On 17th January 2007, three days before the World Social Forum opened in Nairobi, a gentleman walked into the Jamia Plaza, which is located behind the Jamia Mosque in Nairobi’s Central Business District.

He walked around some of the almost 100 shops selling apparel, cosmetics, cell phones, fast foods and other merchandise on the ground floor and first floor of the building and ended up on the second floor of the Jamiat Hotel.

The Hotel’s General Manger, Festus Munyitha, says that after looking around, the man declined to leave and became the first customer of the new hotel. “We had not even got a license to open the hotel and by January we were fully booked for the next one week,” so says Munyitha.

He says the idea of having a hotel within the expansive shopping mall was hatched after the building had been put up and the owner of the building realised there were plenty of shops and had more open space.

The General Manager says the concept of having a hotel within a shopping mall is not common in Kenya but is popular in the Middle East, Asia and even Europe. “If well marketed, this concept is good for the industry,” he says.

Jamiat Hotel, which currently has four superior rooms and 31 standard rooms, plans to put up an extra floor within two years to accommodate recreational facilities such as a fitness centre and a swimming pool. Some of the features in the hotel at the moment include ample basement parking, wireless Internet connection, satellite television, a conference room, a business centre and a restaurant.

Another interesting feature of the hotel is that it has an alcohol-free and no smoking policy within public areas such as the restaurant and lobby. “We have smoke detectors in the non-smoking areas so that we can maintain the standards and protect non-smokers”, says the General Manager.

Munyitha says the hotel’s primary target market is businessmen and conference participants. He adds that the new establishment is keen on seeking customers from Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia. “We want to capture that market because they tend to be loyal customers,” he says.

Plans are also afoot to open a Jamiat Hotel comprising 12 apartments and 30 rooms in the semi-arid town of Garissa in October this year. “The demand is already there. Many humanitarian organisations based in the region are already talking to us,” says Munyitha.

“We have the same supplier and material for linen as the Intercontinental. We got our beds from the person who supplies The Serena”, says Munyitha who started his career in the hospitality industry in 1991 at the Alliance Hotels in Mombasa and also worked at Holiday Inn in Nairobi and the Mada Group of Hotels. “We may not have been graded as a five-star hotel but we provide five-star services.”

Information from: allafrica.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 12:20 am and is filed under Hotel, Real Estate. Tags: Africa Asia cosmetics Ethiopia Europe FIVE-STAR hotel food Holiday Inn Hotel Industry Hotels InterContinental Kenya Manger Middle East Nairobi New Hotel Plaza restaurant Rwanda satellite television Standards Star Hotel Tanzania wireless Internet . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.