< PreviousTalking Heads hoteliermiddleeast.com September 2020 20 After several months of disruption and uncertainty, authorities around the globe are easing their restrictive lockdown measures. However, for the travel industry there does still remain various elements of doubt and there appears to be no clear de nitive timeline when the restrictions placed on travellers and the industry suppliers who operate in this sector will end. Nonetheless, if FCM’s clients provide any crystal ball indication, then the recovery we are all seeking could be on the horizon. Our consultants in the region have spent the last couple of months focussing on repatriation and booking air charter ights using our own in-house supplier, AVMIN, amongst others, but in the last few weeks this has shifted to requests for future travel to various countries that have opened their borders. We’re seeing a steady increase in client enquiries, but we’re aware this could change overnight, and we want to see how things develop throughout the third quarter. The oil sector is obviously crucial to the Saudi market and it’s not so easy to be managing rigs via a Webex, Zoom or Skype call. Thus, we have seen an increase in requests not only in Saudi but other countries in the region from similar clients in the energy and marine sector. We expect to see hotel demand recovery starting in Q4 2020 and this will hopefully continue in 2021. Changes in customer policies to consolidate and reduce leakage has seen an increase in Green shoots of recovery in KSA By Ciarán Kelly hotel demand via the FCM Saudi teams. In Saudi Arabia, once the expected recovery begins in Q4 2020, the markets are expected to continue bene ting from the ongoing tourism initiatives and the numerous upcoming mega projects as well as domestic tourism. The Saudi government has been vocal in promising to use all policies to safeguard the local economy from jobs, industries and livelihoods. This will also help drive green shoots further one hopes. According to our customer research and forecasting within the region, in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is expected to see occupancy at just under 50 percent with Jeddah and Makkah at 35 percent, albeit these three cities are down between 25 percent and almost 45 percent compared to 2019. In 2021, we expect Saudi hotel occupancy to increase further between 10 percent and 20 percent in these markets. There are various other reports out this month within the region that are in line with our own research. One noticeable area that is signi cant to FCM Saudi in the region, is average daily rates have fallen by approximately 35 percent in comparison to this time last year. That trend backs up our recent white paper on running a hotel RFP to address these differences in previously contracted corporate hotel rates and what is trending currently. Time will tell when travel will return to more meaningful, pre-COVID-19 levels. For now, though, it appears those with About the author Ciarán Kelly is the managing director of FCM Travel Solutions (Middle East & Africa Regional Network), parent company of Flight Centre Travel Group in the UAE and brings more than 17 years of experience from the global travel industry, gained from working in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. critical travel needs in certain sectors are starting to speak for themselves and perhaps this is the start of the green shoots of recovery our industry is yearning for. On the ip side, while there are green shoots, the future does remain uncertain as COVID-19 continues to grip us globally with no de nitive vaccine found just yet. If we were to get a second wave in the pandemic that brought back lockdown restrictions in Saudi and beyond, it could really change how the Saudi market and many others recover. We at FCM wait to see what will happen, continue to support customers and keep them informed of what suppliers in the hospitality and aviation sectors are doing to safeguard their travellers. Always by your side to offer your guests an extra star Whatever happens the #1 destination for premium entertainment ''en français''hoteliermiddleeast.com September 2020 22 South African hospitality professional Eugene Conradie has been appointed group F&B director at the Saudi Arabian conglomerate Taj Holding Group (TAJ). Like countless others across the globe, Conradie’s professional career was put on hold at the hands of COVID-19. After only a ve-month stint at Hyatt Regency Riyadh, Conradie left the property as “the hotel downsized to survive the business crisis.” He made the announcement on Linkedin: “Following a two-month pandemic-induced furlough, I'm happy to Former Hyatt F&B director moves to Saudi conglomerate Appointments Swiss-Belhotel International clusters senior roles Hospitality group Swiss-Belhotel International has announced a restructuring of its senior team as the coronavirus continues to have a profound impact on the industry. As