A major new presence on Dundee’s hospitality scene is celebrating its first festive season determined to make up for its lost Christmas past.
The ghost of the ill-fated December 2013 launch of the £15 million Malmaison Hotel has been banished by general manager Steven Simpson and his team.
They are now steering the boutique establishment on Dundee’s waterfront through the busiest spell in its short life, with hundreds of guests pouring through its doors for festive fun.
All of this should have happened last Christmas but the Malmaison’s launch then had to be postponed because of serious flooding inside the B-listed building.
Lucrative Christmas bookings had to be cancelled and transferred to rival venues in a painful and public setback.
It was not the start that the hotel or indeed Dundee, with its lofty ambitions for the £1 billion V&A-crowned waterfront, wanted, but Steven and his team are looking forward and not back.
He believes the hotel has a lot to celebrate this Christmas and is convinced it will go forward to have an even brighter future, and play a full part in the city’s renaissance.
Speaking in the festive surroundings, the garlanded staircase sparkling all the way up to the dome, Steven, 32, said: “We are very pleased with our progress since we opened in February.
“Our 92-seat restaurant is filled one-and-a-half times at weekends, fully occupied and then half filled again, with Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtimes very popular,” he said.
“This was our target at this stage given that we are a new hotel growing our customer base with no previous record to compare with.
“Our figures show we are the third busiest brasserie in Malmaison’s chain of 13 UK hotels at weekends and are sometimes the busiest.
“We are also consistently in the top five overall, which we think is an impressive performance.
“Our function suite, which can take 150 guests, is fully booked for Christmas functions on Fridays and Saturdays and is doing pretty well on the shoulder nights of Thursdays and Sundays, which we are pleased about.
“Our 91 rooms are fully booked at weekends and less so during the week but we have an overall average occupancy level of 73.5% which we think is very reasonable in our situation.”
The occupancy level, just behind the 75% forecast figure for the UK regions, has been achieved within the hotel’s revenue-per-available-room pricing structure.
Steven is excited about Malmaison’s prospects in its unrivalled waterfront setting and is equally enthusiastic about Dundee making the most of the opportunities in its horizon.
He said: “I witnessed how Liverpool was transformed by winning the European City of Culture title in 2008, how it changed from being an old industrial city to a modern centre of culture and tourism which raised the outlook of the whole city and its people.
“I can see the same effect happening in Dundee with the V&A and the waterfront changing the whole atmosphere and perception of the place, economically and culturally.
“The Malmaison Hotel is physically right in the middle of this transformation and we intend to play a full role in making this change successful.
“This is something we are very excited about.”