Transcorp Hotels Abuja has again done its symbolic Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the hotel lobby to the delight of guests. The MD/CEO of Transcorp Hotels Plc Mrs. Dupe Olusola during an interview at the sidelines of the event said the hotel’s bespoke event centre will commissioned in Q1, 2024. She also spoke on the Christmas offerings from the hotel among other issues. Excerpt.
What is the Significance of the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony event?
First, it is to appreciate our quests. We want to give people the opportunity to enter the Christmas season with us. We want people to be merry and have a feeling of hospitality. For us, it is the beginning of Christmas. So, once we do this, everything just changes. So, from the beginning of December, we will start to play music in our lobby, and some of our staff have the Christmas hat on. This is because we want to just come into this space, be happy, and have that spirit of thanksgiving, celebration, and appreciation having gone through the entire year. Transcorp Hilton welcomes everyone to just come and spend time with us. Every year we do this and give back as well.
Beyond this exercise, what else are you giving back to your loyal customers?
Constantly, we are giving back. You can see that we are always trying to improve. If you come into the lobby, we have incorporated drinks for people who come into the lobby to just experience the hospitality that we give. We have a lot of promotions coming up over the Christmas period. We want people to come and have their downtime, relax with their families, and eat at all our outlets. From the Piano Bar to the Bukka, the Pool Side, and more. As you relax into the Christmas period, we have so many offerings. We have a list of activities across the hotel channels. We have a lot of comedy streams, drama, and entertainment. We are constantly looking at ways to give back. We engage the children and also give back to the society. We give out soaps and food to the communities as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We are involved in the community that we do business in.
What other packages do you have for the less privileged?
We are involved very actively in giving back to the community. We are doing stuff with the less privileged children. We had a progamme with UNDP earlier this year. We give back to the girl child through mentoring and we also do a soap programme which I mentioned earlier. For every guest that comes into the hotel, the bars of soap that they use, we recircle and put them together to give back to the community. The same thing we do with food as well. There are different programmes we do across the country. We also give back 10 percent of our profit before tax and invest in entrepreneurship across in Nigeria. We are constantly giving back and looking for ways to give back. That’s important to us.
December is usually a downtime for most hotels in Nigeria because a lot of people travel out of the cities for vacation and conferences are usually low. Transcorp might also be impacted. What are you doing to keep the occupancy level high?
COVID has forced us to look inward. Before now, most people would be on the plane to other countries for everything but when COVID happened, people couldn’t go out of Nigeria or their local community. We also took advantage of that and invested in the hotel and new offerings. This means that you can come with your family over the weekend and spend time. Even if you don’t want to stay in the hotel, there is a lot that you can do. From swimming to tennis, squash, gym, spa and more. We are constantly innovating because we don’t take for granted our leadership position. We are constantly thinking of what to give to our community and meet customers’ expectations. We work to keep people coming back to the hotel year in year out and day in day out. If you go to any of our restaurants, you will have a magnificent buffet. So have so many options. We have local meals, traditional meals, and international meals. We have a Nigerian-themed night where you can eat ordinary meals like roasted corn, boiled corn etc. If you go poolside, you can find roasted plantains, suya, and all of those. We are constantly offering new things to our guests.
Also coming soon is our Christmas village in partnership with JAV. It’s a complete family entrainment. We have a massive number of families visiting the village – both locally and internationally.
Tell us about 2024, what are you looking at in terms of new offerings?
We are super excited about 2024. One of the first things we will be doing in 2024 is to open our new event centre. This event centre is on our premises and has a capacity of 3,500 people. This means we can host very huge event. If you followed this year, so many events happened outside of Nigeria. Countries like Morocco, Egypt, South Africa etc. There is no reason why Nigeria shouldn’t host these international events. So, we are excited about our upcoming event center. From this event center, we will be able to host bigger international conferences. This is not just important for us as a hotel but for us as an economy. The more of those events that we have, the more we employ more people, and the more we can cater to our community and increase the revenue of the country. That’s very important for us. Beyond that, we will continue to improve customer experiences that deliver excellence to stakeholders.
