The Indian market for Dubai-based luxury hospitality company, Jumeirah Hotels, has grown ever stronger, not just for the properties in Dubai, but also broadened to other properties of the group in other destinations, Alexander Lee, Chief Commercial Officer, tells India Outbound. Lee adds that he is seeing existing clients stay longer and move into bigger accommodations like villas.

How has Indian market performed for Jumeirah Hotels this year?

Well, the Indian market has been very positive for us. Over the last two years not only have we seen growing demand coming into our existing hotels, but we have also seen strong demand going into our newer hotels as well. So on a Dubai level we have a number of hotels and very popular hotels in the market. This year, we are seeing about 24 pc growth year-on year in Indian visitors coming into our hotels which is extremely positive.

We are finding that travellers from Indian market are coming to Dubai and staying longer but also more opting for resort properties in Dubai. In the past we had a lot of demand for city hotels, customers wanting to come to Dubai for business meetings and then maybe go to malls for shopping and retail things. Now we are seeing a lot more movement into the resort properties because they stay a little bit longer. And also, customers are looking to have larger suites or villas as they maybe travelling with family members.

We are also seeing strong demand into some of our newer hotels in Maldives, Bali, Muscat, Bahrain, and all four of those locations are enjoying demand from the Indian market, and two of them particularly Muscat and Bahrain have seen a lot of interest from the Indian market for destination weddings.

How have your new properties performed vis-à-vis the Indian customers?

All are very strong. But there is still more potential I think in Maldives and also Bahrain as well because they are newer properties. Maldives as a market was extremely popular during Covid-19 and I think the destination itself is sort of slightly in demand from the Indian market because it had been so high profile, so well visited during their pandemic. We are seeing that business is building back up.

So far this year we have seen about 20 pc growth of Indian business into our property in the Maldives, but I feel pretty confident that there is still more potential.

Which segment of outbound Indian tourism is most important for Jumeirah?

We tend to focus on four key areas. One is more on the independent individual luxury leisure travel particularly as customers who have bookings for higher end in products like villas and suites and tend to stay at the destination a bit longer.

We are also seeing a strong demand, but more potential from that multi generational travel and group travel. And then the third will be around the destination weddings and fourth would be MICE and corporate travel.

In terms of the most potential, I still see that we have potential in two areas. One is in the multi-generational travel where we are able to accommodate small groups of families together. And the second is in destination weddings.

What is your strategy to grow in the Indian market?

So activities, such as our road shows like this, are an important part of that. We are looking to find ways to increase the number of road shows that come into the market and that over time, will allow us to start coming into some more in secondary markets as well.

But we are also looking at slightly expanding a lot of our actual on ground sales too here in India. So making some small increases in the number of people we have in the market is one element, but we also want to leverage, our guest recognition, reward programme to Jumeirah and to be able to have an ongoing dialogue relationship with customers who are repeating into some of our properties or have the potential to try other properties in the Jumeirah brand. So, our marketing communications and our digital propositions help make sure we always stay engaged with the loyal customers and make sure that they come back to our properties as the first choice.

What is your plan for the future expansion?

There is a number of properties that have been already announced that we are going to focus on. So we have two more coming in Dubai. We have a master plan development called Marsa Al Arab which is next to Burj Al Arab on the beach in Jumeirah. That property has a substantial hotel and private residential components. That’s a wonderful new property that will open later next year. We also are developing a property in Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. And that is due to open at the end of 2024 and early 2025. And we also just acquired a new property in Geneva, Switzerland, which is under renovation. So that will open probably either late 2025 or early 2026.