Not many hotels are abruptly situated at locations which afford guests limitless benefits of being close to an international airport; strategic advantages to a major sea port, while at the same time, very close to an international market which is situated on the international route between Nigeria and Benin Republic by road. Also, the Golden Tulip Hotel Festac, which boasts 471 rooms of which 354 are operational whilst the remaining are under renovation, might just be the only hotel in West Africa which affords guests all of the benefits.
In this interview, Marcel Andeweg, the General Manager of Golden Tulip Hotel Festac, shares with Head, African Travel News, Renn Offor and Asst. Head, Friday Nwosu the strategic positioning of the hotel and how the hotel remains competitive with other top hotels which capitalizing on its unique advantages in its pursuit the spreading the Golden Tulip brand across Nigeria and West Africa. He also tapped on the hotels unique approach of maintaining a hotel of international standards with local flavours. Enjoy.
Excerpt:
The location of Golden Tulip, how much does it affect your business since it is not in the economic hub of business within the Lagos metropolis?
Well, it depends on your definition of ‘the economic hub’. If you look at Lagos generally, I agree that there is a lot of corporate businesses that are located on other parts of Lagos; mainly in Ikeja, Ikoyi and on Victoria Island. At the same time one must not forget the enormous potential that the Festac area has within Lagos. There is a large amount of businesses going on in the Festac area. A lot of entrepreneurs are based in Festac. Secondly we are very well located with 
regards to the Apapa seaport, which is a feeder market for our business as well as the international airport and domestic airport of Lagos which are like 30 minutes’drive away from our hotel. So, I think that being in Festac is not necessarily a challenge, being in Festac area is a benefit to our organization. Being present in the local community is an added value for us and an added value for the entrepreneurs that are working from the Festac area.
Does that mean that Golden Tulip does not have the intention of competing with the clusters of hotels on the Island?
We compete with everybody we can compete with, that’s only normal. Of course if we can lure clients that currently are staying on the island or in other parts of Lagos and if they have interest in coming to Festac area, we cordially invite them to come and stay with us. We will b e able to show them the advantages that we have as offer compared to other parts of Lagos. Accessibility to our hotel is getting better by the day, we are centrally located in the Festac area, and we are only 30 minutes away from, for example, Marina area. Should you stay in one of the top hotel in Victoria Island during rush hour and you need to go to Marina, I can gladly make a bet that I will be on Marina on a designated address earlier if we leave on the same time. One of our corporate offices is based on Marina and I ha
ve to visit them regularly.If I leave by 9 o’clock or 9:15 or 9:30am I can get to Marina in 30 minutes. And if you are in any of the properties in Victoria Island or in Lekki or in Ikeja, and you need to go to Marina from Ikeja, it is going to be quite a challenge to get there within the same 30 minutes that it is taking me. So in Lagos, we shouldn’t look at travel time in distance, we should literally look at it as time and not in distance. For example from Golden Tulip Festac to Marina where our office is 13 kilometers and we do that in roughly 30 minutes which quite seems long but if you go from Ikeja to Marina, the distance is slightly longer. If you have an appointment at 10am, you probably have to leave at 8am from Ikeja to get to Marina. Currently in front of Marina there is working going on for the rail link line. Yes, it courses some traffic disturbance, but then I am already at Marina, and I don’t have to go through Third Mainland Bridge. We can argue about it but I can say from experiences that we are actually,quite better located.
I see that rece
ntly Shoprite have been added to the complex of the hotel, how strategic is that?
The compound of the hotel originally was seven and half hectares of land and the owner of the property which is UPDCPlc., a subsidiary of the UAC group of Nigeria,have decided to develop a part of the compound into a shopping mall. That development is welcomed and very much so by Golden Tulip. We see that it enables us to offer a larger variety of services and added value to those who want to use the hotel. Suddenly we have four cinemas on our own compound operated by Silverbird, a very reputable company in Nigeria. We have a large variety of shops that are in the Festac Festival Mall, also Shoprite is there. Shoprite for us as a hotel it’s less important; but for the area, it is very important and there is a synergy. People that come to the shopping mall and visit Shopriteduring the weekend when there are more people, we see them visiting the hotel as well and use our services whiles at the same time there are cinema services available in the shopping mall. So we definitely see the synergy between the shopping mall a
nd the hotel in general terms. But that footprint also extends to the hotel. The clientele of the hotel also extend its footprints to the shopping mall. And that actually helps us. It helps both parties working on this compound ground which definitely is an added value for us.
