Four Seasons plans hotel in Dubai

Rebecca Bundhun

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 6:03PM UAE / November 19. 2009 2:03PM GMT

Four Seasons, the luxury hospitality management company, is in talks with developers to open a hotel in Dubai even as its planned project with Al Futtaim Group continues to be re-evaluated.

Four Seasons, which does not have any hotels in the UAE, is also looking at opportunities to expand into Abu Dhabi. The company is owned by Saudi Prince Al-Waleed’s Kingdom Holding and Cascade Investment, controlled by the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

“Whenever we talk about growth and development, Dubai is on the top of the page,” said David Crowl, the Four Seasons vice president of sales and marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “We have a couple of things that we are working on in Dubai.” He would not provide further details.

Four Seasons and Al Futtaim announced plans in 2004 to build the Four Seasons Hotel Dubai at Festival City, which was to overlook the Al Badia golf course. Although the course opened two years ago under the management of Four Seasons, the hotel was repeatedly delayed and no longer appears on the Four Seasons projects list. Al Futtaim declined to comment.

“We are still engaged with our existing partner,” Mr Crowl said. “It might be better to say that it is ‘postponed’.

“Everyone is in the process of re-evaluating their projects. This is an effect of an economy shrink. It has made the hotel industry take a step back and re-evaluate where we are and where we are going, and perhaps as we move forward we do it with greater thought and care.”

InterContinental Hotels Group took over management of the golf club in July this year. It also manages the InterContinental Dubai Festival City, Crowne Plaza Dubai Festival City and InterContinental Residence Suites in Festival City.

The Four Seasons hotel in Beirut will open next month and its Morocco property will welcome its first guests next year, the company said during a week-long roadshow in the Gulf. It also plans to open hotels in Kuwait and Bahrain in the next few years.

“If you want to build a Four Seasons hotel and let us manage it for you, it would be a very, very high cost and the return on investment … you have to look at in long term,” Mr Crowl said. “If you’re looking at short-term return on investment, you should look at … cheap construction. You don’t have to hire expensive cooks in the kitchen to make your money.”

Four Seasons has experienced as much as a 30 per cent drop this year in its global revenue per available room, a key industry measure, Mr Crowl said.

The Middle East and Africa hotel development pipeline includes 437 hotels, or 120,682 rooms, the STR Global construction pipeline report released last month showed. The UAE has the largest number of rooms under construction at 30,039, the report said.

rbundhun@thenational.ae