Director of Operations
Hospitality Marketing Concepts
Total years of experience :30 years, 4 Months
•Daily, weekly, monthly reviews and interpretation of program sales/revenue reports.
•Manage the sales forecast process, territory planning and strategic development plans of the region.
•Develop and execute call center tactical plans, to ensure efficiency, productivity and profitability of new sales and renewal sales targets of each hotel program.
•Effectively recruit, train, develop and motivate a team of Call Center Managers and Team Leaders in an outbound sales environment, both directly and remotely.
•Travel to and conduct regular visits/audits of all hotel programs.
•Maintain and improve hotel client relationships, by conducting monthly and quarterly reviews of revenue and sales targets achieved by the program.
•Train hotel staff on hotel program.
•Recognize and act on new business opportunities consistent with company strategy.
Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts, Dubai, UAE Manager in charge of Global Contact Centre Present
• Strategically managed the Jumeirah Global Contact Centre, leading a team of 80 colleagues through 3 direct reports.
• Established a team of multilingual sales advisors to handle queries across all continents. The team consisted of over 16 nationalities speaking a total of 14 languages.
• This team booked over 1 billion dirhams of room revenue, and was able to increase sales conversion from 11 to 27% over 3 years.
• Reduced turnover and increased colleague retention by creating a career development landscape. This allowed colleagues to have a career path within the department or other functions within the company, mainly Revenue/Sales/Marketing/Distribution.
• Introduced a dynamic incentive program for the team. This resulted in colleague engagement, and an increase in average revenue per call together with a higher sales conversion.
• Achieved all KPI's set for the department. Those were related to revenue generation, sales conversion, and abandoned calls.
• Partial responsibility of implementation and coordination of revenue strategies across all channels (GDS / OTA's / TPI's / Direct Connect)
• Handled a department budget of over 10 million dirhams, ensuring that all expenses are kept within guidelines and reducing transaction cost to hotels from the 2nd year after centralization by 30%.
• Main Projects: SynXis/Opera full two way interfaces, Email Management System (Microsoft Dynamics), Centralization of all UAE Reservation Departments except for Burj Al Arab.
Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts, Dubai, UAE Revenue Manager in charge of Reservations Sep 2001 to Apr 2006
• Successfully managed the start-up and operation of a new central reservations contact centre. This is to handle reservation requests received thru voice, email, faxes for all properties.
• Introduced the central reservation system and maintained it in terms of loading new rates, new properties, overseeing any enhancements required and coordinating this with the development team.
• Implemented system standards for rate loading, room types, and rate descriptions across channels.
• Established a cross selling culture between Dubai properties in order to increase revenue and reduce regrets. This allowed us to recover over 10% of lost business during busy periods.
• Offered an overflow call service to all hotels ensuring that reservation queries were handled 24 hours a day.
• Chaired monthly revenue meetings between properties to review strategies, discuss market conditions, and any future promotions to be coordinated.
• Overlooked the implementation and trainings of the IDEAS Yield system for 3 hotels.
Hilton Reservations Worldwide (HRW), Dubai, UAE Manager, HRW Middle East & Africa Sep 1997 to Aug 2001
• Reporting to the Vice President of HRW International Operations based in the Head Office at Watford.
• Responsible for a team of 5 sales agents whose main duties are to answer calls through the numerous Toll Free numbers available from different countries in the Gulf and the Middle East.
• Handling customer complaints, training the reservation sales agents on computer skills, sales and telephone techniques, conversion of calls into sales, making sure that they are up-to-date with all the necessary information regarding the hotels.
• Responsible for compiling the monthly managerial reports, yearly budget and forecast.
• Attended all regional sales and marketing meetings in order to promote and improve the services of the call center. The office handled several seasonal promotions that were very successful in increasing the sales figures for the Hotels in the Middle East and Europe.
• Overlooked the customer service center (HHonors) which was based in the same call center and was the overall manager for that section.
Hilton International, Dubai, UAE 1993 to 1997 Reservations Manager - Hilton Dubai
• Fully responsible for all room revenue decisions of the Hotel.
• In charge of a team of 4 reservation clerks and a supervisor.
• Conducted sales calls with the sales team to major corporate clients.
• Overlooked the groups section and issued necessary group contracts and reports to the sales department of any sales leads looked up from previous year group requests.
Reservations Supervisor - Hilton Dubai
• Responsible for all MICE bookings.
• Oversee the performance of the reservation clerks and ensure all requests received are handled appropriately.
Reception Clerk / Cashier - Hilton Dubai
• Performed standard Front Office duties.
• Appointed as the departmental cashiering trainer.
• Responsible for keeping the Front Office Quality Standard Manual up-to-date.
Diploma in Hotel Management (Merit), Athens, Greece (1989/1993) Alpine for Hotel and Tourism Management affiliated with IHTTI Switzerland
Baccalaureate Libanaise, Beirut, Lebanon (1989)