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The Leading Hotels of the World Middle East has had a challenging year, reports CHERYL MANDY
With an aggressive marketing campaign and attractive schemes for agents, The Leading Hotels of the World Middle East remains extremely positive of travel in the region. Hatem Chatter, director of sales, Middle East, tells us what it takes to be the leading hotels in the world. Excerpts from an interview.
How has your business fared so far this year?
January and February were extremely challenging months. Our clients, which are predominantly royal families, restricted travel for two main reasons – to shop around more (as is the trading nature of Arabs) as hotel prices came down further, and to avoid the threat of swine flu, not so much for themselves but in order to protect their small children.
The markets least affected were Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and the most affected has been the UAE – our business in the UAE was mostly corporate.
But our hotels globally are doing surprisingly well, with a 12- per cent increase in room night sales and a 26-per cent increase in reservation sales this year (figures are up until June) over last, with many royals travelling to Europe and the US. Ours is an extremely sensitive market, despite it being one where there is much potential.
Although the least affected by the economic crisis, the royal families continue to travel but for much shorter periods and to fewer destinations. Many are spending the summer at home, not even moving within the Middle East, although Lebanon is the exception. Beirut is completely full – we are selling at rack rate at our two hotels, Le Royal and Le Grey.
What marketing strategy did you put forward to counteract this and achieve these figures?
We initiated a really aggressive marketing campaign. We came up with a lot of incentives for travel agents, including our ‘commission plus’ programme where we gave them 15 per cent commission, at the beginning of the year when we first felt the effects of the global crisis. We knew the least affected market would be leisure, so our focus was on that.
We also did back-to-back road shows in eight destinations in the Middle East, and released our Arabic brochure earlier than usual. Response to this catalogue has been very positive as this region represents a very affluent and sophisticated market. Business is definitely lower than previous years, nevertheless business for our members was increased as we took the right action and fought for every room night.
What does the future hold for LHW (Middle East)?
It will definitely be different in each country. One issue that we cannot predict is the route that travel during summer will take next year. Ramadan falls in the heart of the summer, and there are two completely different opinions when speaking to our customers.
Some say they will not travel because they want to be at home during Ramadan, and the other 50 per cent say they will definitely travel as the holy month falls within the summer season and it will be too hot in this region. If the latter opinion takes place, 85 per cent of travel will be to hotels in countries that cater for Muslims, for example Turkey, Malaysia, Lebanon, Egypt and Dubai will do well. But we have no way of knowing the answers yet.
We have over the years been educating the Arab market to avoid the last minute bookings syndrome, and had achieved a lot in this regard, although they are still not as forward planning as other nationalities. However, now we are back to square one, so we will be working on that again.
Overall, we remain positive. When I asked one customer if he would be decreasing his trips next year, he said, “Hatem, if all the banks in the world are corrupted and crash, I will still travel to all the Leading Hotels of the World that I want to”. Those were encouraging words for me.