IHG Takes on Second Hotel at Dubai's 'Challenging' Heart of Europe Site

25.01.2024 - 06:49 / skift.com / Ihg / Josh Corder

IHG will take over the management of Dubai’s Côte d’Azur Monaco Hotel, the only operational property on The Heart of Europe project. The Heart of Europe dates back to 2008 and remains committed to opening all its 20 planned hotels, even 16 years later.

The Monaco hotel will run IHG’s voco brand, its conversion brand used for soft rebrandings. This means the hotel will plug into IHG’s loyalty and operations systems.

The rebranding will be completed before the end of the quarter and be known as voco Monaco Dubai.

To date, IHG is the only hotel operator to back The Heart of Europe development, which plans one day to have a wide range of known hospitality players running its hotels. In November 2023, IHG signed to manage the Marbella Hotel, opening in 2026, under its more up-market conversion brand — Vignette Collection.

The Heart of Europe is a component of a larger development named The World — an archipelago project situated off the Dubai coast. The overarching goal is to replicate the world map through the creation of individual man-made islands, each representing a specific country. The entire project encompasses 300 islands, with six dedicated to The Heart of Europe.

In a land that calls the world’s tallest building and the world’s largest mall home, visitors are overwhelmed by choice and stuffed with superlatives. The Heart of Europe looks to recreate the continent in miniature form with each hotel transporting guests to a particular country.

At the proposed Marbella Hotel, for example, staff will speak Spanish and clocks will be set to Spanish time.

“We are building something that is not here yet. We need 1,000 ideas of things not currently available to tourists in Dubai,” said the Kleindienst Group chairman Josef Kleindienst in an interview with Skift.

For the Monaco hotel, which opened in 2022, Kleindienst urges that the hotel has been in soft-opening all this time, intending to eventually hand it over to a hospitality operator.

“We are not a hospitality company,” explained Kleindienst. “We always decided to manage [ourselves] during soft-opening periods. We want to open as early as possible, but after the soft opening is done, we will hand hotels over to operators.”

The chairman told Skift that the Monaco hotel has been a challenge to run, and perhaps opened too soon, but that the company had to start welcoming guests so it could build its logistics teams.

“Monaco has a touristic difficulty, it’s our first hotel and near to 10 others under construction. Not many brands would like that, so it’s challenging. But it’s manageable. The construction sound cannot be as noisy as a beach but it’s challenging to keep that away from the hotel,” Kleindienst said.

“Is it perfect? No. Would we have opened