It was during his internship at a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi that Wissam Al Saadi learnt never to underestimate the importance of the TripAdvisor website.
The Palestinian-Canadian, 21, is studying for a diploma in hotel management and tourism at the European International College (EIC) and secured a six-month placement in a luxury hotel’s front office earlier this year.
“The first thing my hotel manager did every morning was to switch on his computer and check the rankings on TripAdvisor,” he recalls. “If a member of staff gets a bad review, they are in big trouble.”
Currently the only institution in the capital offering hotel management and tourism courses, EIC has partnered with a number of UAE hotels to offer on-the-job training to students. Such training is vital in the rapidly growing industry.
The number of visitors to the capital rose by about 20 per cent to 1.98 million in the first half of this year from the same period last year, according to the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority. That is good news for the city’s hotels but also for EIC students, many of whom hope to find work in Abu Dhabi when they graduate. The college, which has about 200 students, is moving to a new, bigger campus in Karama next month as more school leavers consider a career in hospitality.
Unlike EIC’s current villa campus on Muroor Road, which opened nine years ago, the new site has its own kitchen and restaurant facilities to replicate hotels in the emirate.
“With Expo 2020 around the corner, we are expecting more students as opportunities in the tourism sector continue to increase,” says Thouraya Labben, dean of EIC.
According to a JLL report released in July, 5,200 new hotel rooms will open up by 2017 in Abu Dhabi.
Sixty per cent of EIC students are enrolled in bachelor’s degree courses and diplomas in hotel management and tourism, the rest pursue master of business administration or bachelor of business administration studies.
But Ms Labben says that an education in tourism and hotel management does not restrict graduates to jobs in the travel and hospitality sector.
“Career options are wider than that. Any professional who has an education in hotel and tourism management learns the highest levels of customer service, which can be put to use in many fields,” she says.
Ms Labben adds that customer service skills are increasingly desirable to employers, as more jobs are set to become automated. The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology (2013) estimated that 45 per cent of jobs would be automated within 20 years.
“More and more companies don’t differentiate themselves with their product, but with the service that they are delivering,” says Ms Labben.
“Technically, a product can be easily imitated. But customer service is ‘savoir faire’ – it cannot be duplicated. That’s why demand is going to increase for hotel management courses.”
Ms Labben defines EIC as a boutique higher education institution. “The boutique concept emerged in the hotel industry when small hotels decided to differentiate themselves from big hotels through a trendy and customised service,” says Ms Labben. “We were inspired by this and deliberately opted to be a small institution. Our success does not depend on the number of students. What matters is the quality of education.”
But the hands-on experience students are exposed to is also key. Wissam Fattoum, a 25-year-old Tunisian student, completed a six-month internship this year in the front office of the Hilton Abu Dhabi hotel on the Corniche, and in the kitchens of Al Raha Beach Hotel. He is now in the final term of his bachelor’s degree study.
“The reality was not always the same as what I’d learnt in the classroom,” he says.
“The rule is ‘never say no to a guest’. But sometimes hotels get overbooked, and it’s hard to deal with this. And sometimes you have really rude guests to deal with.”
For the Tanzanian student Maryam Yahya, 23, she too, like Mr Al Saadi, discovered the value of TripAdvisor.
After three weeks of her internship at Holiday Inn Abu Dhabi, she received a rave review that led to her promotion to run the guest relations department.
“TripAdvisor is very important, it has changed the competition within the hotel industry,” she says. “It’s a pressure on us, but it’s also an exciting challenge because we’re young and we have that hunger to learn.”
Born and raised in Abu Dhabi, Ms Yahya hopes Holiday Inn will offer her a job when she graduates. s
For Mr Al Saadi, there was more to his internship than worrying about online guest reviews. “When they arrive, all the guests want to be upgraded to the best room, with the best view, and you simply can’t always please everyone,” he says. “The main thing I learnt was how to be hospitable in these situations.”
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