On June 1, Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts reopened the Carlton Tower Jumeirah in London’s Knightsbridge district after an 18-month renovation estimated to cost more than 100 million pounds sterling ($137.6 million).
The reopening of the Carlton Tower Jumeirah follows recent openings of the 350-room The Londoner in September and the 237-room Pan Pacific London in June. All three properties contribute to the luxury hotel segment's resurgence in the United Kingdom's capital city.
Aaron Kaupp, Jumeirah's regional vice president, Northern Europe, and general manager of the Carlton Tower Jumeirah, is confident business travel will return to London and complement the leisure travel that has already returned to the city.
The Carlton Tower Jumeirah opened in 1961 as London’s first tower hotel. As a result of the renovation, the property's room count fell by 30 rooms to 186, with the average room size now enlarged. The hotel now sports London’s “largest naturally lit swimming pool,” Kaupp said.
Hotel News Now sat down with Kaupp to chat about his renovated hotel and the hopes for it and Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts' wider European portfolio. Kaupp has been with the company and the property since December 2019, just before the onset of the pandemic.
Your hotel is a stalwart among London hotels. How has it been regarded throughout its development, financing and reopening periods?
As a company we could not have chosen a better time to renovate the property. We shut down just before COVID-19 with a plan fully in place. There was no displacement in revenue and no displacement of clients. Would it be tough for the next five years to come back to market traction? Definitely, but we started the onboarding process in a very good place because it was when London was still in lockdown.
Has the pandemic resulted in delays? You closed down the asset in late 2019 not knowing of course that COVID-19 would ever happen. How challenging has this property been so far and how has management and owners negotiated staffing, financing and marketing?
The pandemic has surely resulted in delays of the property because first the construction site shut down, and by the time it reopened it took a long time to get back to its original staffing level. On top of that, the supply chains were slow to get the materials in and it was just past Brexit, so the borders and the customs were very slow.
What has changed in the plans for the hotel and its offerings during this time? What was the design brief, and how did that change?
The design brief of the hotel was based on offering something very residential, which is why we chose to work with the London architect and interior designer office of 1508 London. They have done residential buildings such as apartments and private villas in the past, and they understood our vision for creating something timeless.
The design brief throughout this pandemic did not change. At one point we considered changing the layout of the restaurant to allow for social distancing, but we eventually decided against it as we wanted the layout to make sense in non-COVID times.
What do you hope your reopened hotel will add to the London hotel landscape? How do you see business and leisure demand playing out over the next six months, a year, three years? A central location and large ballroom space points to business, but your closeness to Knightsbridge and Hyde Park also suggests the hotel is going after two markets hand in hand.
For us it is very important that we set Carlton Tower to be seen within the local market as a luxury hotel, rubbing our elbows with the top players in London. As far as business demand, that is all dependent on how the travel restrictions look.
London will always be a market that is driven 365 days a year between the corporate traveler, the leisure traveler and the group traveler, so I am confident that once travel will come back, London will be one of the first European markets to really rebound.
Your hotel receives a lot of guests from the Middle East. How is that business at the moment, and what do you expect of it?
Like any Knightsbridge hotel, we have key feeder markets from the Middle East, America and Europe, and we also see a ton of domestic business travelers. Obviously, we want to be an international hotel but, also, we wish to be part of the London scene and be recognized as a neighborhood hotel.
Any Knightsbridge hotel sees a lot of Middle Eastern business in the summer. Currently with the travel restrictions, all the markets are hindered in getting their main international markets into London, so this is not just from the Middle East but from all over the world.
How are you negotiating the strange balance seen now between demand and average daily rate and what are the struggles to generate positive cash flow at the moment?
We are repositioning the hotel at the moment, so we are focusing more on our new ADR positioning versus the already very limited demand, but we want to get our service level right and focus on where the hotel is going to be better positioned down the road.
Talk a little of your own career, and what are the main items on your agenda as regional vice president, Northern Europe? Will we see more Jumeirah developments in that region?
I chose hospitality because I love making people happy and creating memorable experiences. Joining the Carlton Tower in London was a personal challenge I was excited to take on since it was at a time where the focus was to reposition the hotel within the luxury set of London and Paris which, in my opinion, is the most competitive market when it comes to ultra-luxury hotels. That’s what intrigued me about this project.
Jumeirah has a strong will of developing and getting more assets on board. There are currently many talks happening down the pipeline to be continued in Europe. We acquired the Capri Palace in 2019 [in Italy], and we are currently looking at other properties in the European regions. Hopefully by later this year we will have some more news to announce.