It has not been a good week for the travel industry. Thailand is returning to normality but the damage done to hotel bookings is immense and no one knows what will happen next in the country; the violence in Sri Lanka may bring the war to an end but not in a way that will bring comfort to tourists; and the recession continues to bite. A week after Qantas announced drastic cost cuts, the Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific has asked all of its 17,000 staff to take unpaid leave and announced that it is cutting capacity.
Starting in May, the carrier will reduce passenger capacity by eight per cent, cutting flights or seats to cities including Dubai, Mumbai, Paris, Frankfurt, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo. It is also introducing a "special leave scheme" asking staff to take between one and four weeks of unpaid leave over the next year depending on their seniority. A few weeks ago the airline reported its first full-year loss in a decade. The slowdown was made worse because the company hedged their bets on fuel prices earlier in the fiscal year; a strategy that did not predict oil's sharp decline after the recession set in. The first quarter of 2009 saw a 22.4 per cent drop in turnover.
Nor is Cathay Pacific's chief executive Tony Tyler optimistic about the rest of the year. "We anticipate an extremely challenging year in 2009 and a toxic combination of low fares, a big drop in premium travel, weak cargo loads, poor yields and a negative currency impact is making it more important than ever to preserve cash." He says the global economic meltdown is "hitting the aviation industry hard", and that, unlike many of Cathay Pacific's competitors, the airline gets no financial support or fuel subsidy from the government. "Our staff are being asked to make sacrifices that will be needed to see the company through this violent storm," he said. "The pain will be shared from the top down."
An e-mail from my colleague introduces a new word into the lexicon, Dubaiification. It is currently being applied to Antalya on the coast of Turkey where tourist chiefs are turning the area into what is being described as a "European Dubai". In its quest to dazzle, the beach resort already has a revolving hotel, The Marmara, and a replica of the Kremlin. Coming next is the US$1.4billion (Dh5.14bn) The Marman Palace, reportedly the most expensive hotel in Europe. Owned by Relman Ismailov, the president of the Russian group AST (and the man who supposedly paid Jennifer Lopez £1m ($1.46m, Dh5.36) to sing Happy Birthday to him at his 50th birthday party), it has 560 rooms and is described by The Times in London as looking like "Soviet Barbie's wedding cake, with endless layers of white and gold".
Its pièce de résistance is its pool; five acres of fresh water with a sunken aquarium centrepiece that is stocked with more than 2,000 fish and is spanned by bridges based on designs by Leonardo da Vinci. Gondolas take the guests from one end of the hotel to another, a trip that at half an hour is rather longer than a similar service at Abu Dhabi's Shangri-La. Due to open on June 1, The Marman Palace has already taken in a few select guests. The Times' review of the hotel, however, may not go down so well in this part of the world. It says: "The staff don't have the white-gloved prissiness of the Burj al Arab or the robotic tendencies of that other billion-dollar extravaganza, the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, where I was constantly wished a 'majestic palace experience'. At Mardan, they look you in the eye and smile and speak like real people. It is not particularly polished, but a more informal approach seems appropriate for a beach resort."
Closer to home, the Grand Hyatt has a new addition to its growing Middle East portfolio in Doha. It has announced an opening room rate of $247 (Dh900) for guests who stay at the hotel between May 1 and Sept 30. And Gold Swiss-Belhotel Dubai has announced that the structural work on its Bur Dubai hotel is complete and that only finishing touches to the interiors need doing before a July opening. Positioned as an ideal choice for business travellers attending the nearby convention centre, it is also aimed at leisure travellers looking for affordable accommodation. Nils Rothbarth, the general manager, promises "a speciality restaurant which is very different to what you usually find in hotels. In other words, it's not Italian."
Visitors to the Abu Dhabi Pavilion at the Arabian Travel Market, which starts in 10 days, will be able to come face-to-face with the Emirate's heritage in the feathered form of two star performers - Jeer Shaheen and Jeer Hurr. The two champion falcons will make guest appearances on the pavilion in the charge of their trainer, the 33-year-old Othman Essa, a master falconer.
I have become an expert on what happens when you leave things behind at hotels, restaurants, planes, trains, taxis, buses and anywhere that is not home. A feature of the last few years is that whenever I go somewhere I manage to leave something behind - a FedEx van has just delivered a little parcel of clothes that remained in the Seychelles long after me. My experience is the better the hotel the more chance of getting things returned, as long as it is clothes and not jewellery. Leaving glasses in the front pocket of a plane is hopeless even if you remember your seat number, and spas are hit or miss. They tend not to find the item straight away, even when you know where you left it, but several weeks later it will turn up. Sunglasses once lost, no matter where, never seem to reappear and airports are the Bermuda Triangle for lost property.
sryan@thenational.ae
