Emirates ties its hospitality
to large sponsorships
Eddie Lim is the Australian country manager for the Dubai-based airline Emirates, which has an immense corporate hospitality program. Lim said that in Australia, the company’s main corporate hospitality events were tied in with its various large sponsorships covering the Victoria Racing Club (VRC), the Australian Jockey Club (AJC), and the Melbourne (MSO), Sydney (SSO) and West Australian (WASO) Symphony Orchestras.
In terms of racing, Lim said Emirates’ sponsorships with the VRC and AJC provided ideal opportunities to highlight the importance that the company placed on providing its guests with memorable, sensory experiences – whether it be in the air or on the ground.
He highlighted the fact that the marquees in which Emirates hosted its guests at these racing carnivals were becoming legendary for their levels of luxury and originality. Lim said that for this year’s marquees the company planned to have a New Zealand country lodge theme, to align with the recent launch of Emirates’ services to Christchurch. The company hosted approximately 200 guests in its marquee each day of the AJC Easter Carnival in Sydney and each day of the Melbourne Cup Carnival, Lim said.
For the symphony orchestra corporate hospitality, Lim said that the three sponsorships provided opportunities to treat top customers and valued partners to “the Emirates experience”. The airline hosted several hospitality nights every year with each symphony, inviting guests to enjoy magnificent concerts and exclusive cocktail receptions. He said Emirates hosted a range of events with each orchestra, ranging from intimate pre-concert dinners for 20 to post-concert cocktail parties for 200.
On top of these, the company’s sponsorship of Collingwood Football Club (CFC) also provided opportunities to entertain guests, albeit in a totally different setting, allowing Emirates and its guests to attend some of the most exciting football games of the AFL season, Lim said. This corporate hospitality tended to be for smaller groups, he said.
Close working relationship
Lim said that Emirates worked closely with its sponsorship partners. He said that although the company did not sponsor events or organisations solely for the associated hospitality, when corporate hospitality was an important part of a deal it liked to work closely with the organisation to arrange the very best offerings.
Lim said that Emirates would team up with the sponsored organisations to create exclusive events that offered the best in catering, entertainment, and service to guests – the very things that they would find if they were flying with Emirates, he said. He added that sponsorships were chosen mainly for the media coverage they delivered, however Emirates viewed corporate hospitality as the “icing on the cake”.
Lim qualified this by saying that Emirates felt that corporate hospitality was one of the best ways to share “the Emirates experience” with existing and potential partners and customers. He said that all of Emirates’ big sponsorships included a corporate hospitality component that allowed it to host guests at a specific number of events at no additional charge. In addition, Lim said it often invested extra resources in building lavish corporate hospitality areas and offerings that well exceeded the basic hospitality provisions included in its original sponsorship agreements.
Lim also commented that Emirates used corporate hospitality both to foster relationships with existing customers and partners, and to build relationships with prospective ones. He said that its guest lists were created with this split in mind and generally included representatives from its entire stakeholder base, which comprised travel agents, loyal individual and corporate customers, corporate partners, and media.
In terms of its preferred style of corporate hospitality, Lim said that it had to mirror Emirates’ product offering. For this reason, it insisted on events that reflected its award-winning service, entertainment and catering. Its preference was for events that delighted the senses and brought like-minded people together for social and networking purposes, whether they be classical music concerts, football finals, or long and indulgent afternoons at the races.
© pando publications 2005
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