There is a trend in top brand hotels now, as they try to use some signature events to pull the crowd to their hotels. What is your hotel’s idea about that?
Since the mall opened October last year, Golden Tulip Hotel Festac Lagos is offering shopping packages where we offer our hotel rooms for very attractive rates. And that will allow our clientele to use the hotel. The hotel has undergone some major changes. For example, we have opened a brand new fitness outfit and the hotel has outstanding Spa facilities operated by one of the most reputable fitness operators in Lagos, called Body Line Fitness. They also operate a well know outlet in Ikoyi behind the golf course. They are operating their fitness operation in the hotel and our hotel gets benefit from that and it makes it a combination of leisure, shopping , sport, hospitality, good food: all in the same area in Festac.
How has your hotel faired so far since the Ebola crisis, now that it has come and gone. Have been able to rebound from that challenge?
Well, the Ebola crisis has been a major hit for all hospitality providers in West Africa generally and Nigeria mostly because we are based in Lagos. Yes, it has affected us and it has also made us more aware that these things can happen and that we need to be prepared to deal with these environmental issues in our business. It has affected our business but I think that from Ebola we have been able to rebound back to business and Ebola is no longer an issue in Nigeria. At the same time the lessons learned during the Ebola crisis
are still been applied today in our hotel and I think that is important, and it shows to our clientele that we still care about hygiene and health in our property.
You mentioned that Golden Tulip is an eco-friendly hotel, can you explain further?
We try to be eco-friendly as much as we can. One of the things that Golden Tulip Festac Lagos has done is making use of alternative energy sources. We are the only hotel in Lagos that I know of that has its own power generation plant, maybe you know of others. We make our power by using gas, so we consider that to be an eco-friendly step because we are using less diesel. That doesn’t mean that we are not using diesel, but we are using fewer diesel and we are less dependent on power from PHCN, which I think is definitely eco-friendly. And in all the materials that we use in the hotel, we also try to purchase as much as we can locally, so our food supply, we can say that 90% of all our food supplies used in the hotel are sourced locally. So there is no need for major transport or using containers and burning carbonmonoxide and adding carbon monoxideinto the environment. So in our operations we are looking at how we can be as environmentally friendly as we can and obviously there are stipulated set of regulations that exist in Nigeria and we have to respect the rules of the country.
Most top hotel always say that over 90% of what they use in their hotel are imported; and because of that, it has to reflect on the pricing for the hotel. How has your approach affected your pricing?
Golden Tulip Festac Lagos is an international brand and we are a member of a very large hotel family in total of 1,200 hotels worldwide and our head office is in Paris and the brand is owned by Jing Jang from Shanghai and we are one of the largest hotels operating company in the world. And because we are sourcing locally our food prices when compared with other hotels, our food prices are more attractive than other hotels in town.
Do you mean our hotel is making a head way even when other hotels are facing challenges?
Of course there are some difficulties and there are some products that you cannot source locally and we try to import them; but it is not the majority of the products that we need to be able to provide an outstanding service to our guests. We can provide an outstanding service to our guest with a lot of products that we can source locally and some of the products that we source locally can be imported by other parties but we ourselves hardly do importation. Best to source some of the products we can source locally and some of the product that we source locally can be imported by other hotels but we ourselves hardly do importation.
What do you see in the future of the Golden Tulip hotel in Nigeria?
