YOTEL TO OPEN ITS FIRST HOTEL IN DUBAI, UAE

March 10, 2015 – YOTEL,an affiliate company of Kuwait-listed IFA Hotels & Resorts KSCC,has signed a long-term agreement with Dubai Investment Properties LLC (‘DIP’) to operate a new hotel in Dubai, UAE. This marks the hospitality brand’s first property in the Middle East.The hotel is part of a major new development located on Sheikh Zayed Road, directly adjacent to the upcoming Dubai Water Canal Project and at the gateway of Business Bay, the city’s fastest growing business district. Perfectly located, the hotel will be a short walk from the Business Bay Metro station and just minutes from Downtown Dubai, the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall.When complete in early 2018, the 42-storey property designed by ArkiteknikInternational will boast 438 ‘cabins’, furnished with the brand’s signature Techno Wallsand Smart Beds, as well YOTEL’s exclusive Club Lounge, a multi-function co-working and recreational space. The property will also feature 127 serviced apartments, also managed by YOTEL, marking the brand’s debut in the fast-expanding serviced residence space.

YOTEL is a strategic company for our group’ said Talal Al Bahar, Chairman and Group CEO of IFA HR. ‘The brand has increasingly global potential in its ability to deliver attractive returns to investors and an exceptional guest experience at an affordable price. The concept and product are ideal for Dubai, a market where IFA HR has been active for over a decade.’‘We are delighted to announce our first project in the UAE with DIP’ said Hubert Viriot,CEO of YOTEL. ‘Dubai has a thriving hospitality market but lacks good quality, affordable luxury hotels. YOTEL Business Bay will put an end to this oddity and be a true flagship for our brand in the Middle East, a region with huge untapped potential. This project is also our debut into the serviced apartment segment, a natural extension to our brand DNA – smart spaces delivering outstanding value.’

Francois Faure, Executive Director of DIP added ‘Ever since its creation in 1994, DIP has been focused on developing selective, forward-looking projects. YOTEL brings something new and entirely unique to the local hotel market, and is in line with Dubai‘s Tourism Vision 2020 as well as its Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing objective to develop more mid-range hotels. YOTEL Business Bay will also perfectly complement the SINGLE Business Tower, our existing office tower located directly adjacent.’

‘We are proud to add YOTEL to our list of landmark projects in Dubai’ explains Abdallah Moneimneh, General Manager and Chief Architect at Arkiteknik International. ‘Inspired by the YOTEL brand, we have created a contemporary ‘chic’ design. The building reflects simplicity and geometric elegance, offering a minimalist design with a twist and showcasing the YOTEL concept.’

Dubai’s prominence as a capital renowned for attracting a mix of sophisticated business and leisure visitors continues to strengthen. With over 10 million visitors in 2014, Dubai was the fifth most visited city in the world by international visitors, with Saudi Arabia, India, the United Kingdom and the United States topping the list of source markets.

The Dubai Tourism Vision 2020, approved by His Highness Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, aims to attract 20 million visitors by 2020 when Dubai will host the World Expo. New infrastructures are under construction, including the new Al Maktoum Airport which will handle more than 120 million passengers per annum; several world class attractions such as Dubai Parks, which will comprise three theme parks: motiongate™ Dubai, Bollywood Parks™ Dubai, and LEGOLAND® Dubai; the Dubai Opera, a 2,000-seat cultural icon in Downtown Dubai; and the Dubai Design District, a district dedicated to local designers and global brands alike, located steps away from the Business Bay District and the new YOTEL.

This agreement represents the first phase of YOTEL’s aggressive expansion into the Middle East. The company is currently in advanced negotiations on potential hotel projects in other key destinations in the region, including Riyadh, Jeddah, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.

About YOTEL

Inspired by first class travel, YOTEL translates the language of luxury airline travel into a small but luxurious ‘cabins’. Uncompromisingly designed around guests, YOTEL City hotels are taking the essential elements of luxury hotels in smaller, smart spaces and deliver a sense of community with areas for co-working, social gatherings and exercise. Premium cabins include luxury bedding, rejuvenating monsoon rain showers, relaxing

mood lighting and YOTEL’s signature ‘techno wall’ with smart TVs, multi power points and easy connectivity.

Conceived for busy international travellers, YOTEL Airport hotels provide everything for a guest to relax, refresh, sleep and connect within global transportation hubs. Guests may choose exactly what time they would they like to check in and out, giving total flexibility to travellers in transit, staying the night before an early departure or to freshen up on arrival before a meeting in the city.