a response to the current market conditions, Swiss-Belhotel has started clustering roles of some of its senior members. Laurent A. Voivonel – who is SVP of operations and development in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India will now also be responsible for group human resources and talent development. In the new position, he will report to the group’s chairman and president, Gavin M Faull. Elsewhere in the group, Priyanka Kapoor has also been given additional responsibilities. Currently the regional director for sales and marketing in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, she will now head up group sales, marketing, branding and communications as well and will also report to Faull. CAREERS share I have accepted a new role as Group F&B Director with Taj Holding Group in KSA. Thanks to everyone who supported over the past two months and all the best to those still looking.” TAJ is holding company based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia operating in the GCC and a wide range of international business activities, including hospitality and F&B. In his new role, Conradie will lead the group’s F&B side of operations, helping to look after its businesses and brands. An industry veteran, Conradie has worked Faull said: “COVID-19 has resulted in many changes in our thinking and how we handle our global business. “We have learnt that through teamwork and communication we can manage across borders and continents. We have to think differently, cooperatively and supportively. People are our key asset and strength. We have huge con dence in our team and management as we navigate through the complexities to meet the new normal and continue to develop our unique brand and people.” across the UAE, Oman and South Africa in a range of similar F&B roles. Eugene Conradie Priyanka Kapoor Laurent A. VoivonelCareers 23 September 2020 hoteliermiddleeast.com W Dubai – The Palm has announced a new general manager to oversee the popular ve-star hotel. Peter Katusak-Huszvar joins the 349-key hotel after a two-year stint at Accor’s SO/ Vienna, where he oversaw the renovation of all the rooms and public spaces. He has also held senior positions at the Le Méridien Budapest, Hungary, art’otel Budapest, Hungary and Kempinski Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten München, Germany. Now in Dubai, Katusak will oversee all aspects of the hotel, including its impressive portfolio of F&B venues, W Dubai – The Palm gets new general manager including those from chefs Massimo Bottura and Akira Back. Announcing the news, W Hotels said Katusak-Huszvar is an industry disruptor who embodies the vibrant and playful elements of the W brand, having previously been the pre-opening GM for W Dubai, Al Habtoor City in 2015, GM at the W Guangzhou in China a nd GM at W St. Petersburg, Russia. The hotel group’s statement says he also excels in business development, operations, cost management and food and beverage operations. Peter Katusak-HuszvarCareers hoteliermiddleeast.com September 2020 24 Thamim Ansari, pastry chef at Andaz Dubai The Palm DAY IN THE LIFE From freshly baked pastries at breakfast time to intricate desserts drawing on Dubai's heritage and trips to the souk with his teamCareers 25 September 2020 hoteliermiddleeast.com The signature dessert 8am I generally arrive in the hotel around this time and the rst thing I do is visit the breakfast offering to check the quality and make sure it’s perfect. If anything needs to be changed, I ensure it happens there and then. We have a dedicated pastry counter in The Locale and we incorporate the local avours of Dubai, such as rose and zaatar, into the breakfast pastries. We also have Yemen Simr honey, which is very popular. The pastries are all freshly baked to ensure the aroma lasts throughout the whole breakfast service. Our guests love this. It’s really important to me to chat to guests and get their feedback. I always encourage them to try our signature Andaz favorites. At The Locale we also have a grab and go counter where residents can stop by to pick up a freshly made loaf of bread. We bake bread on rotation throughout the day, which changes every meal period to ensure the guests receive a variety of tastes when they visit. The sourdough is our specialty and our guests keep coming back for it. 10am Once breakfast has nished, I head to my of ce and check my emails and plan for the day ahead. This is my admin time and I have to ensure that all orders are placed. Lunch preparations begin straight after breakfast. Every day we have different pastries and desserts on offer for our guests, with a different theme to ensure that guests here on holiday get to experience new creations. Guests are invited to visit the dessert counter and select the one that they would like to try. It is so important that we can interact with the guests and tell them the stories behind each dish, because every dessert we make has a purpose, which