Well, I think that the future holds a lot for us. If you see where we are now,things can only improve for the hotel industry in general. Golden Tulip as a group is spreading through Nigeria. And for our property in particular, that means that we can make better use of the brand identity that would be spreading throughout Nigeria, and throughout West Africa. So it means that people coming from other destinations to Lagos, knowing the other Golden Tulip Hotels is in other parts of Nigeria and West Africa or the world would then have a preference. That is the strength of having the brand here. But looking at the Nigerian market and looking ahead, there is still so much to do in kick-starting the economy back in Nigeria. So I can only see a very healthy and very bright future for the hotel industry in Nigeria and obviously for our hotel in particular.
All our guests that arrive Golden Tulip Festac Lagos when they are checking in, we realize that they would have probably traveled anywhere between an hour or an hour and half before they get here. And during their registration process they are offered a chilled glass of Juice.
With online platforms driving businesses now, do you still think there is need for fam. trips and facility tour?
Well,one doesn’t exclude the other; and it very much depends on what your client needs. In the past fam. trips were organized to get people, for example, into Lagos to taste the life in Lagos and the hospitality. And that used to be very important because the travel agent used to be the first person to talk with the client, trying to get the business to your hotel. If your travel agent left Lagos with a very good impression, he would then rather promote you and the hotel. That has changed, however for larger events, large conferences or conferences that have international exposure. There will still be need for familiarization tour because those organizers will need to see the facilities before they can actually go and book the facilities. Online presence does not change that, online presence is very important for the hospitality industry, they are able to drive market to your hotel and it is extremely important that you have a good rapport with your online travel agent. But having them doesn’t exclude necessarily the need for other marketing activities. One should not depend solely on the online travel agent. For example, within Golden Tulip we still have a department that provides us with services with our own central reservation system and we offer our central reservation system to the online agent to make use of it to actually facilitate their work to get business to the hotel. That is very important with the online travel agent; but then, if there is an organizer for a trade show, say Dubai and they want to organize something in Lagos, they will definitely have to come to Lagos to actually find accommodation to judge the accommodation. That would remain important and would shift more to group business than to individual travel agents visiting the area.
You mentioned online travel agents in most of your explanation, but you didn’t talk about tour operators, travel writers?
As I said a tour organization or an organizer wants to organize an event in Lagos, he will mostly likely engage a DMC (Destination Management Company). He will use a local DMC in Lagos to give him 2, 3, 4 proposals and based on those proposals they will then decide to come and do an inspection. So there is still need for tour operators. Group travel is not easy to manage through your own travel agent. The online travel agent can try it but it is still a business that goes very much face to face. The client, for example, in the States wants to come and visit Badagry. There will be tour operators in the States, there will be locals agent in Nigeria involved; and they will work together in getting the tourism business done. That is on the leisure side. At the same time we also have to recognize that leisure travel into Lagos from the international market is still underdeveloped, while the leisure travel from Nigerians travelling into Lagos is a larger component. You have people who travel to Lagos to visit friends on the weekend as well as Lagosians travelling outside Lagos to visit their families. But the international leisure travel to Nigeria: now, there is plenty of room to develop that.
You have been in the industry for quite some time, what do you think are the challenges to the growth and profitability in the hospitality industry, and what do you think is the way forward?
One of the things that could help getting more inflow of travelers to Nigeria would be a visa on arrival policy. I think that is something that would help the industry in general. I know that won’t be easy, it is a very tedious process. For example in my country of origin to obtain a visa for Nigeria, it is a very tedious process. The amount of documents that I have to send even if I get personal visitors is a lot. I understand where that is coming from because probably it is reciprocity, so the Dutch asks Nigerians for lot of papers then the Nigerians will also ask the Dutch for a lot of papers, so this is how it works. In many countries where these challenges are not there it will be very good if you have a visa on arrival policy. There are countries that do it, I think they have started in Ghana already. It will make it easier for a traveler to go on a plane and know that when he gets here he pays 25 or 50 dollars for his visa on arrival and he is able to walk through.
When we talk about hotel standardization and hotel rating, if you were to talk about hotel standardization and hotel rating experience what will you be looking out for?