YOTEL currently operates three airport hotels in London Gatwick, London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol airports; and one city hotel in the heart of Manhattan, New York. YOTEL is expanding rapidly with seven new hotels under development globally, including two new airport hotels set to open at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (2016) and Singapore Changi Airport (2018); and five new city hotels currently under construction in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2017) Singapore Orchard Road (2017), Miami (2017), San Francisco (2017) and Dubai (2018).

Founded by YO! Founder Simon Woodroffe OBE, YOTEL’s HQ is in London and has offices in Boston and Dubai. Its major partner and shareholder is IFA Hotels and Resorts KSCC based in Dubai.

Dubai announces plans for 'Museum of the Future' to highlight human innovation

Dubai, the city with a skyline straight out of a science-fiction movie, launched plans Wednesday for a "Museum of the Future."

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced the new museum, which will provide "a permanent home for the world's greatest innovations," according to Gulf News.

HE SAID THE MUSEUM IS THE "FIRST STEP OF MANY TO COME" TO FULFILL A MISSION TO MAKE THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES A GLOBAL INNOVATION ENGINE.

Emirati Minister of Cabinet Affairs Mohammed al-Gergawi told reporters on Wednesday that the Dubai museum will showcase innovations in design and technology from fields such as transportation, health and education.

The $136 million project is expected to open in 2017. The curving, oblong — and of course futuristic-looking — building will feature poetry written by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and prime minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates

Al-Gergawi said the museum aims to change its exhibits every six months to keep pace with changing technology, aiming "to always be 10 years ahead of today."

Additional reporting by The Associated Press

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

source: http://on.mash.to/1wVb9jM

By: Jessica Plautz

Dubai rated among top destinations for holiday season

Busiest day for people jetting around globe will be Friday, December 19

By emirates 

24-7 staff

Published Thursday, December 18, 2014

Dubai-based Emirates airline also expects this week to be its busiest of 2014, as travellers head home or abroad for the holiday season. (Ashok Verma)

British Airways has rated Dubai among top travel destinations this festive season along with other popular holiday spots such as Barbados, New York, Australia and Barcelona.

British Airways’ biggest Christmas operation kicked off with 2.7 million customers flying during the festive period and 267 flights flying around the network on Christmas Day.

The busiest day for people jetting around the globe with the airline will be Friday December 19 with 129,000 people flying.

Dubai-based Emirates airline also expects this week to be its busiest of 2014, as travellers head home or abroad for the holiday season. Over 80,000 people will travel on 19 December with Emirates on over 240 flights, according to the airline's latest booking figures. This represents an increase of almost 23% over last year.

Currently, British Airways operates three flights a day from London Heathrow to Dubai. The airline also offers UAE residents two daily flights to London Heathrow from Dubai and one daily flight from Abu Dhabi.

On December 25, 267 flights flown by 817 pilots will be making their way around the airline’s network delivering loved ones. The 3,500 cabin crew working on Christmas Day will serve customers more than 37,000 turkey dinners and traditional mince pies.

Christmas will be bigger and better for British Airways in 2014. This year, the airline unwrapped its presents early, with the arrival of 20 new aircraft into its fleet since last year’s festivities.  It means British Airways is expecting to fly its biggest ever operation carrying some 2.7 million customers over the festive period.

Festive period calculated from December 12, 2014 to January 5, 2015

source: http://bit.ly/1zK358u 

Real Estate Investing Information You Need To Know

Posted by Clarence Smith

Investments should be something to take plenty of time with as they deal with your hard earned money. If you hurry through it, you’re more likely to lose money. This article provides some great guidelines to help you in this venture.

Protect your growing real estate business by establishing a LLC or other business entity. This ensures that your investments will be protected. An LLC will also qualify you for important tax benefits that come about thanks to your new investments.

Talk to other folks who invest in real estate. Get advice from people with experience. A few friends knowledgeable about real estate investment can be handy. The internet is an invaluable source for finding others. Consider joining groups where you can learn more.

Do not buy properties in bad areas. Know the property before you buy it. Research carefully. If the deal is too good, it might be in an area with high crime. Not only could selling it be a challenge, vandals could ruin your hard work.

Hire a property manager who can screen tenants. This will help you find qualified renters. If not, you may start bleeding money.

Start investing immediately if you are thinking of making real estate a career or side business. One big mistake people make is not immersing themselves in the market immediately and educating themselves on it. The longer you stay on the sidelines is the more time you are missing out with people seizing the initiative.

Make certain that you can afford the mortgage on any property you purchase. The property you choose may have periods of vacancies that you need to account for when you make your mortgage payment. Expecting that your rental income will cover all of the expenses of a property is not realistic.

