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Video footage of the infamous Basil Fawlty from hit UK sitcom ‘Fawlty Towers’ was once used to train hotel staff. Not so that they could learn the finer arts of insulting guests, serving raw mullet or offering a rat (“No, it’s a hamster!”) to a public health inspector for dessert. No, Fawlty’s antics were, of course, used as an example of what not to do.
Dubai’s hotels may be light-years ahead of Torquay’s these days, but in a bid to raise industry standards even higher, the emirate will soon get its very own centre of excellence for hospitality. A joint venture between Australia’s Blue Mountains Hotel School and the UAE-based Al Hai Group, the Dubai Hotel and Tourism Management Institute will open its door in the first half of next year.
“It will facilitate the growing needs of the industry, both in terms of training existing human resources in the hotel sector and by providing quality undergraduate and postgraduate education for future hoteliers,” says Blue Mountains director Fritz Gubler. The school already has two campuses in Australia and two in China.
“We will bring in staff from other countries who want to go into the hospitality industry,” he says. “We will also try to persuade people to enter the industry by talking to them in the high schools about career opportunities - because as an industry, we don’t do a good job of selling it to the young people as a massive opportunity to work in a fun sector.”
Gubler admits hospitality has a bit of an image problem but insists that, forty years on, he would take the same career route if given another chance. Though often perceived as a low-wage sector for foreign migrant workers, Gubler tells his students that the perks are there to be earned. “If you get to a higher level, the pay is good. When I got to be general manager of a resort... the only thing I had to pay out of my own pocket was my aftershave,” he says, since his food, transport, uniform and accommodation were all included.
Gubler feels that today’s Generation Y, the children of the Baby Boomers, are actually pretty well suited to hospitality. “They are footloose, they are butterflies,” he says. “They don’t want to spend twenty years working in the same job.” He points out that the industry provides ample opportunity for jumping ship, perhaps literally, to a cruise-liner, airline, hotel or restaurant, if an employee is in need of a change.
But equally, staff retention is one of the biggest problems the industry is facing. And Blue Mountains hopes to buck the local trend of poaching by training up more qualified staff. The Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management churns them out for the Jumeirah Group, but for the rest, it’s a bit of a free-for-all, so the big hotel chains will be keen to tap the new supply chain.
“I’ve had several meetings in the last few days at the ATM (Arabian Travel Market). They just look at us as a saviour,” Gubler says. “They realise that pinching each other’s talent is not a sustainable solution for the industry here in Dubai. That is what happens at the moment - a new hotel opens and they just try to [poach] staff from the other hotels.
The institute aims to start with a intake of 200 students, rising up to 500 over the next four years. On offer will be a one-year diploma, a two-year associate degree and a three-year Bachelor degree. All programmes will be internationally accredited and the institute will be a member of the Orion Hotel Schools global alliance.
Hotels can send their existing employees for more training, probably loaning them money for the fees, Gubler says, but he also wants to set up as many as ten training centres closer to hotel areas, in addition to the main campus, now in the final design stages. “We want to bring the training to the people rather than the people to the school,” he claims. As Dubai’s tourism sector expands, Gubler thinks even maintaining today’s standards will be a challenge. “The hotels here are probably the most fantastic in the world - but I wonder if all these investors in these beautiful hotels realise that 50 per cent of luxury is actually the service. I don’t see much investment in that part of providing luxury. But we will have to be part of the solution and give them the opportunity to do a better job in training the staff.”
If only Basil Fawlty had had that opportunity, he might have been able to attract the higher class of clientele he so deperately craved.
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