Five-Star Comfort Powered by Intelligent Building Insights

A five-star resort in Dubai set out to deliver exceptional guest comfort while meeting its efficiency and energy management goals. It turned to Honeywell for help, and the results have exceeded expectations.

The Challenge

• Reduce energy use year over year throughout the 750,000 sq ft resort
• Monitor and improve progress toward sustainability goals
• Transition from reactive to proactive maintenance
• Increase visibility of operations and key performance indicators (KPIs) at the portfolio level
• Assess whether to expand capabilities to other properties

The Solution

As Dubai's closest beachfront resort to downtown, this five-star property combines spacious accommodations, nine acclaimed dining venues, and expansive recreation across a 14-acre stretch of natural coastline. To uphold this standard of five-star service, the property needed a smarter way to manage comfort, energy efficiency, and operations across its 237 guest rooms, suites, and amenities. Leadership wanted deeper insight, efficiency, and responsiveness through an advanced building management system and predictive analytics that could extend across multiple properties.

The goal was to reduce energy use year over year, improving both operating costs and sustainability performance.

Achieving that meant giving the facilities team better insight into how energy was being used throughout the 750,000 sq ft property, along with clearer visibility into equipment performance to reduce the cost and disruption of reactive maintenance. Leadership also needed to monitor KPIs remotely, particularly as other properties consider adopting these capabilities.

The resort engaged Honeywell for a one-year program built on Honeywell Forge for Buildings. The property already operates a third-party building management system (BMS) and Honeywell INNCOM guestroom automation to optimize guestroom energy use. Honeywell Forge integrates with these systems to provide cloud-based analytics of sitewide data and performance, through two modules: Carbon & Energy Manager and Predictive Maintenance.

After esablishing the building's performance baseline, Carbon & Energy Manager uses machine learning to analyze sitewide energy use, surfacing recommendations for improvement and the option to let the system automatically adjust energy use based on real-time needs and conditions.

Predictive Maintenance uses continuous analytics to identify the earliest anomalies in equipment performance, flagging maintenance needs before disruptions occur and before guests notice.

Together, these tools give staff a comprehensive view of energy use and equipment performance across the site, supporting improvements in both areas. KPIs, benchmarks, and trends are documented as clear visuals, making it easier for multiple teams to assess results and plan next steps.

After the first year of deployment, the program has delivered on expectations, and the resort is now evaluating how to scale these capabilities to additional properties in the region.

The Results

• Machine learning delivered year-over-year energy savings by autonomously implementing a dynamic chilled water reset, eliminating the need for manual programming and seasonal tuning (290.5 MWh, 195 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions)
• Baseline quality checks rapidly identified major sources of energy waste: sensor issues for central AHU and humidity, 43 zones with excess setpoints, and a chiller bypass valve stuck 100% open
• The facilities team shifted from reactive to proactive maintenance
• The building management team now has easy access to clear, actionable KPIs and recommendations, including preventive service to support asset longevity