Is there someone you’re considering as a partner for an investment property? If so, you may want to look into non-recourse loans. This will give you protection due to negligence. You will boost your freedom to earn more money and have fewer risks than other traditional partnerships and loans.

If you possess a vacancy when it comes to the property that you are investing in, be sure to have money set aside in order to cover monthly mortgage expenses. You will feel better until the next tenant comes around when you have the extra money.

With the above tips, you will make wise investments. You have the ability to make smart choices, so do just that. Use this advice to ensure your investing goes smoothly. It will please and profit you in the long run.

source: http://bit.ly/1wx1EtG

whats the relation between landscaping and property value?

DOES LANDSCAPING INCREASE YOUR HOME'S VALUE?

Written by Andrea Davis on Monday, 13 October 2014 3:14 pm

After spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on landscaping, how do you know if you'll recoup your investment? Homeowners may wonder if their efforts are worthwhile compared to interior projects. In actuality, landscaping comes back in resale value more than you may think.

According to a publication from Virginia Tech, a home landscape has been valued at around 15 percent of a home's total value. Furthermore, certain landscape aspects add more to the home than others, including:

Design: 42%

Plant size: 36%

Diversity of plants: 22%

The study cited that a $150,000 home could go from $8,300 in worth to almost $19,000 more with the addition of a landscape.

That's a lot for just adding a front yard to your home.

Here is more information about these elements and how to increase the value of your home.

Landscape Design

Photo courtesy of Jardin Passion Landscape Con

How you design the landscape is the first step in creating a beautiful and valuable front yard. If you plant shrubs, flowers and trees without a design in mind, you could run into maintenance issues down the road. This is why you might call in a landscape designer to help. Landscape designers have the knowledge when it comes to creating landscapes to match homes and climate conditions. They know which trees, shrubs and flowers mix versus which ones might be troublesome. The end result will be a manageable, uncluttered and beautiful landscape that you can enjoy for little to no hassle.

Plant Size

Photo courtesy of Applegate Landscape Co.

On a visual level, adding different plant sizes will make your front yard look more appealing. Adding different shapes and colors complements your home and the lawn. On a maintenance level, mixing small and big plants will cut down on clutter in your yard. If you have too many bushy plants, their roots and branches could get mixed together and cause maintenance issues. So plant different trees, shrubs and flowers to make your landscape colorful and varied to add onto your home's appeal and save on trouble.

Diverse Plants

Photo courtesy of M&M Garden Designs

Intertwined with the plant sizes you choose are how diverse they should be. You don't want to plant only shrubs and trees with leaves. Vary it up with fruit trees or shrubs that have flowers to add color to the front yard. You also might choose annual and perennial flowers to sprinkle across your yard. You will need to replace annuals every year, but that gives you the chance to try out different flowers. Perennials, on the other hand, will last for many years and can endure harsh winter conditions.

Conclusion

Whether you hire a landscape designer or decide to tackle the front yard landscape yourself, be sure to include these three elements. Adding them to your front yard will pay back dividends in your home resale value, and it will make your home more attractive to buyers.

Photos courtesy of DesignMine

Andrea Davis is the editor for HomeAdvisor, which helps homeowners find home improvement professionals in their area at no charge to ensure the best service in the shortest amount of time.

source: http://bit.ly/ZXIr8r

How Do Hotels Decide Which Room to Give You?

How Do Hotels Decide Which Room to Give You?

Ever wonder what goes on behind the computer screen behind the front desk? Like, how did they decide to put you in the smoking room when you asked for non-smoking? Or how did they give you a deluxe room with an ocean view when you only paid for a standard city view? Our Front Desk Guy, Aditya Rajaram, is here to tell you all about it. Got a question about the front desk? 

Room allocations at a hotel are quite complex. The juggling of different room types, VIP requests, accessible requirements and guarantees can be a very delicate task, which is often complicated by the hotels lay out whether it be oversized (Vegas!), historic (church!) and oddly designed (Berlin!)

Deciding which guest gets which rooms falls to one of the most multi-dimensional roles in the hotel, the rooms controller.

Not only is the rooms controller supposed to manage the inventory of the hotel and ensure that the hotel maximizes its revenue for the day, week, month and year, but also they must know the hotel’s priorities when it comes to their guests, namely which special requests supersede others. After all that they have to make sure they keep a few tricks (rooms) aside in case of any last minute problems and requests.

The rooms controller receives all the input from each department (sales, events, front office, housekeeping etc.) and then works to match all requests to the available rooms in order to maximize room revenue (always Goal #1.)

