Hotelsupplygroup.com aims to become a major international business-to-business e-commerce supplier to the hotel and catering industry. It will achieve this goal by initially marketing a broad range of goods to over 5,000 independent hotels currently under contract to Leisureplanet.com, a leading international online travel services company. The offers will be provided exclusively to these hotels both through the e-commerce platform, embodied at the hotelsupplygroup.com website, and through more traditional methods such as catalog and other offline marketing campaigns. An initial mail-out of over 5,000 catalogs in the appropriate local languages is being sent to independent hotels in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Spain and Germany.
Clive Kabatznik, Chief Executive Officer of Leisureplanet Holdings, said, "The official launch of hotelsupplygroup.com marks a further expansion of our Internet related activities. This business-to-business e-commerce venture allows us to inexpensively leverage Leisureplanet.com's unmatched international independent hotel database. By offering these hotels the ability to access products at prices normally available to large chain hotel buyers, we provide them with a value proposition that will be hard to beat.
"We believe that our unique access to independent hotels worldwide, along with the ability of InterCommerce Trading to supply quality goods at highly competitive prices will provide an excellent springboard for the successful launch and future growth of this new venture."
Charles Edelstein, President of InterCommerce Trading, LLC (ICT), 49% partners with LPHL (51%) in the hotelsupplygroup.com joint venture, expressed enthusiasm for the move noting his company's commitment to create a "streamlined Internet platform that will attract thousands of other non-chain hotels and catering companies" to the "exclusivity of ICT price value deals never before available to independent owners and operators. We're giving independent hotel properties a new level of purchasing clout!," Edelstein concluded.
Leisureplanet Holdings, Ltd. LPHL is a publicly traded company, focusing on investing in non-US, Internet-related businesses. Its current holdings include a majority stake in Leisureplanet.com, a leading Internet travel services provider and a 33% stake in Magnolia Broadband, a company developing unique broadband fixed wireless access products in unlicensed radio spectrums, as well as businesses in various industries including value-added convenience foods and leisure products. The company recently announced that it is in negotiations to sell its stake in its South African listed subsidiary. The current value of this stake is approximately $38 million.
InterCommerce Trading, LLC (ICT), creates business-to-business and business-to-consumer channels for a broad range of consumer goods, including discount and closeout merchandise. ICT recently acquired SM International, Inc., a Staten Island-based trading company specializing in sourcing goods for large multi-national discount chains. ICT's joint ventures, in addition to hotelsupplygroup.com, include Category Manager(sm), a revolutionary Internet buying platform servicing one of Europe's largest retailers. ICT also founded , which combines a traditional "bricks & mortar" retail operation in Kennebunkport, ME, with a "clicks & mortar" online store, and recently acquired BCI International, Toms River, NJ, a leading producer of bridal shows and is "webizing" the bridal business by repositioning the company as .