Rove Hotels, a joint-venture company from Emaar Properties and Meraas, has captured some of the hottest corners in the UAE real estate market, from being the only hotel within the Expo 2020 Dubai complex to a hotel right on La Mer beach in Dubai.
The brand creates no-frills, functional hotels, but the locations of their properties are on par with their five-start peers. To offer competitive prices on prime property, the brand relies on building efficient infrastructure and integrating technology as key means of keeping costs down.
Paul Bridger, the chief operating officer at Rove Hotels sat down with Arabian Business to discuss the brand’s strategy, expansion plans, and what role technology plays in their business.
AB: Have you seen customers be more conscious towards sustainability within the past few years?
It’s interesting. We monitor what kind of questions we get before people stay, and we’ve seen an increase in questions to our call centre and on our social media asking about what measures the hotel takes.
We have seen a definite increase. And we’ve also seen it in feedback.
AB: How has the increase in customer curiosity changed how you approach sustainability, or has it changed the way you communicate with customers about sustainability?
We’ve had to tweak some of our operations. For example, we’ve started using technology to track food waste through a partnership with Winnow who have this great little tool that measures your food waste each day, and advises you which items you should buy less often and prepare less of. It’s great, but it is difficult for our chefs who are used to doing something their own way.
Before that, we would have used common sense, but to put some technology behind it is really good.
We’ve also had to communicate better. So the less is more messaging has really helped us.
AB: What other kind of tech are you guys using in your operations to increase sustainability and improve efficiency?
Because all of our buildings are relatively new and opened within the last five years, we’ve been able to build technology into the building. We have a central hub with a building management system that tracks everything from power consumption, water consumption per day and per hour, and our rooms actually can sense things.
Normally you go into a room and you have a keycard that you put in a slot to turn the lights on. We don’t have that, and that’s because the room senses if the room is occupied, and then the air conditioner and power can turn on and off.
And when you leave, it will pick up that you’ve left within a certain amount of time. So it takes the human element out, which is great. Now it does it for you, which is good.
AB: What role does efficiency play into your overall sustainability goals?
The model naturally lends itself to sustainability, because we have a kind of less-is-more attitude. Whether it’s using LED lights or reducing water consumption, which we’ve reduced by up to 40 percent, or having efficiently designed plumbing, it ties in nicely with our DIY concept, because you don’t have anything in your room that you don’t need.
AB: How did you guys choose to focus on location?
Traditionally in Dubai, you will have a kind of five star location, which will be smack bang in the middle beach, or downtown or wherever.
We’ve been very targeted, and we’ve had a little bit of luck to have these great locations where people don’t need to compromise on location for price.
The secret is that we’ve managed to be really efficient in our building, we’re very efficient in our operations. In our City Walk Hotel, we have 566 rooms, but it doesn’t feel like it’s got nearly 600 rooms.
We’ve centralised our activities across the hotels, and we have a sort of self-help concept, which allows us to run our hotels efficiently to keep the price down.
AB: How did you identify that niche and how do you see it expanding?
We were well onto the sustainability and co-working thing before Covid-19. The co-working was part of Rove’s DNA from the beginning, and that’s the small things from having a socket that’s convenient to everywhere you want to sit. We’re okay with 20 people sitting in the restaurant with laptops open.
We now have office rooms, and during the pandemic we saw we have hundreds of people across our hotels working every day; there was a period when they weren’t allowed to leave home.
AB: When did the office rooms roll out?
About two weeks after lockdown. During lockdown, we said ‘what’s this going to look like after we reopen and we know that we want to be at the front of whatever that is.’
And we have to be responsible with hoteliers, but we also want to be commercial. So we launched this hybrid room and co-working space.
AB: What’s been the reaction to them? Do you foresee them staying around after the pandemic?
Even with the four-and-a-half-day working week for a lot of places now, I think it’s a norm that it’s okay for people to work in different spaces. And I think hotels will be one of those spaces.
We have a huge community of people that work in hotels one or two days a week, or all week. And the office rooms are still super popular.
AB: Rove has been steadily expanding over the past five years. What’s next?
Last year, we opened in Expo 2020, which is a massive coup for a local, small hotel brand.
AB: How did you get that contract?
Good persuasion, and a promise of high numbers. We were actually 50 percent over our promise for profit last year.
Expo had to change their plans a bit in terms of visitor numbers [because of the pandemic] and focus more on domestic tourism. So despite that we managed to massively outperform our profit numbers in Expo, which has given our brand more awareness within the region.
We’re still evolving, but we’ve managed to kind of reinvent that resort type experience for somebody that maybe doesn’t need all the frills of a five-star hotel. In the Middle East, the midscale lifestyle hotels has been a bit of a forgotten segment.
We’ve got more properties coming up in the UAE, two of which will be in Ras Al Khaimah. We have also announced one in Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City, and I hope we can announce some more in Saudi.
We’ve had loads of interest recently from across the region, and we’re focusing on the GCC and Egypt. We’re in active talks with Oman and Egypt.
AB: How do you remain one of the key players in this space?
First thing, we keep an eye outside the region. As trends emerge, we’ll see them in Europe and the US first, generally. We also keep an eye on what’s happening culturally; gaming is huge right now, and we’ve dipped our toe in a bit, and we’ve launched gaming bedrooms.
