After the fire

Laura Collacott meets the chairman of luxury resort developer and operator Kerzner International, Sol Kerzner, and discovers why he won’t let a small fire stand in the way of his big business ambitions.

Looking at the fire-scorched, smoke-damaged central section of the Atlantis Dubai, it's hard to believe that the hotel is going to go ahead with its planned opening at the end of September.

In just a few weeks (at the time of writing), the 1,539-room monster of a resort will throw open its doors on The Palm to the general public, to become one of the city's biggest hotels, and take on the Burj Al Arab as the grandest.

Only the dome of the hotel's central lobby - which sits beneath the (US$25,000-a-night) bridge suite - was destroyed by fire on the 2nd September. Miraculously, no one was hurt in the blaze.

The PR representative assures me that the celebrated Dale Chihuly glass sculpture that forms the centrepiece of the reception room "only needs cleaning", though I'm more dubious about the claim that most of the damage is "relatively superficial".

Sol Kerzner, chairman of Kerzner International - the firm responsible for Dubai's newest landmark - has flown in to inspect both the progress and the damage. He describes how the news was broken to him: "I got a call at quarter past four in the morning; I was in London. Alan Liebman [the organisation's managing director] called me. I answered the phone, I said, ‘Yes, Alan?' - and my wife said, ‘Tell Alan not to call at crazy hours'!

"He was obviously quite shaken and made the call immediately. I told him not to waste time on the phone and just to get ahead and do what he had to do." Kerzner is nothing if not pragmatic.

I wonder if he still feels as confident now that he has had a chance to survey the site. "Delighted" was not the response I expected.

"I'm not delighted with the fire - it was a bit of a setback," he clarifies, "but in any event, we will open on time. It happened very fast; it was early in the morning and I'm just pleased that our security folks were on it very quickly and everyone remained calm and dealt with it as best they could.

"In each tower we have independent elevators and, fortunately, independent lobbies, so people will be able to come in; the place will be complete - the pools, the rides, the dolphins, the restaurants. It's really just the central lobby, which fortunately our people were able to restrict the fire to."

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