Corporate sales look to soften: Marriott

There are signs the corporate market is starting to re-think its travel policies during the current credit crisis, Marriott International has claimed.

"In Dubai, we are seeing a little bit of a softening from the larger corporates," revealed Marriott International area director sales and marketing Middle East and Africa Jeff Strachan.

"They are not actively slowing down their business, but they are talking about it. Head office is telling them there will be a slowdown.

"However, the Middle East is the growth market for nearly every industry and let's face it, you can't stop the infrastructure being built so companies have to send people here on business."

However, Strachan did warn that hotels who relied more heavily on leisure business from source markets impacted by the credit crunch might start feeling the pinch.

"We don't have beach properties in Dubai, but for those that do, they might start to be hit and that means they start going after Sheikh Zayed Road business to compensate. As a result, Sheikh Zayed Road will go after Deira business and so on, so there could be a domino affect," explained Strachan.

"I think we could see hotels competing with one another for business much more than ever before."

The answer, he said, was for hotel sales teams to "get off their backsides" and start being creative.

"We need to be as flexible with our clients as possible - we can't restrict them and say you can only stay one night or ten nights," said Strachan.

"I am encouraging all of our hotels to be creative and think outside the box and when we have meetings with tour operators, we ask how we can work with them to stimulate the customer."

He revealed that while sales and revenues to date hadn't "noticeably" declined on last year, tour operators from across the globe were starting to bring up the subject of room rates. Strachan also noted that hotels in Egypt were set to benefit from the global downturn.

"Some tour operators are moving charters from Spain to Egypt because it's a cheaper option," he said.

"However, somewhere like Dubai might suffer.

"The type of people that travel there are perhaps the ones with bigger mortgages who work in industries hit harder by the crisis, although the source markets for the destination are so large it might not make much of a difference. It's the unknown really, so we must work to stimulate demand."

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