Abu Dhabi-based hotel management outfit Rotana preserved staff jobs during this year’s global coronavirus pandemic by effectively loaning them out to other companies.
The initiative is similar to loans conducted in the world of football, where players move from one club to another and the latter pays a portion, or all, of their wages.
Rotana CEO Guy Hutchinson told Arabian Business, in this instance, the companies benefiting from his company’s staff received ‘marquee players at cost’.
He said: “We were just very determined that when we hit the peak of that hard stop in and around April when travel stopped and corporate stopped and hotels, particularly in Dubai, we saw the occupancy just fall off a cliff, we were focused on how we protect our employees because the cash flow challenges and how those were individually going to play out per hotel, it was clear to see what the immediate future was going to look like.
“We could see that there was going to be three-to-six months’ intense pressure on cash flow.”
Rotana is one of the region’s most powerful hotel groups, with approximately 70 properties and 20,000 keys, boasting a workforce of over 10,000 employees.
And while Hutchinson said no properties closed during the enforced lockdown periods across the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, novel measures were taken to ensure staff remained in employment.
This included building five call centres, which were used by the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company. He explained: “If you called the Estijaba hotline for Covid, since May or June this year, that’s exclusively Rotana staff answering those calls for SEHA. That has now expanded and we’ve actually had to hire external call agents because this has become a business model that’s going to run for another three-to-five years probably.”
Guy Hutchinson, President and CEO, Rotana Hotels
Hutchinson revealed that deals were also struck with delivery firms and other companies, with some 700 staff members in total from Rotana redeployed.
He said: “We identified a lot of opportunities where we could take the payroll burden off the hotels, keep them trading and keep staff employed and paid throughout the crisis.”
He added: “It’s been a hard slog, just the most difficult year. We’ve had to deploy a lot of lateral thinking. Unlike many companies we never closed any hotels. We kept everything open and kept everything trading. We built some lateral businesses, some of which have now gone on to be permanent revenue streams.”
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