INTERVIEW - MADS WOLFF, GENERAL MANAGER, 25HOURS DUBAI: "YOU NEED TO CONSTANTLY DEVELOP AND RETHINK WHAT HOSPITALITY IS" (United Arab Emirates)
Right in front of the Dubai Museum of The Future, stands the 25hours One Central hotel, a haven for all travellers looking for a unique nomadic experience.
INTERVIEW - MADS WOLFF, GENERAL MANAGER, 25HOURS DUBAI: "YOU NEED TO CONSTANTLY DEVELOP AND RETHINK WHAT HOSPITALITY IS" (United Arab Emirates)
Right in front of the Dubai Museum of The Future, stands the 25hours One Central hotel, a haven for all travellers looking for a unique nomadic experience.
What happens if you take a world map, shake the colourful designs out of it, add a pinch of luxury, and dust it all with playfulness? The 25hours hotel. Part of the Ennismore group, the lifestyle property is managed by Mads Wolff, an ex-chef, who's proud of the diversity, the comfort and the "come as you are" atmosphere that all make the property's identity. Make no mistake though, from the welcoming valets, the concierge, and the high ceilings right to the skilful baristas or the spectacular view from the rooftop pool, 25hours offers the luxury of service and experience. Mads Wolff has a wealth of expertise from Japan to the Maldives, including Qatar, Bali, and Saudi. "I went from being a chef to working in hotels, to food and beverage, to hotel management. That's how I ended up at the 25hours". Back in Dubai, he's now at the helm of the 25hours with a mission to offer a different idea of luxury in a city welcoming the most diverse travellers, but all with one common trait: high expectations.
Journal des Palaces: What type of luxury does 25hours stand for?
Mads Wolff: 25hours is a five-star hotel, but it's not your typical luxury hotel, it's a five-star and quality service and all of that, but it's a very different approach to hospitality and home. Products like 25 hours bring a lot more experiences than your typical luxury hotel, so to speak. It's all about what you experience when you go into the lobby. It's a very different environment. People feel very comfortable in this space because they feel at home, but with the amenities and services of a five-star hotel. I think that would really attract people to come and choose this place. Our biggest room, called the Hakawati suite, is 250 square meters, including a 50 square meters balcony that's like our royal suite. Hakawati in Arabic is a storyteller. That's what this whole hotel is about. It is storytelling, when you walk into the lobby, if you look up, you see the ceiling which explains the whole story of this property; it is all about bedouins and nomads. And you see everything in between and how the travel and the journey goes. And when you go to the room floors, they are not the same. So if you go to the second floor, it's more bedouin and sand and desert and photography on the wall from the desert. The higher you go up, it becomes more and more modern, and you get to experience that journey. So even if you come three, four, or five times you can have different experiences staying with us depending on which floor you are ending on. People also come from outside to use the facilities and enjoy the experience. All the people you see when you enter the lobby are our hotel. That's what's quite unique about this property.
Was the idea to be like a hub for the urban workers? What clients are you catering to?
Our co-working space can be an experience in itself indeed. Beyond that, we have 434 rooms, so it's a rather big hotel, and we offer more than eight F&B outlets around the hotel as well. Overall, it's just a big space as well, and the people visiting are the community that has been created since we opened. Despite the large co-working open space, 25hours, is not specifically targeted to "young people" or start-ups. It's really for everyone. You can have very senior people, from the government or private sector, sitting in one part of the hotel, while a young student is studying in another. You have content creators, fashion designers, or other creative people who are just attracted to the space because of the diversity it brings in.
How do you define your kind of luxury?
It's more about the experience, the human interaction, and the service. There's a time when you just go to a hotel and check in and go to your room, and you go out and everything needs to be nice, but today people are looking for something more than that. What can they interact with? What are the stories and the pictures they're bringing home? That's what it became all about today: providing an amazing experience and a quality service to people. But it doesn't have to be served with white gloves and a tuxedo. You can serve guests in a very casual environment. It's more about how you communicate the personality behind the people. Even having a coffee in our lobby is a different experience than you have in many other lobby cafés around many hotels. On the first floor, we have the Analogue Circus, where you can play vinyl records, use old Walkmans, play with arcade machines, or watch black and white TVs. It brings you back to a different era where you can interact with technology and have fun. Of course, the rooms are unique as well. They are very different from what you typically see. The Farmstay suite is my favourite room. It's like a junior suite, with a very open space without a wall between your shower and your bedroom. It's not the biggest suite we have, but I just love it. Our rooms are quite specific, and most guests who come to us love that about the hotel. We approached our service and product in a very different way than your standard hotel. I think there is a lot of space for more new products, but products that push the boundaries of what is there today.
What's your hiring and training philosophy? How do you build your teams?
It's all about the people and personalities, and a little bit less about maybe having worked in a hotel before. From the beginning, I hired many people who might come from retail backgrounds or stand-alone restaurants, and not from hotel backgrounds. I really want to get a diverse crowd of people inside. You can teach people most things about what's going on in a hotel, but personality cannot be taught; either you are a certain type of person or you are not. Hiring people is about taking care of people,because they're the ones who represent your business most of the time. I don't get to meet all the guests, but the barista or lobby café sees most of them. So it's important to have the right type of people to represent you, your brand and your message as well. We host guests from all over the world, and we have more than 400 employees from more than 65 nationalities in the hotel, so it's a big crowd of people with many different cultures.
How do you set yourself apart in the luxury Dubai scene?
We offer a different kind of environment: comfortable, homey, with a diverse crowd. Maybe it didn't fit well from the beginning, and I think that's a part of why we have been so successful. It's because we are something new to the market that didn't exist yet. Because there are so many products in Dubai, so many beautiful architects, and so many beautiful hotels. I'm always trying to push the boundaries of what can be done in a hotel setting. And I think that's what makes 25hours really different. People want something new, they want to see what else is out there, and I think Dubai is a market where it still has so much more potential, so it's just waiting for the next one to do something new again. There is still so much more you can do, and hospitality has become a bit square in certain aspects. It's very important to challenge those aspects to keep providing new experiences for guests. And also that it's a very different market today than it was five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago. "Lifestyle" has become a very overused word: it's either luxury or lifestyle. You put this label on it, but today everybody calls themselves a lifestyle property, so you need to constantly develop and rethink what hospitality is today versus just five years ago.
What would be your advice to someone looking into a career in luxury hospitality?
I would say not to limit yourself to one kind of mindset. You must experience and see as many different properties and ways of doing things as possible. It's very easy to get limited in this line of work, so I think it's about keeping a very open mind.
A lover of human interactions, Sonia started her journalism career in various media outlets before moving to London and shifting to the digital industry. Listening to her calling, she's picking up her pen to share the passion and ambitions of luxury hospitality.
