Citymax Hotels, a key component of Landmark Group’s hospitality division, offers the facilities and services of a four-star hotel at three-star prices. Defining itself as a hi-tech revolution in business hospitality, Citymax Hotels currently operates three hotels in Dubai, all of which are designed to exclude the unnecessary frills that typically increase the price of an overnight stay. The brand’s primary aim is for its properties to redirect savings to guests without sacrificing comfort, design or functionality.
A different league
The company’s distinguishing trait is first and foremost its modern elegance and polished style. The overall design of the hotels creates a contemporary appeal, ensuring functionality and simplicity. Deliberately unostentatious, the style of the hotels ensures a modern and accommodating environment that openly expresses Citymax’s core belief of offering value for money.
[C]itymax’s primary aim is for its properties to redirect savings to guests without sacrificing comfort, design or functionality
Citymax Hotels offers high-end facilities that would ordinarily be found in a five-star resort, including 24-hour room service, free Wi-Fi across the hotel, full concierge services, a full buffet breakfast, complimentary tea and coffee facilities, free shuttles to beaches and shopping centres, first-rate gym facilities and a swimming pool. Offering such amenities at reasonable, three-star prices without ever compensating on quality or service places Citymax in a completely different bracket to that of your standard midmarket hotel.
Household names
In any hotel, food and drink is a key driver behind the entire guest experience, with a good or bad meal easily shaping the guest’s perception of the hotel as a whole. Recognising that the quality and variety of restaurant choice is becoming an increasingly important factor to the discerning traveller, Citymax Hotels has set itself the unprecedented challenge of offering fine dining facilities in its three-star hotels. While this was not a simple task, after only three years the company is witnessing steady growth, with consistently high room occupancy rates and ever-increasing popularity of restaurants and bars across the group.
The standard all-day restaurant, which is often the only dining facility available in midmarket hotels, has been subsidised across all Citymax hotels. The company offers a variety of restaurants and bars in every one of its properties, thereby enabling the brand to cater for a much wider audience. It has succeeded in carving out a firm, but niche, position within the highly competitive dining-out market in Dubai, where the Citymax dining establishments now exist as independent brands: they hold identities so strong that they have successfully become household names within the local community.
Cost-conscious travellers
The profile of a typical traveller expected to visit the Middle East in the future is becoming harder to define. With a larger number of visitors now on tighter budgets, the region has seen a rise in economy-class travellers seeking out low travel costs. Citymax has been working hard to fill such a gap in the market within this particularly affluent region.
As such, Citymax Hotels is witnessing a rapidly increasing number of bookings from such business travellers. Those looking for a good deal in a central city location, without compromising on the comforts and services to which they have become accustomed, are turning to the group for their reasonably priced corporate travel requirements. Citymax, therefore, has developed a keen understanding of the needs of the modern traveller: ensuring that its hotels are clean, spacious and contemporary, Citymax also offers complimentary Wi-Fi as standard and has created a mobile-responsive website that is ideal for those booking travel while on the move.
The group has also found that such demand is increasing due to the increased presence of budget airlines in the region. In the first quarter of 2014, passenger traffic rose by 11.4 percent to a record 18.36 million travellers, making Dubai’s airports the busiest in the world for the very first time.
Impressive portfolio
The company’s portfolio currently boasts three properties. Citymax Hotels Bur Dubai, the largest of the three with 691 rooms, is situated in the heart of Dubai’s historical district. Located close to the Khalid Bin Walid metro station, the thriving Karama shopping and restaurant district, and only a short taxi ride from Dubai Mall – the world’s largest shopping centre – Citymax Bur Dubai serves as the first choice for those wishing to spend their money in Dubai’s luxury shops, rather than on its hotels.
The hotel’s dining portfolio includes Claypot restaurant, which won the 2014 BBC Good Food Award for Best Casual Indian Restaurant. Guests can also enjoy Pan-Asian cuisine at Sizzling Wok, relaxed dining and entertainment at The Huddle Sports Bar & Grill, or catch up with friends and colleagues at the more casual City Café and Lavazza coffee shop.
Across the city, adjacent to the Mall of the Emirates, Citymax Hotels Al Barsha attracts both business and leisure travellers to its 376 rooms. The hotel is ideally situated in close proximity to Dubai Media City, the region’s largest media hub, as well as to Jumeirah Beach Residence and The Walk; two of Dubai’s premier lifestyle destinations. Citymax Al Barsha’s dining facilities include The Huddle Sports Bar & Grill, Maxx Music Bar & Grill, City Café, and the Lavazza coffee shop.
Citymax Hotels Sharjah is located near the world-renowned Sharjah Gold Centre, as well as the city’s traditional souks. In close proximity to both the Dubai and Sharjah international airports, the hotel features 239 guestrooms as well as a selection of flexible meeting rooms. It too features a Sizzling Wok restaurant and City Café.
In the pipeline
Citymax Hotels is now planning to expand its position within the midmarket segment of the United Arab Emirates’ hotel industry. Additional rooms are desperately needed within the three-star category, and so the hotel group already has three new properties planned for Al Barsha, Business Bay and Ras Al Khaimah. These new properties are all in various stages of construction, but are all scheduled for completion between 2016 and 2017. The addition of these new hotels will bring the brand’s total inventory up to around 2,000 rooms.
2014 saw Citymax Hotels enjoying a string of achievements, including winning several awards. This success then continued in 2015, with the Al Barsha hotel having been voted the Best Budget Accommodation Provider, Dubai in the Business Destinations Travel Awards. Russel Sharpe, COO of Citymax Hotels, says, “Winning such a renowned travel award is not just an endorsement of quality but also a guarantee of excellence for the hotel guests, and we are delighted to have won.”
Citymax Hotels’ other recent awards include the 2014 World Travel Award for the Middle East’s Leading Budget Hotel Brand, the MENA Travel Award 2014 for Best Price Value Hotel, and the Tatweej Academy for Excellence Award for Best Budget Hotel 2014.
