Jumeirah Group seeks hotel staffJumeirah Group seeks hotel staff

To sign MoU with Hotel School:

Shirajiv SIRIMANE

One of the world’s largest hotel chains, Jumeirah Group will sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hotel School of Colombo to train hotel staff for the international chain.

The Hotel group that owns and operates world’s only seven star hotel Burj Al Arab has estimated that they need 60,000 employees in the next five years for their hotels.

To meet this demand, the group has already set up a hotel school in the Philippines.

The Sri Lanka Hotels School is operating under capacity training only around 500 whereas it could train over 1200.

In addition construction of another hotel school in Kandy, which could train a further 1,000, is under way.

The Dubai-based international hospitality firm Jumeirah Group manages about 10 luxury hotels and resorts primarily in the Middle East, but also in London (the Jumeirah Carlton Tower and Jumeirah Lowndes Hotel), and the US (it acquired the Essex House in New York’s Central Park South in 2006 and renamed it the Jumeirah Essex House). Jumeirah, which began operations in 1997, is a member of Dubai Holding, a collection of Dubai-based businesses and projects.

Deputy Minister of Tourism, Faizer Mustapha met the CEO of the group Guy Crawford and offered that they could also use the service of the Sri Lankan Hotels School. “They were very happy with this offer as the Sri Lanka workforce is very talented and approved this proposal. They will now visit Sri Lanka soon to iron out the modalities of the proposal and to sign a MoU with the hotels school,” he said. Jumeirah Group hopes to recruit students from the Lanka Hotel School in the future.

Due to a series of meetings held with the Gulf private sector in recent times the hotels have opened their doors to employ Lankans to hotel back office operations. The income the Lankan employees receive will be around Rs. 50,000 per month.

“We have already sent over 500 rural youth to the Gulf and expect to send more than 1,000 next year,” he said.

Due to a series of promotions launched in the Gulf in the last two years there had been a 30 per cent increase in arrivals which was most welcome by the industry.

The investments made to Al-Jazeera Television to promote Sri Lanka too have had a major positive impact on Gulf arrivals.

The Sri Lanka Tourism expects this momentum to continue and is predicting this growth to increase to 50 per cent. “I am sure in the next five years, Gulf arrivals will be the Number One to Sri Lanka as there is no recession in the Gulf,” Mustapha said.