Faruk Aliyu is the representative of Shelter Suites and Hotels Limited. Shelter Suites and Hotel is primarily a hotel developer based in Abuja. It currently owns the franchise for WYNDHAM Hotels and Suites which is part of the largest hotel companies in the world with over 8,000 properties worldwide. Aliyu, who has cut his teeth in hotel management, speaks extensively on hotel management in Nigeria and why Hawthorn continues to carve a niche for itself in the nation’s hospitality industry. Excerpts.
Hospitality is one of the major industries in the world; given your experience how will you describe the trend in Nigeria?
In a country with 170 million people, there is always going to be a need for hospitality, particularly hotels. I think there is a tremendous opportunities and there are also tremendous challenges though. The challenges are of our own making. People always ask why hotels in Nigeria cost more than anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else in the world they do not have to do what we do. They do not have to do power generation. We are designing a hotel in Lagos where you need to do your own waste treatment, you need to do your own water treatment, basically the entire infrastructure that exist in other places you need to provide them yourself. When you start to look at the potential returns the only way you can achieve that is by charging high rates, simply because it is too expensive to build here. It cost almost twice as much to build a hotel in Nigeria than to build in Kenya.
A lot of places in the world cannot really charge that but Nigeria can and that is because people see the opportunities here. Hospitality is an industry with a lots of potentials and opportunities. You just need to key on the right opportunity.
What makes Hawthorn Hotel tick?
Our services are excellent, our rooms are cute and I think the people. Hospitality industry is a very thriving industry and nothing pleases me more than seeing the people that we work with and make progress. You see people that have started as housekeepers they are now managers, people that started at the lowest level and have now been promoted because their work ethics have taken them to managerial positions. That is one of the things we try to hold on to. We also believe that this is something that we care about and the guest experience is something that is uppermost in our priority.
We want to make sure that anybody that comes in stays as best possible time here, whether they stay for a night or whether they are staying for a year. So I think the people per level of service. All other things are easy anyone can build a beautiful structure. The difficult part is making people feel at home.
Your hotel has to contend with five star hotels in Abuja, how are you coping?
I think we are copping. The thing is we have created a niche since we are a extend stay hotel so most hotels you go into is a standard room so maybe a room the size of my office. In our hotel, we have all suites so our hotel here is 14.000sqms but we only have 120 beds. If this was a traditional hotel we will probably have 300 rooms in a hotel of this size. We can compete because of the space that you get. The idea is it is going to be a home from home because if you stay here you will really do not miss a bit because you can work, you can play and you can do both. So that is how we have been able to compete because our offering is different from traditional hotel as an extended stay brand.
What are those things that make it different from other hotels in the FCT?
Like I said it comes back to the people. We are an international brand with a local management focus. So it thinks global at local philosophy. We have standard operative procedures that are of international renown but with a touch of what is in Nigeria. If you look at our menu you can get eba and egusi, so you can get the best of all. So that is the thing we try to do, we try to marry the thing that people love when they travel internationally. Nigerians love food so we have to start with food. I think that is what sets us apart; we have been able to marry not only our local customs but international best practices as well.
Feedback is very important particularly in the hospitality industry. What do you get from this angle?
The good thing about feedback is that we get both the good and the bad. When you hear someone say “oh this is the best place I have stayed”, it is the best feeling in the world and at the same time if you hear someone says “I have stayed there but I have not really enjoyed”., it is almost like the most painful feeling in the world. So the thing is trying to get the people that does not enjoy your services back so that you can prove a point, what is it that they do not enjoy? I believe that you can turn anyone into a happy customer if they did not enjoy you the first time because there is always room for improvement, you learn something new every day.
The opportunity is there to always do better the second time and the third time. In our industry feedback is the only way you can survive because a guest comes in and he does not like it then it does not come back again and a guest come and he likes it, he is going to come back and he is going to tell the world all about it.
So you want the guest that does not like it to tell you why he does not like it so that you know what to improve on so that he can come back. So I guess feedback is paramount in our industry because it is an industry with so much choice that if you do not like what you are getting here you can go to hotel b or hotel c. that is why feedback is a lot important.
Staff are one of the key factors in any organization, are your staff getting the needed training?
One of the things is that you have to empower whoever it is before you expect results. I am sure you guys have had some training in this field before you can say you want to do this. We have citizen journalists but they can just report what they see but to now take the final point and reposition it accurately needs a great deal of training so this also applies to the hotel industry, the people that work here need training it is something that we believe in and it is something that we not only spend money on but we also spend time on so that people know what is expected of them, people know how to do their job and people can deliver.
In the hotel industry every single department is as important as the other. If a guy comes and the food is wonderful but the room is dirty he will say “they have good food but their room is dirty I do not want to go back there”. And if he also likes the room and the food is not good it is still the same thing. It is like you have won here but you have lost there but in the long run you have lost.
That is why you have to focus on every one from the personal reception to the person that cleans your room so that your room is neat and organized. You have to train people so that they know what they do and they can do the right thing when they are supposed to.
It seems Nigeria is not fully harnessing the potentials in the hospitality industry, as an expert what is your advice to the government?
I will not call myself an expert but as someone in the industry it is a holistic thing and I can go on for days talking about it. In order to make a move we have the issue of power but power does not only affect us it affects also manufacturing. So power not only affects the hotel’s running cost it but it also affects everything else. What do I mean by that? Towels. Our brand specified specific … for towels, how many people produce towels in Nigeria, bed sheets. All of these industries are not there because of what? Power and a few other issues. Then you say maybe I can import these things and then it is contraband to import them, so what do you do? And then you have the cost of finance for hotels are notoriously long term investments. You need to have tools to be able to sustain for that extended period and the biggest thing is the cost of finance. If you are borrowing at 25% in two and half years your interest is compounded and probably the same amount as you borrow.
I hope the incoming administration can make more transparent the issue of taxes. FCT just introduced what they called the luxury tax. So what they say is anyone that stays in a hotel is rich. In the FCDA you already have AMAC and you have all these levies and I know in Lagos states and other states it is a very similar thing as well. We need to streamline these agents coming in saying they represent this and that. I hope they can simplify it. If the government does what we hope they would a lot of these things will fall into place on their own.