Dubai Airport Freezone based Roombase Deuromedia Forecasts Future Of Tech For Hospitality Business

Upon landing at the Dubai International Airport, a hotel driver greets you upon arrival and hands you a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and you begin to input your preferences for breakfast or any meal, the kind of room, temperature etc. And your wish is executed on arrival at the hotel.

At the hotel, as you enter your room, your name is flashed on the TV monitor with a welcome message and the room temperature is set to your preference with your favourite music plays on the background and a chilled welcome drink awaits you as you start to unpack.

You leave the hotel for the mall with your hotel loyalty card equipped with an RFID and a bar code reader and swipes it on a bar coded merchandise and a related ad on the product is shown on a nearby monitor. As you walk by the mall, ads that you are interested in are flashed by LCD panels nearby getting the data from your stored preferences on a card and relayed by global positioning system (GPS) on your cell phone.

After a full day wandering around the mall, you decide to come home, again hail a cab swipe a card reader showing the card driver the exact address of your hotel.

"These are the technologies that will be coming sooner than later in the deluxe hotels, and high market shopping malls in the UAE and the Gulf region," said Nadeem Al Kooliyat, Managing Director of Roombase deuromedia FZCO, the Dubai Airport Freezone regional office of an Austrian company. "We opened our office in the Freezone three years ago to service our clients in the region which include 75 hotels, shopping malls, banks and hospitals."

Other new technologies he expects to come to the UAE hospitality sector are Bluetooth push technology and Bluetooth downloads and mobile phones with bar code readers.

Mr. Kooliyat said his company supplies entertainment technologies and IPTV systems, digital telecommunications, video on demand, hotel interactive TV systems and high speed broadband internet billing system for hotels. Roombase has a worldwide turnover of XXX in 2009.

He claims a 24 per cent market share in the Gulf market which includes hotels and malls from Lebanon to India or a total 300,000 hotel rooms. In the UAE, he said they are No. 1.

"We provide 24/7 service support and maintenance to our clients through our online system and third party partners and technicians on the field. This is backed up by our 65 engineers in Austria which is connected in the system through our intelligent servers. Mr. Kooliyat said his company's competitive edge is that they offer peace of mind to their clients and end to end solutions. "Our clients can enjoy and party assured that our equipment will work and be maintained 24/7 by our office and our partners."

Why the decision to set up show at the Dubai Airport Freezone? "The Dubai Airport Freezone is a good launching pad for our company in Dubai; the administration is friendly and flexible. The proximity to the airport is a plus for us as we move a lot of electronics equipment and products in the region We would not consider relocating our office, at the Freezone we have easy access to our clients in the region," said Mr. Kooliyat.

Mr. Mohammed Suwailem, Director of Sales at the Dubai Airport Freezone said, "We are proud that Roombase, after three years of operation within the Freezone had taken advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the UAE and Gulf countries. We work hard to meet the expectations of our tenants and we are keen to receive feedback from them to further improve support and services to facilitate them in attaining their economic goals."