allows us to express our andaz. Andaz means personal style in Hindi and we are the lucky ones that get to bring this to life. We have varied themes such as ‘the avours of Arabia’ and ‘Chocolate in The Woods’, which is a delicious dessert based on ve elements of nature: earth, air, re, water and space. Each element is interlinked with the avours associated; earth includes anise, air involves aerated chocolate, re has charcoal smoked chocolate, water is the moisture and we have an edible sweet mushroom, and for space it‘s dehydrated berries. One dessert I am particularly proud of is the Taste of Dubai. This dessert is inspired by the signature tastes and avours of Dubai, using ingredients that can easily be found in most Emirati kitchens, including cumin, g, simr honey, hazelnut and dates. It’s nished off with our signature edible perfume infused with the aromas of the spice souk. We really create theatre with this dessert and guests love it. 1pm My team and I always try and have lunch together, it’s our chance to not talk about work, we chat about each other’s lives and crack some jokes. I have a team of eight pastry chefs, a mix of Indian, Sri Lankan, Filipino and Tunisian. The team is small but very passionate about what they do. Dubai is a melting pot of cultures and I try to encourage my team to infuse their cultures into the work that they do. Combining this mix of nationalities, passions and creativity we have created a strong team that work well together. 2pm After lunch is when our creative juices come out. We chat as a team about future focuses, what’s coming up and brainstorm together. We talk about culinary trends and what’s happening in the world. For me it’s really important that I always identify my limit so I can make sure I cross it every time. I try to encourage my team to live this ethos so that they too can grow and push themselves. I am not a leader or a boss, I am part of the team, I don’t consider myself as a leader as everyone in the team is as important as each other. As a team we look after the whole hotel. We have developed the desserts for all outlets, in-room guest amenities, events, VIP guest gifts, outside orders such as birthday cakes and also birthday cakes for team members, this is always an important celebration for Andaz. Evening Once my shift nishes I am always on the lookout for new ideas, so as a team we plan once a week to visit the souks and art galleries in old Dubai to gather more inspiration. Rather than taking ideas from other cake shops or patisseries it’s really important to be unique. Andaz as a brand is focused on art so we ensure that our work is also re ective of this. 8pm Time to switch off and re-energise.hoteliermiddleeast.com September 2020 2627 September 2020 hoteliermiddleeast.com You can call him JJ Hilton’s area president, Middle East, Africa & Turkey, Jochem-Jan Sleiffer, on his rst eight months and what’s coming next By Paul Clifford It’s clear after spending just a few hours in his company that Jochem-Jan Sleiffer is a people person. Hilton’s area president, Middle East, Africa & Turkey is looking around the Waldorf Astoria DIFC, where the photoshoot was taking place for this feature, and is talking to staff along the way. The hotel staff are nervous around him at rst, as you probably would be when your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss (and the rest) is in the building, but after a minute or so in his company they relax. His charm is disarming. “Call me JJ,” he says the rst time we meet. “Everyone does.” You can see why his team look up to him (and not just because he’s tall). Sleiffer, who has been in the role since the start of 2020, has had quite the introduction to the region. No-one would have predicted what his rst eight months in post would have thrown at him. But, despite the turbulent year so far, he appears to be taking it all in his stride and is optimistic for the future. A few days after the photoshoot we sit down for this interview. Only now we’re talking over Zoom. While Sleiffer’s role usually involves almost constant travel, the past few months have curtailed it. Now, however, he is in Bodrum, Turkey, to visit two new Hilton properties, Susona Bodrum, LXR Hotels & Resorts (the rst LXR brand in the country) and DoubleTree by Hilton Bodrum Isil Club Resort. The trip coincided with the Dutchman’s 30th anniversary as part of the Hilton team, which is where our conversation starts. “When I was six years old I stayed with my family in a hotel in Austria and it made such an impression on me when I got back to school I wrote an essay about my experience,” he says. “I still have it. It says I will go to hotel school, I will buy a hotel, I will buy a chef and I will buy a maid and I will get my family to stay with me. “I’m not from a family of hoteliers but it made an impression. By the time I was 15 I was working in a restaurant washing dishes and serving people alongside my studies. I didn’t get into hotel