Fairmont Palm Boss: Be My Guest

The vast high-ceilinged dining room is filled with the loud clutter of breakfast, as hundreds of guests begin their day. No one is more relieved about this than Martin van Kan, general manager of the Fairmont Palm hotel, which opened just three months ago.

Originally billed as a sprawling leisure resort, the $330 million Dubai hotel has defied its careful prediction models and is instead luring business travellers with a weakness for a view of the Palm’s balmy waters and the hotel’s generous 3,000 square metres (sq m) of conference space.

“Three months of operation has proven that budgeting is not a science — it’s a weather vane activity. Originally we were going to favour the wholesale business — the leisure customer,” says South African Van Kan.

“As the hotels settles and we get more contracts with travel agents internationally, we’ll probably shift back to where the hotel was originally focused. Currently we’re 50-50 across business and leisure customers.”

The hotel, developed by international firm IFA Hotels, features 460 metres of beachfront, 381 guestrooms, a 1,600 sq m spa, and seven food and beverage outlets. The resort also offers 562 luxury apartments bringing the total number of keys in the development to 957.

Having tested his mettle at international brands across the world, from Oman to China and Qatar to Nepal, the hospitality veteran is now tasked with bringing his 25-year-career knowledge to the UAE’s glitziest beach strip. But it wasn’t always like this.

By his own admission, Van Kan shunned academia as he was growing up. As a last resort, his father called in a favour from a friend and packed his teenage son off to the Furama InterContinental in Hong Kong to work as a bus boy. The friend confided to Van Kan’s father, “six months in this job will either make or break him.”

“I was excited, I thought I would be on the bus, ferrying the travellers to the hotel and showing them the sights,” Van Kan says. But the reality was far more pedestrian. “A bus boy collects dirty plates. That’s literally all they do,” Van Kan adds, “and I loved every minute of it.”

From here, Van Kan enrolled at the prestigious Ecole Hôtelièr Les Roches in Switzerland. A few years later he landed in a bedsit in the rather less salubrious climes of Willesden Green, north London, keen to kickstart his hospitality career.

He says: “I earned £65 a week before tax. By the time I paid my rent, which was £40, and my bus pass, there was only change to do the laundry.”

It wasn’t long before a young, single and strapped-for-cash Van Kan jumped at the chance to work in the Middle East: “I wasn’t even sure what the job was, I just said ‘yes’”.

Today he’s a testament to the entrepreneurial it’ll-all-work- out-in-the-end school of thought — just don’t tell his academic South Korean wife, who jokes that he sets a bad example for their two sons. “I was asked to give a talk to a local school, and she said ‘Martin, don’t, you’re going to give them the wrong idea,” he smiles.

Most of all Van Kan says you’ve got to do what you love: “If you didn’t enjoy what you did, you’d stay in bed, roll over and go back to sleep.”

With Dubai’s recent tourism uptick — a direct result of the Arab spring dispersing tourists and businesspeople from areas such as Syria, Bahrain and Egypt — the stars are aligned for Van Kan’s hotel to exceed its targets.

“As soon as we opened the doors on December 15, we were flooded. We opened in peak season, which was a lesson learned, and we had to learn it fast. People often say ‘build a hotel in Dubai and they will come’ and that was never more the case than on our opening day,” he says.

“We have been busy ever since, which is really good news. It will still take some settling down because every hotel takes some settling in. The best hotels are like well-worn jumpers.”