I live in Dubai, and our first office is in Manchester, at Dalton Place on John Dalton Street. TLC also has studios in London and Berlin, but the line that defines most of my working weeks runs between the North West of England and the Gulf. After a few years of it, I have stopped thinking of them as two markets with different rules and started thinking of them as two versions of the same business, each good at something the other could learn from.
What UK operators do well
UK hospitality is disciplined about cost because it has had to be. Energy, wages and business rates have squeezed margins for years, and the operators who have come through it know their numbers to the penny. They ask hard questions about the return on every piece of technology, and they want reporting that ties back to the profit and loss account. That discipline shapes the way we build reporting for UK groups, and it is a habit worth exporting.
UK operators also have a long memory of loyalty that worked. Club Individual grew to nearly two million members across Piccolino, Gino D’Acampo and Bar & Grill restaurants, and that kind of history means a UK board understands what a programme can do, and what it costs when it is run badly.
What the Gulf does well
In Dubai the expectation of service is higher and the appetite for trying something new is bigger. Venue groups think in experiences rather than covers. A launch is an event. The groups I work with in the region, AlphaMind, Solutions Group, Leylaty in Saudi Arabia, move quickly and expect technology to keep up. They are also comfortable with cashback held as a real balance in dirhams, a mechanic UK operators are often nervous about and one that works very well when it is designed properly.
Time zones are a feature
Dubai is three or four hours ahead of the UK depending on the time of year. People assume that is a nuisance. In practice it means our day starts in the Gulf and finishes in Manchester, and a problem raised by a UAE venue at the end of their afternoon lands with a UK team that still has hours to fix it. For clients with venues in both countries, it means somebody is awake when service is on.
It does demand discipline about handovers. Every issue has an owner, a note and a next step written down, so nothing depends on who happens to be online. That habit came from running shifts, and it is the same one I would recommend to any group with sites in more than one country.
What travels and what does not
The technology travels. A loyalty platform, a guest app or a reporting model built for a Manchester group will run perfectly well in Dubai. What does not travel is the assumption that guests behave the same way. The ordinary Tuesday in Manchester and the ordinary Tuesday in Dubai Marina are different days, with different people, different spend and different reasons for going out. The Gulf summer is the low season; in the UK it can be the busiest time of the year. A programme copied across without rethinking the calendar and the rewards will underperform in at least one of them.
The cloud is physical after all. Running systems in two regions also means thinking about resilience in both. When the AWS UAE region went down earlier this year, the clients we recovered fastest were the ones whose systems were built to move. That lesson applies in London as much as in Dubai.
If you are thinking of crossing over
UK groups look at the Gulf more often now, and some Gulf brands are looking hard at London. My advice in either direction is the same. Keep the platform, change the calendar, localise the rewards, and spend time on the ground before you decide what guests want. Most of what I know about hospitality in the UAE I learned by standing in venues on busy nights, not from a spreadsheet.
If you are planning a move in either direction and want to talk through the technology side, get in touch. Between Manchester and Dubai, somebody on our side will be awake.