Step into this snazzy new airport hotel and you’ll soon feel like you’re in a luxurious oasis some place else.
By Veronica Johnston
A room in the new Sudima Auckland Airport hotel really is like no other. A Kauri tree motif greets you as you swipe your room key outside the door. Then the invigorating black, grey and cream colours, with splashes of orange, strike you as soon as you walk in. What pieces of furniture there are hold court in the uncluttered room. Each piece is there for a reason, not for decoration. Not that the room lacks furniture, it simply has everything you need without the excess.
Opening its doors for the first time this month, this is a stylish hotel with a conscience. Every effort has gone into ensuring the hotel is kind to the planet from the size of the rooms to the meals. The rooms are more compact than spacious, and there are no balconies because they take up too much space. Don’t expect the windows to open either as this can make a room harder to heat or cool.
Every window in the hotel has been double glazed though to work in tandem with the air-conditioning system that operates on the energy generated from the kitchen chillers and deep freezers. The system also cleans and filters the air while keeping the room temperature at a comfortable 20°C.
Pour yourself a cup of the fair trade, organic coffee and you’ll soon notice there’s no mini bar in your room. Why have mini bars when you can have 24-hour free service instead? This free beverage-delivery service allows guests to order a drink from the hotel bar and pay the usual bar price for it, not an inflated mini bar one. Making guests order through the bar also means the duty manager can better control the amount of alcohol drunk. So if intoxicated guests in room 107 order a second bottle of whiskey, the duty manager has the right to refuse to them. A 24-hour food delivery service still incurs a room service fee though.
But enough about what the rooms don’t have and back to what they do. You’ll find each is smartly decorated with original artwork, sleek side tables, a smart-looking armchair and a 32-inch LCD television. Access to wireless broadband abounds, the television has a media hub so guests can plug in their laptops and iPods, the linen is 100 per cent cotton and the mattresses have been custom-built especially by Sealy.
Finding a firm-edged mattress that’s just right proved a real challenge for the team at Sudima, says general manager Stuart Long. “Believe me – we’ve sat on so many beds,” he says smiling. “The owner, Sudesh Jhunjhnuwala, particularly wanted a firm edge because he says every time he goes into a hotel room and sits on the edge of the bed it tips.”
So a good night’s sleep is guaranteed at the four-star hotel situated just two minutes drive from Auckland Airport. 153 rooms grace the premises including 26 executive rooms and one suite. There’s also an indoor heated pool, fully equipped gym, and the Visaya bar and restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Being so close to the airport means business travellers are the hotel’s main target market so it’s no surprise that the conferencing rooms are state-of-the-art. Vidcom, the hotel’s audio-visual equipment services supplier, has installed a fully automated system which includes a touch panel control of the screens and projectors and a selection of input devices. It’s highly flexible too. A mobile wireless touch screen can control individual or combined rooms, allowing a faster turn-around of the rooms, which in turn increases their availability and maximises their usage.
But it’s no good having the best technology if you don’t have the best staff. And that’s where Long’s down-to-earth management style really comes into play. Having run hotels for more than 50 years, Long is a great believer in keeping the management structure flat with an executive housekeeper, executive chef, office manager, food and beverage manager and chief engineer. The five of them basically run the hotel.
Long also encouraged each department head to hire their own staff members. “They’ve got to work with them not me,” he says. Though he gave his management team plenty of advice including looking for a second-in-charge who could easily step into their role. “You need to employ somebody who wants your job, even if that means never standing in the way of anyone who wants a promotion and encouraging your staff to seek better things.”
It’s the hotel’s customers that are foremost in his thoughts however. “One another thing I feel very strongly about after 50 years in the industry, are the people,” he says. “I’ve got nothing against accountants – it’s just that it’s important that hotels are about people, and the guest comes first. They might not always be right but they’re still paying the bill and they’ve got to come first. So what we’ll be trying to do is anticipate what people want. If they want something different, we’ll give it to them.”
And putting people first is exactly what the menu has been designed to do. “I’ve been very insistent on that,” says Long. “I want a reasonable portion sized meal to be served without delay. We’re not a five-star restaurant and we’re not a five-star hotel. People in an airport environment don’t want to wait for 45 minutes while their meal is cooked. It’s got to be a menu that can be produced quickly.”
