Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts still is most identified by its ultra-luxury Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, but during the past 16 years the hotel company has built and acquired its way to a global portfolio of more than 20 properties.

　　Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts still is most identified by its ultra-luxury Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, but during the past 16 years the hotel company has built and acquired its way to a global portfolio of more than 20 properties. Contrary to the prevailing image of decadence, many of those hotels primarily are business travel hotels, including the Jumeirah Frankfurt, Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai, Jumeirah Carlton Tower in London and the Jumeirah Himalayas Hotel in Shanghai, according to Jumeirah Group COO Nicholas Clayton.

　　Group vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas Tom Civitano said Jumeirah's position in corporate travel programs is on the rise. "Companies are expanding to include other hotels that we have in other destinations," he said. "In 2005, we'd get requests for maybe one or two. Now, we're getting requests for proposals that include seven or eight different properties, and that's our measurement of success: how we can expand the RFP for each company, as opposed to signing up new RFPs."

　　Clayton, who joined Jumeirah in April 2012, spent most of his career working for luxury hotel companies—including Viceroy, Mandarin Oriental, Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons—often as those brands were in early stages of development. In a November interview with us, Clayton said that while Jumeirah has progressed beyond that early stage, growing the portfolio currently is the group's "major objective." That includes a return to the Americas, where Jumeirah in 2012 lost its presence when JW Marriott took over its Essex House property in New York.

　　How big do you see Jumeirah becoming in the long run?

　　There are some advantages to being a smaller group. We can be nimble and customize and have some flexibility on a lot of fronts, but the downside is that we're not in every location around the world. That's probably what travel buyers would say the most about us: "We love your hotels and the teams that service your hotels, but you need to be in Hong Kong and these other places." We actually have a company structure that's built for 50 hotels. We don't have to do too much to change our core structure and coverage, meaning we have sales and marketing assets around the globe. If we open a new hotel, or five or 10, I wouldn't have to change a lot in the structure of the company, just supply the staffing for the hotel itself. So, we're built for growth. We are an owner of some hotels. In Dubai, we have some ownership position there. The first of our hotels was created in order to give birth to the tourism industry of Dubai. Burj Al Arab was built to grab the international attention of the tourism audience and create a story, along with Emirates Airline. From that, we started to get more opportunities to manage hotels, and we became a management company as well as a hotel owner.

　　What are your target regions?

　　In the Middle East, the brand is very well-known, and there are lots of hotel opportunities in that region. It's also profitable to run hotels, so there's an incentive for people to develop properties. That could be in Doha; that could be in Saudi Arabia. We're looking at a project in Abuja, Nigeria. If you ignore Asia/Pacific, it's a big mistake for the future, so that's important to us, as is growing that European portfolio. Here in the States, we would like the one-two punch of the East and West coasts. We will find the right opportunity and re-enter the market here, even if we have to do some degree of participation and buying our way in, which happens in our business sometimes today. People offset some of the cost of the development to win a contract of 20 to 25 years. If we need to be flexible, we'll do it, because we see New York as being the world's city. Certainly for the travel industry, it's one of the best markets in the world when it comes to profitability and revenue per available room. Miami is an interesting city, but that would not be a top priority. We have many years of growth to look forward to, so we'll play to our strengths right now.

　　What are the markets you'll be entering in the next few years?

　　Five properties in China, a market we had done a lot of due diligence in. We had lots of things going with developers there, but the developers have taken their time, and things have come on later than predicted. That includes Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Sanya. We'll look for properties in the key cities of Shanghai and Beijing. Bali is under construction, and Bangkok. We just announced a hotel in St. Petersburg, which is helpful because we have quite a Russian clientele that come to Dubai and the Maldives. St. Petersburg is a conversion of a historic building and is probably up in the last quarter of 2015, so that's a nice fast-track project. We had something very interesting in Moscow. It has gone away, and we hope to have something go back soon, because that's a place where our brand has some strength and resonance, mainly because of that Dubai traffic.

　　On the corporate travel side, have buyers noticed this growth, or do they still see Jumeirah as regional?

　　We're only 16 years old. It's a very young brand versus some of our competitors. That was one of the reasons I joined the company, because I saw this growth taking place. We had a few of our properties come online as takeovers, so they were not known or planned and all of a sudden became a part of the portfolio in a short period of time. Grosvenor House came on in a short period of time, Rome was a takeover of an existing property and so was Pera Palace in Istanbul. When people are not pleased with their current management or want a better brand, we just have to see what it takes to get the hotel there. In the case of Rome, it was an exquisite hotel, and besides doing branding, it met our criteria for a capital city in Europe.