Karim has over 20 years experience as a hotelier. He is currently the Area Director of Operations at Marriott International where he is responsible for four countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. He runs a team that supports each General Manager of the 35 properties that report to him throughout Europe. He previously spent 10 years at Four Seasons Hotel across Europe as Director of Rooms and General Manager.
That’s a very good question because, before, we were expecting the behavior of the customers to be really focusing on the service and on the quality of the service and the brand name. Now they will be focusing a lot on health and safety, despite the fact that they know that the brand they were travelling to before, is very strong in making the hotel safe for them. I think they will be looking, first, at the new procedures that the hotel is putting in place and that’s where we communicate a lot with the customers. We remain in contact with them, even though the hotels are closed now, and make sure that, when we reopen, they are fully aware about what we are going to put in place, in terms of procedures for cleanliness of the rooms, for example, or at the check-in.
In terms of type of customers, with the business customers, there is not much interaction with them, when they come to the hotel. Most of them they arrive, they leave early in the morning, they go out doing business, for the whole day and they come back in the evening. I’m sure that, first of all, we will have the leisure customers coming to the hotel, because of the whole lockdown and people would like to travel again. They would like to come out from this lockdown and just enjoy life, outside of their homes. They are where we need to make sure we answer all their questions, in terms of health and safety, by the procedures that we will put in place, then just continuing business as it was before. Making sure that we anticipate their needs and that we make them feel comfortable at the hotel.
Yes; that will definitely be ramp-up time, after we open the hotels. First of all, we will definitely have a lot of locals and we will focus on the local business, because planes are not yet flying. The borders in Europe are closed to Schengen. The United States doesn’t want their citizens to travel abroad. So first of all, we will have local customers. Also, with all the technology that is now available, a lot of people are doing what we are doing now. I didn’t travel to London; you didn’t travel to Paris, to meet and talk. I think a lot of companies, because they were also hit financially, they will review their travel plans. They will probably ask some of their business people to not travel, where before they were travelling. You have a two-hour meeting; don’t travel. Just do it by Skype or by Zoom. Then they reduce the costs and it will be as efficient as it was, face to face. We have now put everything in place to make it successful. It’s a new way to do it.
During the year, you can see, in the main cities in Europe, how the market is. You can see that, in the summertime, it’s mainly leisure travel. The rest of the year, especially end of September, October, November, and then January, February, March, it’s more for business travel. That’s where we are going to see reduced travelers. I think, on the business side, we will see reduced travelers. On the leisure side, I think we will have more and more people travelling.
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Karim has over 20 years experience as a hotelier. He is currently the Area Director of Operations at Marriott International where he is responsible for four countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. He runs a team that supports each General Manager of the 35 properties that report to him throughout Europe. He previously spent 10 years at Four Seasons Hotel across Europe as Director of Rooms and General Manager.