Mazin Alabdulkarim
Managing Partner, The Hotelier Office.
The light
Mazin runs a hotels consultancy in Riyadh and writes publicly about the part of hospitality owners discover late: how a standard lands on the bill. A brand promise is a cost structure, and the gap between the two is where a hotel investment goes wrong.
He also writes about why a hotel is a different kind of asset from the rest of a property portfolio, with a much shorter list of plausible buyers when the time comes: real estate investment trusts, sovereign funds, family offices. That is an unfashionable thing to say out loud in a market building a great many rooms.
For an owner weighing a serviced or branded residential play against a straight lease, it is the right conversation to have before the design is fixed rather than after.