A newly opened resort with no presence in Spain. Five years later, a top-ten source market.
Vakkaru Maldives is a high-end luxury hotel in the Baa Atoll. Morii’s founder represented it in the Spanish market for five years, building that market from nothing.
Spain’s rank among the resort’s international source markets
Of continuous representation in Spain
Value of a single multigenerational reservation
Spanish luxury travel agencies contracted
MICE and incentive houses opened
The resort was open. The markets were not.
Vakkaru Maldives had opened and the product was finished. What it did not have was distribution: a set of source markets that understood the property well enough to sell it. Spain was one of them — a market with real appetite for high-end long-haul, and nobody on the ground to work it.
Building that presence from the Maldives would have meant hiring into a market eight thousand kilometres away, for a share of business nobody could yet size. The resort approached us instead.
Over-water pool suite and beach pool suite. Images courtesy of Vakkaru Maldives.
Four moves, in order
Signed a representation agreement
Vakkaru Maldives appointed us to represent the property in Spain — one accountable party for the market, working to the resort’s standards, rather than a distributor among many.
Designed a contract for the Spanish market
Spanish agencies buy on different terms to the UK or Germany. Rather than apply the template used in other markets, we worked with the resort’s commercial team to build contracting that matched how this market actually books. That came first, because without it the agencies had nothing to sell.
Signed the luxury travel trade
Spain’s high-end leisure business runs through a limited number of luxury travel agencies and travel designers. We contracted fifty of them — not a mailing list, but signed agreements, property training and a named contact at each one.
Opened the incentive houses
Then the ten Spanish MICE houses placing high-end incentive travel — a channel most leisure representation never touches, and the one that brings group business at volume.
Not one kind of guest. Four.
Honeymooners. Couples travelling together in pairs and small groups. Families. And the bookings that only a market you know intimately will hand you — multigenerational parties of thirty or more, reserved a year out, at values reaching €150,000 for a single stay.
Honeymoon
Couples
Travelling in pairs and small groups
Families
Multigenerational
Parties of 30+, up to €150,000
Share of Spanish room nights across the mandate.
Over five years, Spain became a top-ten international source market for Vakkaru Maldives.
A market that did not appear on the resort’s board reporting ended up among the ones that did. That is what representation is for.
The years that shaped the experience
A selection. The hotel career began in 1997 with sales and marketing roles in Karachi and Dubai; the posts below are the ones that built the commercial method we bring to a property today.
Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, Muscat
Cluster Director of Sales & Marketing · 2015–2016
The Westin & Le Méridien Bahrain City Centre
Complex Director of Sales · 2014–2015
Sheraton Addis, a Luxury Collection Hotel
Director of Sales & Marketing, then Executive Assistant Manager, then Area Director of Sales & Marketing, East & South Africa · 2005–2014
Sheraton Deira & Jebel Ali International, Dubai
Director of Sales · 2001–2004
Sales and marketing roles inside international luxury and upper-upscale brands, where standards are set centrally and the selling is done locally. It is why we start from what a Director of Sales actually needs — why an independent property gets brand-standard discipline without the brand, and why a branded property gets the local presence a global sales office rarely reaches.
If your property is in the position Vakkaru Maldives was in — or you simply want to enter and grow the Spanish and Portuguese market — the conversation is a short one.
Twenty minutes on what Spain and Portugal are currently worth to you, and what it would take to change that.