school so I did facility management. I still wanted to do an internship in a hotel, so I ended up in the Hilton Amsterdam in 1989 as a trainee. I made a connection with the F&B manager who hired me a year later as chief steward in the kitchen.” After eight months Sleiffer followed his boss to Brussels and has never worked in the Netherlands since. Once in Belgium he soon moved from an operations role to a commercial role. “My boss said if you are a good leader you can work in any part of the business, and I have taken that on. You really have to look for people with those leadership skills that can be put to use in other parts of the business. It was a courageous role to move me, but it was an opportunity to learn things that would eventually make me a better general manager.” His rst GM role came at the Hilton Athens. A job that he says threw up some problems at rst. “All of a sudden you are the boss and you have people looking up to you, and if someone has a problem, people think you will have the answer. There were sleepless nights, but ultimately I came through.”JJ Sleiffer hoteliermiddleeast.com September 2020 28 Moves to London and back to Brussels followed, back to the property where he was washing dishes 15 years previously, before becoming area manager in France then onto VP for Northern Europe (overseeing 23 hotels). That then grew to a position looking after all of Europe apart from the UK and Ireland. He now is responsible for around 160 hotels in this region with almost the same amount in the pipeline. Mentorship He says Hilton’s ability to retain and nurture talent is the reason he’s still at the company all these years later, and is keen to see that the next generation of talented hoteliers get the same opportunities he has. “We need to make sure they can grow and are challenged. The mentorship programmes we offer, and I personally mentor some people, means we’re always working to get the best people through our ranks quickly, and I get a lot of satisfaction and energy from working with those people, and I’m learning from them, too. It’s really nice to get ideas of how we can run the business differently. “One of the things we have to do more of is listening to the young people in our teams, but I think that’s one thing Hilton does particularly well. We’re trying to have as much open dialogue with the next generation as we can. They have a different view of how people should work. Flexibility is something that’s key for them, and we need to adapt. After the current crisis is over we need to work with our teams and owners to protect our business and deliver the things that make hotels successful. “It’s interesting to be working with ve generations of people – from 65 year olds to 16 year olds. You need to have an open ear, nd out what drives those young people. Here in the Middle East we’re working with the local [Emirati] community and are speaking to their schools. We have the Board of Future Generations which has people between 18 and 25 years old, sitting as a shadow board, almost, and give them problems to solve and they come up with a different answer to we would.” He points to the Hilton Honours app as an example of what the younger members of the team can come up with. Each city now has an area guide on the app, which is put together by the young team members, as they pointed out that’s what younger travellers want to know. “People will work better if they work for a company they can believe in and has the same values as they do. Hilton cares about the way it treats people. It cares about sustainability. We are a rst-name company. People call me JJ, I’m absolutely ne with that. It means people feel comfortable talking to me. It’s important that there’s communication and we interact with the community we operate in. By 2030 we want to double our social impact and half our environmental impact. That’s something people can get behind.” Staying sustainable Hilton introduced its CleanStay in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming one of the rst hotel groups to introduce new health and safety protocols for the new landscape. With travellers now putting cleanliness at the top of their priorities, Hilton wanted to act fast. CleanStay standards include sealing rooms after they’ve been cleaned and sanitised, so guests know no-one else has been inside, decluttering the rooms of unnecessary items, and more. But has it been possible to maintain the same sustainability goals while having to increase the use of things like single-use plastics, for example? “Taking care of the world around us, which we call Travel With Purpose, has been around for at least a decade. We do this already, not because it’s a trend. You can also see from our websites what each hotel does in terms of energy consumption, “Travel will resume, though it will take time. We want to make sure people have a place to go to when they’re ready for it.”JJ Sleiffer 29 September 2020 hoteliermiddleeast.comNext >