Keeping your covers

As the Middle East's culinary reputation proves, its hotels are home to a wide variety of F&B outlets - but with this variety comes a range of issues, from competition to staff concerns. Caterer Middle East met up with some of the region's F&B directors at Park Hyatt Dubai's Traiteur restaurant to discuss the challenges.

Is there too much competition between outlets within some hotels and how are these problems resolved without prioritising one outlet over another?

Halim Chamel Ghobar: It means you have to work harder in order to actually achieve what you can with what you have to offer in terms of F&B. If your hotel is quite big you have to have enough choice for your hotel guests by ensuring there are enough varieties of cuisine available. We have to work especially hard to attract lots of guests from outside the hotel, because of where we are. A Sharjah resort hotel is a little different to a city hotel in Dubai and the challenges of F&B are always there.

Sid King: It's a challenge to fill all of our restaurants, there's no doubt about that, but the licensing in Dubai is a little different to Sharjah and we're not competing so much with street restaurants. I think we can afford to have so many outlets, because our direct competitors are the hotels down the road. Although there are a lot of five-star hotels in Dubai there are not so many in Deira.

We fill our restaurants most of the time and I think we'll continue to do that due to the fact only hotels can sell alcohol and also for the kind of service we offer.

Urs Solenthaler: Each hotel in Riyadh has its own market share and separate targets for the individual concept of their respective outlets. All hotels in the city have different outlet concepts and do not compete with each other.

Mario Magalhaes: We need to have an all-day restaurant as a lot of our clientele come on fixed-package holidays and they know exactly what to expect in regards to billing - especially with the current economic situation - but we also have speciality restaurants that are particularly popular during the weekends.

I think for the right restaurants with the right service there's a big demand. We have two fairly well known restaurants - The Peacock, which is a Chinese with a very good reputation and a steakhouse called The Grill Room. For the right price and the right service there is always demand, but being a beach resort we must ensure we can cater to package holiday tourists.

Michael Allegra: The location of our hotel is perhaps a little different to the other hotels at the table because of the adjacent golf course, but you can't take away from our location in Deira where you have a lot of established hotels with a lot of F&B outlets. For a property our size, anywhere but in Dubai you would expect to find one and a half restaurants, but we have three - strictly because we're in Dubai and we have to be competitive.

We don't have too much competition between our outlets; we offer Thai, European and Arabic cuisine, so we offer a mix for whatever you're feeling like on the day.

How much co-operation is there between unaffiliated hotels across the region; is it better for business to share or keep F&B trade knowledge for your own outlets?

Magalhaes: Personally I think that we are not talking to each other as much as we probably should be, however it depends more on personal relationships. It's not about relationships between hotels, but rather whether you know your counter-parts in other hotels. In that respect I have to admit we do exchange quite a lot of information with the local hotels in the area around Jumeirah Beach Residence.

Liaising between hotels, in terms of price strategies or anything like that tends to work on a more a personal level - you know someone and therefore you exchange information with them.

When I was working in Europe a couple of years ago we used to have an association of F&B directors and I think a similar organisation here would be a positive thing.

It would open a lot of windows and close others that probably shouldn't be open. It would present a lot of opportunities and there would be a lot to gain for all of us, but that's my own opinion obviously.

Ghobar: [In Sharjah] there are some other hotels who do not want to give us any information or co-operate. One time I tried to hold a roundtable, similar to this one on F&B outlets, and some of the participants were not really free to express themselves, possibly because they had been restricted by their GMs or owners. At Coral, we don't believe this is a clever policy as we feel it is important to be a market leader.

King: I don't know about F&B management, but there are plenty of bar associations as far as I'm aware. From a personal perspective, when I first came to Dubai I approached a couple of assistant F&B managers from various hotels and asked to meet them to discuss what they were doing and their price structures.

They were more then open about discussing these issues and were very helpful. I'm sure if you approach anyone in the correct manner they would definitely help you out; after all we are in the hospitality industry.

Solenthaler: We do share limited information with our main competitor in the city.

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