Most of the room booking is done at least three to five days out, with only minor changes to room blocks accommodated on the arrival day, depending on any last minute issues. For large events like weddings and conventions, the front office, housekeeping, and events teams work together for weeks in advance to ensure all room types are blocked as per the event contract so that there are no surprises from either side when the day arrives.

For a transient corporate/leisure traveller (not part of a group or event) rooms are allocated based on their guarantees, their loyalty status (gold/platinum guests are typically upgraded) and their VIP status (Lady Gaga would not be given a standard, double bedroom, if you catch my drift).

On any particular day, during the hotel's stand-up staff meeting (a 15-minute briefing of all the days events, VIP’s, strategy etc.) front desk staff are informed of the hotel status whether it's fully sold-out, or a quiet day with many room types available (this is when you could receive unexpected delighters in the form of room upgrades.).

From that moment on, when a guest comes to check in, the front desk agent already knows to what extent they have the freedom to change the room type assigned. The rooms controller would typically have allocated a room based on all the above mentioned statuses and also included specific comments such as ***VIP Do Not Move/Amenity In Room*** or ***Guest must have accessible room Do Not Move*** These comments typically alerts the front desk agent to clearly inform the guest of their room type and ensure them that all effort has been made to give their the best room available.

Sometimes, however, guests have reservations with minimal information, have paid the highest rate for a room type and only mention upon check-in that it is their wedding anniversary or birthday. At this point, the front desk staff, depending on the status of the hotel, would have the ability (if the hotel is serious about empowering their staff) to upgrade and change the room type assigned, assuming that it is not messing with the overall hotel inventory planning.

Many times a front desk staff would reach out to either the rooms controller or the front desk manager to double check that a variation from the original room assigned is allowed and then informs the guest of the last-minute change. This is also true for guests who want to change their view, bed type or even proximity to an elevator. Most front desks do have the authority and the common sense to accommodate each and every guest to the best of their ability as long as they don’t do it at the expense of significant loss of revenue or another guests’ guarantee.

The hotel’s primary job is to ensure complete guest satisfaction and if that means that hotel staff have to go out of their way to allocate the best possible room for the guest, then that is exactly what needs to be done. When hotel’s is sold-out, the ability to be flexible with guests’ requests does become challenging but front desk staff should be creative and honest with the guest and ensure that they are doing their best to manage expectations.

Many believe that room assignments are quite a computerized task. To the contrary, while revenue management systems do ensure the right reservations for the right days, it is actual people in reservations, front office and the front desk staff who use their best judgment to accommodate the best room types and categories in the best way possible. Not to forget housekeeping, who really are able to deliver clean rooms efficiently and give the hotel the most flexibility with room assignments.

source : http://bit.ly/1vko16E

European Hotel Development 2014

Construction Pipeline Europe

European Hotel Development Pipeline For October 2014 at 905 Hotels

• November, 13 2014
• STR Global

Year-to-date 2014, 391 hotels with 61,961 rooms have opened in Europe. In the remainder of the year, 74 more hotels with 8,412 rooms are planned to open. The Upper Midscale segment (19 hotels with 1,973 rooms) and the Economy segment (14 hotels with 1,933 rooms) are expected to open the most rooms.

The Europe hotel development pipeline comprises 905 hotels totalling 142,785 rooms, according to the October 2014 STR Global Construction Pipeline Report. The Under Contract data includes projects in the In Construction, Final Planning and Planning stages but does not include projects in the Unconfirmed stage. 

Year-to-date 2014, 391 hotels with 61,961 rooms have opened in Europe. In the remainder of the year, 74 more hotels with 8,412 rooms are planned to open. The Upper Midscale segment (19 hotels with 1,973 rooms) and the Economy segment (14 hotels with 1,933 rooms) are expected to open the most rooms. 

In 2015, 235 hotels with 36,788 rooms are expected to open. The Upscale segment is planning to add 10,399 rooms within 60 hotels, the most rooms of all the Chain Scale segments. Three other segments are expecting to add more than 5,000 rooms in 2015: the Upper Midscale segment (6,224 rooms within 41 hotels); the Upper Upscale segment (5,583 rooms within 27 hotels); and the Economy segment (5,045 rooms within 30 hotels).

About STR Global

STR Global provides clients—including hotel operators, developers, financiers, analysts and suppliers to the hotel industry—access to hotel research with regular and custom reports covering Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and South America. STR Global provides a single source of global hotel data covering daily and monthly performance data, forecasts, annual profitability, pipeline and census information. STR Global is part of the STR family of companies and is proudly associated with STR, RRC Associates, STR Analytics, and Hotel News Now. For more information, please visitwww.strglobal.com.

source: http://www.hotelnewsresource.com/article80771.html