Jumeirah Group eyes growth in hotel visitors from India
The company, which is currently setting up four new hotels in Dubai, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, will consider the possibility of entering India with its own property when it decides to expand its geographical presence in the future.
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Dubai-based luxury hotel operator Jumeirah Group is looking at increasing the number of visitors to its properties in different parts of the world from India, one of its top ten markets, group Chief Commercial Officer Alexander Lee said on Tuesday.
The company, which is currently setting up four new hotels in Dubai, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, will consider the possibility of entering India with its own property when it decides to expand its geographical presence in the future.
"India is a very important market to the Jumeirah brands, our hotels and resorts brand has always been very popular with the Indian market...The Indian market sits as a top 10 market in almost all of our hotels," Lee told PTI.
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He further said India is "a very strong contributor to the demand going into almost all of our hotels. It's also one of the strongest growth markets for us as well."
Citing the example of the group's hotels in Dubai, "which are very established and consistent hotels that run extremely high occupancy around", he said ,"the amount of demand in India is still growing this year by around 24 per cent compared to the same time last year".
"We're also seeing that similar trend in other markets like the Maldives where we've seen growth around 20 per cent this year."
Also we're seeing strong interest and intent for the new hotels particularly when it comes to destination weddings. Muscat and Bahrain both have seen a lot of inquiries...And we see there's more potential to continue to grow," Lee said.
He, however, did not elaborate on the number of visitors from India to the group's hotels.The group is targeting four key customer groups -- independent luxury traveller, multi generational families, destination weddings and corporate and business travellers.
"We've seen particularly in that multi generational family area, and a big surge in demand from customers, who are wanting to travel, perhaps with their parents, brothers and sisters and children in small groups of 20 or 25...," he said.
These are similar to customers in the Middle-East, he said, adding, "we can draw our experiences from our strong history in the region, to be able to deliver against the expectations of the Indian traveller coming into our hotels, with the same type of needs that we can take care of."
When asked if Jumeirah Group would consider opening its property in India, Lee said, "We are exploring growth across all the different geographic markets but we haven't yet got any firm plans to come to the Indian market at this point. It is absolutely going to be on the horizon at the right time."
At present, he said the group has four hotels coming up -- two in Dubai, one in Geneva, Switzerland, and one in Saudi Arabia."They are projects that are already well underway to deliver the next phase of growth.
Beyond that, we want to be able to grow further," he said Jumeirah Group has 26 luxury properties across the Middle East, Europe and Asia with over 6,500 rooms.
In order to increase traffic from India, Lee said, "We're also looking at increasing our sales presence locally on the ground here within India as well, to strengthen that amount of exposure we have in the market.
One of the things that we recognise is that our strategy to date was focused mostly on key cities and we see there's more potential to grow into some of the secondary cities as well.
He further said, "As we see more revenue generation coming out to the market, it will allow us to further invest in the market to grow more potential."