, if you had a concert, no matter what the concert was, or if you had a sporting event, it didn’t matter what it was, everybody came. The town was a much smaller place, you met everybody and you knew everybody and they knew you and I think it was a bit like a village in a way. Now, it’s become more compartmentalized and people have choice so there’s a philharmonics concert happening in the theatre, there’s some other things happening sports wise, there’s cinemas all over the place. There’s lots of choice. Then you’ve got sporting events on top of that. So people do tend to say “I can’t go to everything and I need to follow my particular interests” and we’re looking at a very solid tennis following. The places in the tennis stadium are sold out; space is the pressure. But we’re finding ways to deal with that and if we can’t succeed on this site then we may look at other opportunities in keeping with the strategy and the focus of the government of Dubai. The government of Dubai, as we all know, wants new things at top international standards; we’ve got the Meydan horse racing, the horse industry, a city being built right now at Nad Al Sheba. That is the aspiration of the government. So when they’re doing something, they’re doing the best that can be done. When the tennis stadium was built 12 years ago, it replaced a temporary structure, which was built each year for the tennis, which was made of scaffolding and it worked very well, it was a lovely atmosphere. It was replaced by the tennis stadium, which was designed and built in 9 months, it was an incredible feat. Now it’s got to the point where that is also moving towards its capacity and we have to make provisions for the future. But it was world class, has been world class, and in actual fact it is world class as voted by the players year in, year out over the past 10 years. But yes, there is space pressure.

You mentioned that you have plans to build a new hotel. What other new developments are you planning?

Well, on this site we feel that the hotel will maximize the space that is available to us in terms of it going to the extent where we will be putting a very big building over ground and then putting parking underground and gardens on top of it again because we think it’s important to maintain this green oasis in the middle of the city. The hotel itself has 295 rooms, with several restaurants, bars, function rooms, meeting rooms, etc. We have already added 3 restaurants to Century Village, with the new grounds and the new tennis courts. We have put in the Akaru spa, which has now been with us for three years and that’s evolving very well. The scale of construction causes its own problems in that we’ve lost a lot of car parking at the front of the building right now, and we’ve substituted it, with the cooperation of the municipality, with other parking opposite the stadium. So it’s working but in terms of room for development here, there might be room for some very small things, maybe a few small restaurants or something similar. We’ve got a physiotherapy clinic here, which we’re looking at evolving. We’ve got things like ladies’ and gents’ hair salons, dedicated nail spas, things like that. We’re slotting in all the bits of the community. So there might be room for some small developments. We’re thinking of putting in a small pharmacy and a small grocery store in front of the hotel development but we don’t see that there’s much room to do much more than that. The idea of the hotel was to finalize the available space while maintaining the integrity of the site. But, looking outside of what we’re doing here, we are building a new Irish Village at Festival City. We expect that to be in operation by October or November of this year. We’re looking at other opportunities to expand the Irish Village out to other parts of the city and possibly to other parts of the region. Right now we’re focusing on Dubai and we believe that you get your foundation right in Dubai and then we can do other things very quickly later.

Do you think that, on a long term scale, you’ll be able to export this concept internationally?

Definitely we’ll be able to export the Irish Village concept. It’s been a brand that has evolved very well over the past 11 years and it seems to have created a life of its own. We’re very lucky; two weeks ago we had Sir Bob Geldof playing at the Irish Village and he told us that he liked the venue, he liked the atmosphere. Again, there’s an easiness about what we’re doing here. In the Irish Village itself, we have a lot of Irish staff there, we like to keep as many Irish staff as we possibly can. The whole Irish concept, the Irish notion, has been successful internationally. What we’ve done with the Irish Village, we feel, is we’ve focused on authenticity and it’s not just a case of putting up an Irish façade and off you go. It’s not the façade itself, it was built in Ireland, put into containers, brought over here and built over here by Irish trades people on site here. That is something that we believe brings soul. There’s a lot of soul in the Irish Village and it’s very well supported, it’s very much a community place. People come down on Fridays or Saturdays, in the daytime it’s full of families and their kids. We’re very lucky in terms of the environment; we’ve got the lake there in front of it and a lot of greenery around, there’s soul to the place. It’s not easy to export soul! But we believe that it is possible, not easy but possible. We do think that it is an idea that can be transported and replicated, not easily, but can be done.”