By Courtesy Pyramisa Location, location, location: The LTI Pyramisa Aswan is on a Nile island. News Focus Achilles Heel The crisis in Greece, and the collapse of the euro, could scuttle Egypt’s plans for economic growth. River of Strife A new agreement among East African countries may spell the end of Egyptian control over the Nile . On the Block Foreign investors buy up African farmland, sparking fears of a new colonialism. By Mohamed Allouba Regional Sales Manager Emad Farid bills Pyramisa as “a 100% Egyptian company, with no foreign investment.”

By Nadine El Sayed

It’s a testament to investors’ new interest in real estate and tourism developers that Pyramisa Hotels, Resorts and Cruises leapt into the ranks of actively traded companies in 2006, allowing this major player in the Egyptian tourism scene to land at number 81 in its first appearance on the bt100.

Pyramisa, a diversified tourism operator and developer, has pleased customers and impressed both investors and analysts despite a 5.51% dip in 2006 revenues to LE 137.13 million. Investors cheered its May 3, 2007, announcement that it had reached a deal with the Egyptian Tourism Company to buy 96,800 square meters of land from in Sahl Hasheesh, near Hurghada, at a cost of LE 44 million, a move that will guarantee Pyramisa can continue to participate in the boom for leisure services along the Red Sea coast.

Founders of the Sahl Hasheesh project, the company also owns a hotel complex on an exclusive 28-acre island in Aswan and has invested in a range of real-estate developments across the country. Pyramisa started small in 1979 with a 126-room hotel — the Isis Luxor — and now operates some 6,700 rooms across the nation.

“Our chairman was into real estate only and never worked in the area of hotels until 1979, when he decided to partner in Isis Luxor. This was a great success, and helped us reach where we are today,” says Emad Farid, Pyramisa’s regional manager for sales and marketing. The company now owns hotels in Downtown Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada, along with six Nile cruise boats.

Pyramisa boasts a handful of star attractions in its portfolio. The LTI Pyramisa Isis Island Resort and Spa in Aswan is a 180-room hotel built on a 28-acre private island, featuring a small zoo and a jogging track. The group’s newest hotel is the Pyramisa Blue Lagoon, overlooking a large swimming pool on the new promenade in Hurghada, due to open in July. Another prime investment is it hotel, and partnership, in Sahl Hasheesh: “Seventeen kilometers of pure sandy beach with no construction on the beach side,” says Farid. The project is still in its construction phases and is expected to have “a sunken city beneath the water. You can go snorkeling and you would find a complete sunken city that is already built over there, six cinemas, shops, an international gambling casino and three golf courses. It is a completely self-contained resort designed from the beginning in a proper way,” he says.

The LTI Pyramisa Sahl Hasheesh has already opened 550 rooms, and expects to complete all 850 rooms soon. The Sahl Hasheesh beach is a project between “six investors, including Naguib Sawiris, Ibrahim Kamel, Sabbour and Mohamed Azab, our chairman. They decided to build a resort with the idea of international standards: no construction on the beach, which is a promenade where you can have a walk on a pure 17-kilometer stretch of sand,” says Farid.

Pyramisa also invests in real estate and is currently working on projects in Sixth of October City, Sharm El-Sheikh and Sahl Hasheesh. Pyramisa is looking into “the possibilities of acquiring hotels or apparthotels [luxury serviced apartments for short-term stay] in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, to be our first development outside Egypt,” says Farid.

The company is well diversified across the key tourism hotspots in Egypt and has chosen to position itself as a proudly “100% Egyptian” company to compete with the global giants who currently dominate the hotel and resort industry. It is a refreshing change from the standard tactic often employed by Egyptian businesses looking to compete internationally.

“The Pyramisa group is proud of being a 100% Egyptian company, with no foreign investment. It is made by Egyptian hands, run by Egyptian hands and operated with Egyptian hands,” says Farid.

“We tell people we are an Egyptian chain that is different’ — we tell tourists ‘Come and try an Egyptian chain. You are going to Egypt — why don’t you try an Egyptian chain and Egyptian warmth?’ You would find us in most tourism agencies and their brochures,” he explains.

Farid believes that Pyramisa’s success is built on two key contributors. “We have two teams who are really excellent: The first team is the board of directors, and they listen to every single detail and have very good ideas and strategies. The second team is our associates — and they are the secret of success with no doubt,” he says.

Pyramisa is currently in the execution phase of a five-year marketing plan that primarily targets foreign customers — although the group is now also preparing to launch a large-scale marketing campaign targeting Egyptians. Locals make up the fourth largest customer group in resort towns such as Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada.

Farid knows first hand that the real challenge in marketing holiday destinations is not to catch the attention of a potential customer or even to convince a holiday-maker to try one of your properties. The most challenging task is to deliver such an exceptional experience for the customer that they choose to come back time and time again. “For a client to come once is easy but for him to come again is hard,” he believes.

Given this focus on keeping its customers satisfied enough to come back again, another important factor in how Pyramisa approaches customer service and successful marketing is ensuring positive word-of-mouth promotion — a hugely important asset in the business world.

“I want my client to tell the ten people around him that they were happy; word of mouth is the strongest type of promotion you can ever do. If I tell you I went to Pyramisa and had a good time, the food and the animation were great — these few sentences are much stronger than if you hear them in an ad.

“We train our associates to deal with people, smile when they answer the phone cheerfully — just a smile, does it cost? We also teach them to say a nice word to any guest they meet,” he explains.

When asked about the company’s plans for targeting overseas markets, Farid points with a smile at a world map looming above his desk. He explains that the world is their marketing plan, although prioritized. “Every person on earth is an opportunity of sale, a person I want to approach. Everybody on earth works hard for 11 months and has only one month of vacation — I target this month, and tourism all over the world also targets this one month.” Because it is only one treasured month, companies in the industry cannot afford to get things wrong. “When you come to me on vacation, you do not expect anything wrong to happen — you have worked hard to gather this money, so you will accept nothing but the best,” he says.

Being in a service industry and selling experiences, Farid describes their business as the easiest and yet the hardest one. Although people’s needs from a good holiday are fairly easy, those needs vary widely, and anything that goes wrong in fulfilling them will result in serious damage to the hotel’s reputation and image. “If I am selling you a pen, I will tell you its qualities and price, and you get to take it home, but hotels are different. You don’t take the pen with you home, but what you buy is a service: a smile, a nice word from the young lady from housekeeping, if you are sitting in our restaurant you need somebody to be nice and courteous to you. So, how is it difficult? Everybody is different — your needs are different than mine, which makes it hard,” he explains.

To fulfill a diverse range of needs, the hotel follows a flexible strategy, without giving up their standards. “In the hospitality business, you have to cope with different tastes and give everyone what they need so that they go home happy. I listen and I customize 100% based on tastes; an Italian for instance doesn’t like hard liquor — so if I tell them that we have an all-inclusive package, why don’t we provide him with the wine instead of hard liquor? And make their pastas al dente and their pizzas thin? We do have standards and a policies and procedures book, and I believe in following books — but I am a greater believer that no book can tell you how to handle everyone,” he tells.

Finally, Farid believes that one of their secrets to success was working closely with outside collaborators and the industry as a whole. The hotel, and Farid himself, works closely with NGOs to boost the future of tourism as a whole in Egypt. “We always suggest that we [the tourism industry] all line up for one project and amalgamate our forces to have a much stronger effect — no one alone can do it, so why don’t we unify it all as a big master plan for Egypt as a whole? We also need to think about the future generations — we need to be working now for Egypt in 2030.”  bt