An aeronautical engineer and a mechanical engineer are not the obvious founders for a Dubai holiday home business, and what they carried across has little to do with aviation. Engineering treats variation as the problem to be solved, and a holiday home produces variation constantly: different guests every few nights, different faults, and a calendar that behaves differently in each season. First Class Property Management was built on the view that most of that can be written down, measured, and repeated.
Two Engineers and a Single Apartment
The company started in Dubai in 2020, from one apartment. Its founders are Rohollah Rohparwar, a German national who holds a BSc in Aeronautical Engineering and worked at Airbus before moving into management consulting, and Luís Santo, a Portuguese national with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering whose consulting career ran across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.
Neither background is a hospitality one, which is the detail worth noticing. Engineering assumes that a reliable outcome comes from a documented procedure rather than from a talented individual having a good day, while consulting adds the habit of asking what a process costs and what it returns.
Applied to a property portfolio, that thinking produces the same question at every step: what is the standard, how is it checked, and what happens when it is not met.
Systematising a Guest Stay: What That Involves in Practice
Most holiday home operations are assembled from parts that work in isolation: a cleaner, a handyman, a pricing tool, and a phone that someone answers. Systematising the operation means defining the handovers between those parts and giving each a standard that can be checked.
Guest contact is one of the clearest examples. Every property is assigned a dedicated Guest Experience Manager, a named person rather than a rotating queue, and that line opens on WhatsApp two days before arrival and stays open until departure.
Guests are met at the property in person wherever that is practical, and self check-in is held as a contingency rather than the default, so an arrival follows a procedure rather than a message.
Pricing follows the same logic. Nightly rates are set with AI-powered dynamic pricing and reviewed daily by pricing specialists, which puts the arithmetic on the software and leaves the interpretation of an event week or an unusual booking pace to someone who knows the market.
Reporting is fixed rather than requested, so owners follow bookings and the calendar in an app while a financial statement is issued on the 15th of each month.
What Does the Record Show?
Scale is what separates a claim from a record, since a routine holding across hundreds of properties has been tested in a way a handful of well-run units cannot test it. As of July 2026, First Class Property Management manages more than 700 properties across Dubai.
Compliance is the first place to look, since Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism (DET, formerly DTCM) licenses every holiday home in the city before it can host a paying guest. The operator reports zero fines from the regulator since the company was founded in 2020.
A clean record at that scale rests on each registration being filed correctly and kept current, rather than reviewed once a year when a renewal falls due.
Guest ratings describe the other half of the record. The company reports an Airbnb rating of 4.9 from 12,344 reviews as of June 2026, a volume at which a weak turnover routine tends to appear in the score rather than average away.
Neither figure predicts what an individual property will do, since results vary with unit type, building quality, and layout. What they describe is consistency at scale, which is what a process-led operation is built to produce.
What Process Cannot Standardise
A systems-led operation is not an automated one, and the distinction is worth holding when assessing any operator.
Written procedure handles the repeatable part of hospitality well, covering turnovers, response windows, compliance filings, and the reporting calendar, though it cannot settle whether a complaint deserves a refund, or whether a rate should hold through a quiet week whose cause the data does not yet show.
Judgement fills that space, and attention is finite in any operation, so the routines that are written down free up the attention the unusual cases need.
That is the reasonable case for engineers running a hospitality business. The value is not process discipline as an idea, which any operator can claim, but the fact that a documented process leaves a record, and a record is something an owner can ask to see before signing
anything. Backgrounds make a good story, though the checkable evidence is what an owner should be reading.