Well, Nigeria is a member of ECOWAS; and ECOWAS has a very clear set of standards to determine whether you are unclassified or whether you are a 4-Star or 5-Star hotel. It has to do with your square meters; it has to do with your facilities and they are all very objective methods. You can very clearly pinpoint what those rules are. What hotel classification does is that it tells the traveler the minimum that he can expect in that hotel. And I think it is good that exists and it is up to the traveler to decide whether he wants a one star, two star, three star or even a seven star hotel, should those ratings be there. If we can all agree that we use those standards and we can all agree to our ratings, it is the application of the star rating, it can be important and become less important. In the global travel market, you get other brands of hotels popping up. If you would apply the star rating from ECOWAS, for example, there probably would be a one star hotel that are funky and fancy and they are top class, although their square meters maybe small. But if you look at hotel rating I think it does give the traveler a guidance of what he may expect from a hotel. And therefore I think that having classification is good.
And how could that be enforced?
It must be enforced facts. For example, if a room in a four star hotel needs so many square meters then that is the guideline. You can’t enforce based on the colour of your room. For example, because that is not objective any more that is subjective. And that is a matter of taste and we can’t argue taste. You might like green, I might like an off white room or you might like a red room. Now, that is taste and that cannot be a part of it; but we must take into account facilities. Do you have gym or a fitness facility? It is a matter of ticking yes or no and it doesn’t matter whether your gym is 5 or 6 years old, if everything is working, then it’s a gym and you have to tick yes.
If more Africans travel more within Africa the African countries will benefit, the hotels will also benefit. So, what do you think African countries should do to achieve that?
If you look; to say 10 to 15years ago, if you wanted to travel from one African country to another African country you had to leave Africa to fly back. If I wanted to Nairobi for instance, I need to fly to a European country and then change aircraft and fly back to Africa. The intra-African travel is developing, that is very important. There is more travel possibilities to travel within Africa without having to leave Africa and that is actually helping African countries in getting mutual inflow of tourists into their countries. Add that to a visa on arrival policy, I think that would be great. At the moment you can travel within West Africa, and travel to almost all the countries from Lagos. And Lagos is developing itself slowly and gradually as a hub. I think that combination is very important to get the flow of African travelers in Africa to boost travel.
Which country would you consider as your dream vacation in Africa?
First of all, I have worked in the African continent for quite a number of years and I have always made it a point that the country where I am, I want to visit as much as I can. Unfortunately, in Nigeria you have to be more security conscious than other countries. That is why I haven’t been able to do that. But I would love to go places. I have been told that there are beautiful game parks in Nigeria. I like to see wildlife, which is something that I enjoy very much, and this is something that I would love to do. If I would need to spend a vacation on the beach, I would probably go to Republic of Benin next door to visit one of their resorts which is on the beach front. There are a couple of nice resorts just outside of Cotonou. And it also depends on the purpose of my trip. I don’t really have an ideal holiday, but when I do vacation I want to see things. If I can do that within Nigeria, as long as I am in Nigeria, I will give that my preference to visit as much of Nigeria as I can. Unfortunately, there are some security restraints. They are not always reasonable but they are still there, and you have to take that into consideration.
Five top hotels in West Africa?
First of all I think that I will pick the hotel where I first worked in when I came to Africa, which is the Golden Tulip in Accra. I would choose that for its outstanding location in combination with the facilities they have to offer. It is within Accra and it is located near the airport centre and close to the ministries. So, if I would have to choose a hotel in Accra I would choose that hotel. If you are talking about top hotels, if you look in West Africa I think it is an experience on its own. And at the same time, it is not a top hotel. It is located in the games park Penjari, it is a lodge where if you stay there overnight, in the evening, sometimes, the elephants are walking through the compound of the hotel. It is definitely not the best hotel if you look at standards in terms of quality but it’s a wonderful place to go to. So, hotels like that would definitely be on my list. That is why I like Golden Tulip a lot because we have a set of international standards that we apply into our hotels. We also look at the local flavours that we can apply in the hotel and that is something that I would look out for if I would chose a hotel.
