La Dolce vita in meetings

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Sarah O’Donnell discusses the importance of UK buyers, meetings technology and expansion plans with Dolce’s Chief Revenue Officer, Barry Goldstein.

International hotel group, Dolce Hotels and Resorts, has reported a 45 per cent increase in UK outbound conference and meetings bookings across its portfolio of properties in Europe and North America. The group says this demonstrates a growing confidence from the UK outbound market and a return to better budgets for 2011.

The latest figures, announced at Dolce’s biannual UK Showcase Event in April, showed a 50 per cent increase in bookings for Europe and a 25 per cent increase in bookings for North America from the UK during 2009/10, compared to the previous year. Dolce expects the figure to increase in 2011.

Since selling its only UK property, the Dolce Norton Manor in Hampshire in 2005, Dolce has hinted at plans to re-establish itself in the UK market.

Dolce’s portfolio includes properties across North America and in Belgium, France, Spain and Germany. Dolce hosts some 30,000 events and four million group clients globally every year.

How important is the UK market to Dolce?

It’s encouraging to see such a marked increase in bookings coming from the UK. While our customers from the UK are still cautious, we are starting to see healthy signs of improvement with bookings up and more leads coming through than we saw in the same period of the previous year. This underlines a growing trend that for the right venue and product people are willing to spend money to know they will deliver event success.

The UK is a crucial territory for the Dolce brand; we work with many businesses across Britain to bring their meetings and events into Europe and to the US.

What is the purpose of your UK showcase event?

It is important for our properties as it allows them to engage with key agencies and take people through any changes within the brand and any new tools for meeting planners we have introduced. It allows us to share our focus and commission events business.

UK meeting planners and corporates currently account for 20 per cent of our total business worldwide.

To what do you attribute the increases in business in Europe and North America?

Naturally, there is a rebound in the market globally. However, we have increased our visibility by growing our global sales team and will have three global sales staff based in the UK alone in this financial quarter. (Dolce has appointed a new Director of European Global Sales, Juliette Knowles).
We have a renewed focus on our conference and meetings offering to make it more appealing to current and future clients. We are not back to Dolce’s heyday with the business levels of 2007, but it is already closer to 2008.

Which sector/country was most resilient last year?

Currently, the meetings and business travel market attributes to 65 per cent of our business. The association market is still strong and the corporate market is   picking up but we have noticed it is still budget conscious.

In terms of destinations our New York and Boston properties continue to see healthy results and our new property in Las Vegas (see box right) has seen a real interest from the UK market. For Dolce, our European properties were more challenged by the global financial crisis especially in Spain, Germany and Paris.

We hope to expand the brand in Europe with three more properties in the next 18 months and grow by at least three or five in the States in the same period.

What have you done differently to your competitors?

We invested in our food and beverage offering, relooked at packages and upped the game with the latest forms of technology for our meeting rooms. This all bettered the customer experience.
The recession made us relook at our customer relationship and sales culture. We tried to create a renewed interest in our offering and it is paying dividends.

We definitely saw an increase in shorter meeting requests and customers wanted to create personalised packages.

What are your growth plans for Europe, and the UK?

At the moment the UK market is very important to us in terms of actual clients and meetings held, however, we are actively looking for a UK property of our own and destinations where we could launch into the UK hotel market.

What importance does technology play in the Dolce brand?

We have standardised our meetings technology across the whole brand and updated our offering. Technology, and what our clients can do with it, is very important to the Dolce brand.

We have check-in services that allow a planner to track when their delegates arrive and our newly-introduced SpeedRFPs tool enables planners to solicit bids from multiple hotels across multiple brands. Its adoption has surpassed expectations and has doubled our RFP volume since introduced. 

Any comments? Email conferencenews@mashmedia.net

3 Jan 12

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