Kuwait still means business

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Hilton Kuwait Resort.

The government should have a vision for the development of business and leisure tourism overall, which will get rid of the administrative red tape that we find sometimes in Kuwait.

Mövenpick Hotel and Resort Al Bida'a director of sales and marketing Hassan Hassanein says that there is a problem with the visa system in general.

"That is one of the big negatives, because visa requirements change frequently and immigration policy is not stable. The government needs to change this so there are clear visa regulations," he says.

Apart from the issue of obtaining visas there is not a general problem attracting staff to Kuwait, according to Landais.

"Kuwait is not a hard country to attract quality staff to. It's not a place where staff will be ill treated, quite the opposite actually. I think people would be attracted to working in the hotel industry in Kuwait," he says.

Over the next two years Kuwait will see the opening of five new hotels, including the 207-room Hotel Missoni, 150-room Staybridge Suites Kuwait Salmiyah, 280-room InterContinental Kuwait, 160-room Ibis Sharq and 165-room Golden Tulip Kuwait.

"It's true that in Kuwait there are a lot of five-star hotels coming up, so maybe there will be too many of them," says Landais.

"Now developing economy lodging like we do I think we are taking an untapped market, which is going to be beneficial both for the investor and for the operator, and also for the client - an alternative to the five-star."

Creating an alternative to the increasingly competitive five-star market is Accor's response, but Mövenpick's Hassanein believes that the answer is to increase demand to prevent an suffering from an oversupply of properties.

"I have noticed that the hotel business needs to be facilitated more from the parliament, from the government, they have to get more investment into the country rather than Kuwaitis investing outside the country as they do now," he adds.

Unfortunately Hilton Kuwait Resort general manager Andreas Bossard is not confident that the government will give the hotel industry the attention it requires.

"They made a big effort by working out a tourism plan with the help of certain UN organisations and a very good study was published, but so far nothing," he says.

"I don't think the government is very much interested otherwise. Things which have been discussed for a long time, such as building a convention centre and building some infrastructure to support the industry have come to nothing."

Establishing Kuwait as a meetings destination would be one way of boosting the industry, according to Bossard.

"Attracting meetings business would be easier than attracting tourism, because there you will always have a problem," he says.

"A world-class convention centre would help, but the government hasn't done much, and development of the airport is slow to say the least. No, they are not that interested."

Rezidor Hotels Group currently has one property in Kuwait, the Radisson SAS Hotel Kuwait, and regional director of sales and marketing Craig Senior disagrees with Bossard's negative view of the government.

"From our side the government is interested in the industry. If you look at it I don't see how they could not be interested because it's been a critical source of revenue generation for the country," he says.

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