Professional And Individual Service The Key To Success In Dalian

Takayuki Kato, the general manager of Nikko Hotel Dalian, has more than 30 years hotel management experience and has worked in several countries including Japan, Germany, China, and Australia.

What aspects of Dalian city impress you?
Dalian is a beautiful seaside city that has great potential as a meetings, incentive travel, conventions, and exhibitions destination, because of its good weather, a wide variety of food, and because it is clean city. And nowadays it is getting more popular to the MICE markets.

Hotel Nikko Dalian has an excellent location, what do you expect the percentage composition of your guests to be?
As a business hotel, most of our business comes from corporate accounts, including FIT and corporate meetings groups, also leisure accounts account for a certain percentage.

How does Hotel Nikko Dalian differentiate itself from other top-level hotels around Dalian?
Hotel Nikko Dalian is the only hotel managed by Japan Hotels Management Group in the Dalian marketplace. We can share the resources of the whole group, and being a well-known brand gives us more opportunity in the Japanese market, which is a very important source for the Dalian hospitality marketplace.

What is your strategic plan for achieving your target RevPAR?
Strengthen the development of the Chinese Domestic market and the American and European market: especially the MICE market.

What is your management philosophy? In your opinion what makes a hotel a good hotel?
As a hotelier, I work with many people with different backgrounds — different nationalities, mother tongues, and religions — and everyday my team is serving a wide range of people who come to the hotel for various reasons. We must offer them "Contentment and Trust and Progressiveness" to make them satisfied and want to come back. That’s why we are here; however, the personnel foundation and satisfaction are also very important, it determines where we are now and how far we can go.

Therefore, the hotel that deserves the definition of "Good" must be the favored choices of guests, owners, employees, and society by providing consistent and personalized services.

How will you apply your previous working experience around the world to the management of the Hotel Nikko Dalian?
I have been working in NHI for 27 years and the experience covers: sales division, rooms division, global sales and marketing, and the business development office. And I have progressed from a graduate to a general manager.

Market segmentation is one of the most important things for us to clarify and then we can set the right customer targets and supply what the market demands most. Both the tangible quality and intangible service quality are very important, especially in the hotel industry. And the system of delivering the excellent services depends, to a large extent on the hotel’s personnel. So the business and staff are the most essential elements, and the rest of the benefits and achievements will follow just as long as we can achieve the first two elements.

What difficulties do you expect to encounter as a result of the global financial crisis?
Understanding, analyzing and dividing the markets, creating the attractive and unique products or packages for concerned customers and groups, "fighting" with the sales team, being harder and more aggressive… and then we need to trust the team and believe that the market will recover.

Why should business professionals choose your hotels as venues instead of others in Dalian?
Professional and individual service, the latest facilities, and the cooperation of our sales team make more and more business professionals choose our hotel.

At present, many large hotels are focusing on business development in the MICE sector. What special expansion plans does Hotel Nikko Dalian have for targeting the MICE market?
From August 1, 2009, to target the MICE market, the Hotel Nikko Dalian gave free Internet access for all guests, also they can get mileage points for eight airline companies. We also offer executive meeting packages for the MICE market.