The menu is wide-ranging with fewer meal options to ensure speed-of-service, quality and a healthy portion size. The restaurant atmosphere is informal rather than slack or stuffy so people can move through efficiently. And when the number of hotel guests exceeds 40, a buffet will run alongside the a la carte menus at breakfast and dinner to help speed up the service for those who have a plane to catch.
This is no ordinary buffet though. Small, individual dishes rather than big trays of readymade traditional buffet food will be on offer. So instead of a big pot of butter chicken stewing away on the buffet table, guests can select a small dish from the six or seven available. It’s more work for the staff as they’ll need to keep topping up the supplies, but it’ll taste fresher.
So all that’s left now is to get the word out. The hotel’s handy airport location means it will easily attract those who leave their bookings to the last minute. Hotel display screens displayed in the airport as well as a 24-hour free shuttle bus ferrying people to and from the airport every half hour will help capture them.
For those who like to book ahead, the hotel website is up and running, the direct mail-outs have been posted and positions on Wotif.com and the like have been secured.
But with China fast becoming the biggest outbound tourism market in the world, and daily flights between China and Auckland Airport starting soon, we reckon the hotel is more likely to be short of beds than people.
It’s a wild kitchen and bar
Designing the kitchen and bar in the new Sudima hotel was a welcome challenge for the talented and experienced team at Wildfire Design.
Having chef-trained designers on a kitchen design team certainly helps when it comes to creating and building commercial kitchens. It was an extra bonus for Sudima Auckland Airport general manager Stuart Long when he hired the team from Wildfire Design to design and build the hotel’s new kitchen and bar. What he got was the best all-round solutions in highly functional, polished and streamlined spaces that work with the chefs toiling so hard in them.
That’s how Nils Danielsen of Wildfire Design would describe the new brassiere-style kitchen and bar his team developed at the Sudima Auckland Airport hotel.
“Our brief was to design a highly functional kitchen that could be seen by the diners with separate production areas for preparing meals for the hotel’s restaurant, 24-hour room service offering and plated banquets.”
As the kitchen would have to cope with all three services at once, Danielsen suggested a plated banquet regeneration system, which allows the chefs flexibility and control to deliver high-end, quality plated meals in an efficient and consistent manner.
Cooking the banquet meals like this also helps free up more space for a back-of-house area that can handle the room service orders, which also doubles as another service area when the kitchen is really busy. There’s also plenty of room for a separate side kitchen to handle the dirty dishes too.
Having found a solution that best copes with the different service demands of the kitchen, the next focus for the design team was the equipment the chefs would need to produce a variety of good quality food including the pizza on the room service menu. One must-have, the team suggested, was a small double deck pizza oven that can be used to quickly produce an Italian-style pizza.
The design team also had to suggest products that were cost-effective and could cope with the high pressure demands of a busy restaurant and banquet scenario, especially with the Rugby World Cup coming up. The dishwashing area alone has to be able to cope with 200 guests in one of the conference rooms and possibly another 200 people in the restaurant. Luckily, one of the things the hotel management did not want to compromise on was buying cheaper products. “They wanted to buy quality equipment for a longer term solution so we showed them the options,” says Danielsen.
Naturally keeping a busy kitchen like this clean would be another challenge so Danielsen’s next suggestion was to plinth mount the whole front area. This is simply a more hygienic way of installing the ovens, fridges and sinks as they sit on a 150 high base, so you don’t need to clean under them and can avoid the dirt traps. “It’s very functional as the equipment stays in its place,” Danielsen says. “It’s bolted altogether so you end up with a nice, neat cooking line where the chefs can’t drag their equipment everywhere.”
The designers also had input regarding the floor finishes in the kitchen and they recommended a company called Flostone Industrial Flooring. The non-slip, one-piece, robust resin floor has gone down over the concrete base without the usual joints you get with tiles or polyester. The flooring has been so popular that it’s also just been laid in Eden Park’s new South Stand re-development. The durable Peran STB flooring system used is solvent free, hard-wearing and easy to clean.
The end result from floor to ceiling is a kitchen that is open, spacious and highly productive. Just how any chef designing their own commercial kitchen would want it to be, of course.