A landmark in 35 years of change

Much of Abu Dhabi is now scarely recognisable from the day when Sheikh Zayed inaugurated Le Meridien Hotel in the old Tourist Club with the UK’s Queen Elizabeth. Just a few years ago it faced demolition but it celebrates its birthday with a gala and exhibition.

Sheikh Zayed and Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom inaugurated the hotel in 1979. Courtesy Le Méridien Abu Dhabi

A specially invited group of royalty, VIPs, and long-standing staff members will gather for a gala reception at Le Meridien Abu Dhabi this evening to celebrate the hotel’s anniversary, 35 years to the day after its inauguration by the late Sheikh Zayed and the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth.

It is an anniversary nobody expected to celebrate, a party that everybody expected to be a wake. As recently as 2011, Le Meridien was still scheduled for demolition as part of plans to build new road bridges between Al Maryah Island, the capital’s new central business district, and Al Zahiyah, the area formerly known as Tourist Club.

The plans represented the death knell for one of the capital’s best-known landmarks. “From 2005, there’s been ongoing talk of this hotel being demolished,” says Nemo Acimovic, Le Meridien’s general manager. “When I took over in 2010, I was given nine months to hand it over for demolition because bridge number three, from Al Maryah Island, was meant to come right through the lobby here and connect to Electra Street.”

The marina precinct next to the hotel is being demolished and Hamdan Street has been extended to make way for the new bridges, two of 13 that will eventually link Al Maryah with its neighbours. However, thanks to an agreement between Le Meridien’s owner, Abu Dhabi National Hotels, the Urban Planning Council and Abu Dhabi Municipality, the hotel will remain as the focal point between the bridges that will eventually cross from Al Maryah on a new, adjusted alignment.

A look at any satellite image of the area reveals the remarkable nature of Le Meridien’s escape. The hotel sits across the path of Sheikh Zayed the First Street, or Electra Street, and extensive ramps were built – behind Le Meridien and across the water on Al Maryah – to allow construction of the new bridge to begin. Even as late as 2011, Le Meridien’s fate seemed certain.

“Investment had stopped a year or two before, the age of the property was showing and morale was very low,” Mr Acimovic says, “but just before August 2011 the works stopped in their tracks, the machinery moved away and from that point, there was no more talk about the demolition of the hotel.

“Our task from 2011 until now has been to secure reinvestment, to regain the confidence of the market, and to tell everybody that we are back and that we’re a force to be reckoned with.”

This evening’s gala event represents the latest chapter in Le Meridien’s great escape. Not only will it act as the launch of an exhibition, A Journey Through 35 Years, in which photographs from the hotel’s archive will be put on public display, but Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, the Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development, will unveil a plaque commemorating the anniversary while adding his signature to the hotel’s guest book, the Livre d’Or.

Even more than the hotel’s photographs – which capture its inauguration as well as visits by foreign dignitaries such as the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, King Juan Carlos I of Spain and even Muammar Qaddafi of Libya – the signatures in the Livre d’Or encapsulate the changing role the hotel has played in the fortunes of the city.

The agreement between Le Meridien and Abu Dhabi National Hotels was signed in 1975 at a time when the Hilton was the only international hotel operating in the city. With the city’s marina on one side and the original Tourist Club on the other, Le Meridien stood at the heart of Abu Dhabi’s earliest leisure complex with its pool, tennis courts, restaurant and beach.

Air France had established the brand in 1972 “to provide a home from home” for its passengers and aircrew. The first Le Meridien hotel was the 1,000-room Le Meridien Etoile in Paris, but within two years the group had 10 hotels in Europe and Africa and by 1978 there were 21 worldwide.

The Abu Dhabi hotel was planned as part of this second wave of expansion but its opening was delayed thanks to lobbying by local cement manufacturers who saw the hotel’s steel-framed construction – the first of its type in the capital – as a potential challenge to their livelihoods.

By February 1979, however, the hotel was ready, just in time for its inauguration by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who arrived in Abu Dhabi on board the royal yacht Britannia as part of a wider tour of the Arabian Gulf. The visit, less than a month after the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, attracted the attention of the world’s media, all of whom were in the capital to see the queen received by Sheikh Zayed and the six rulers of the other emirates. The following month, Sheikh Zayed returned with the president of France, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the French ambassador and the secretary general of Air France for the hotel’s official opening at a rather lower-key event.

All of these events are captured in the Livre d’Or, as are the many visits in the early 1980s by French and francophone dignitaries and celebrities such as Abdou Diouf, the president of Senegal, Prince Albert of Belgium, the leaders of Tunisia and Morocco and the singer Sacha Distel.

It is a period in Le Meridien Abu Dhabi’s history that is remembered fondly by Sainalabadeen Saliabee, from Trivandrum in Kerala, the hotel’s longest-serving employee.

Mr Saliabee, or Zain as he is known to his colleagues, arrived in Dubai in 1976 to work as a storeman for a dredging company in Jebel Ali and started at Le Meridien Abu Dhabi as a driver in October 1982. He now supervises the hotel’s car team.

“I was 25 when I started working here and the only five-star hotels in Abu Dhabi were Le Meridien, the Sheraton, the InterContinental and the Hilton. I am 58 now, that’s my whole working life.

Mr Saliabee’s first job was to drive aircrew and guests to and from Abu Dhabi airport when it was still at Al Bateen.

“It was a very busy time for the hotel with aircrew, lots of ministers came, especially from France. Our head office was in Paris and the airlines were the backbone of the hotel. We had crews from Air France, Egypt Air, Garuda – the Indonesian airline – and even Air China.”

If the hotel’s clientele was very different in the 1980s, so too was the surrounding area.

“This area was a posh area at the time. There was the Tourist Club on one side, the marina on the other and when you looked from the back of the hotel there was only the sea. There were no buildings anywhere and if you wanted to cross to Saadiyat Island you had to take a boat.”

As Mr Saliabee and his boss, Mr Acimovic, admit, Abu Dhabi’s skyline is not the only thing to have changed. Le Meridien Abu Dhabi is no longer a five-star hotel, newer venues now play host to the capital’s visiting politicians and VIPs and guests are just as likely to come from Russia and China as from France. The changes, however, have not deterred the hotel’s regular customers.

“We have some guests who have been coming to Abu Dhabi for 30 years and whenever I see their faces, I remember their names. They are always surprised, but they are very happy,” Mr Saliabee says.

To capitalise on the hotel’s new lease of life, Mr Acimovic has plans for even more changes.

“This year we have budgeted for renovation of the rooms, the lobby and the all-day dining area. Nothing major will change – the idea is to maintain the feel and the soul of the place – but it will be renovated in a way that is acceptable to Le Meridien as a brand to make it look fresh while maintaining the charm.”