What a sensation has Apple created to China? There is a “3rd apple” theory on the Internet explaining the craziness in a funny way – “The 1st apple had tempted Eve into Serpent’s conspiracy and opened up human’s eyes to good and bad; the 2nd apple had inspired Isaac Newton to discover the law of universal gravitation; and the 3rd apple, brought Chinese worship of face, pretentiousness, and machiavellianism to full play.”
Forget bunk beds. In Hong Kong, capsule hotels just might be the next big thing for budget travelers. Hoping to capitalize on what seems like an ideal conundrum — a dense metropolis where both occupancy rates and per-night prices are high and centrally located land to develop new hotels is scarce — Galaxy Stars Limited, a local company, has started offering pod-beds for sale.
The Sydney Morning Herald points out that when China hacked into Google and Intel their motives were pretty clear, but that this most recent attack on iBahn, took some looking into. Partnered with companies like Cisco, Verizon, and iPass — iBahn offers secure Internet access to millions of global hotel guests every day. One of iBahn's largest clients is Marriott International, which holds meetings for multinational companies.
Mirvac Group has sold its hotel management business Mirvac Hotels & Resorts and associated investments to a consortium including Accor Asia Pacific and Ascendas for 327 million Australian dollars (US$327 million). The transaction includes 46 hotels across Australia and New Zealand and represents a 15.1% premium to the carrying value of those assets as at 30 June.
What could have been a dull security conference in Canada yesterday turned into a pretty interesting one when a former diplomat discussed how the Chinese government gets at foreign political targets and high-profile business people. The Chinese government uses "sexpionage" - often in hotels - to get the job done, former Canadian diplomat Brian McAdam told conference goers, according to accounts by Canadian news outlets including the National Post and Vancouver Sun.
Several U.S. hotel chains are ramping up their push into China, pledging to build dozens of properties there in the next three years. Sheraton, owned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, announced on Wednesday plans for nine new resorts in greater China by the end of 2012. With nearly 4,000 rooms, a 10th resort in Macao, a special administrative region of China, will become Sheraton's biggest hotel and Starwood's largest resort.
EVENING was falling in the old Japanese capital of Kyoto, and I was tucking myself into a container slightly larger than a refrigerator. I pulled down the shade and, after a bit of contorting, lay down, the wall a few inches from my feet. It was a dainty little space, about 3 ¼ feet wide and 6 ½ feet long, charmingly traditional with rice-paper latticework and two woven-reed mats. I felt like an origami crane as I folded my 6-foot-2-inch frame into this “tatami capsule.”
The expansion in China of hotel chains including Hilton Worldwide and Hyatt Hotels Corp. may be undermined by low demand as four in 10 rooms sit empty. China’s occupancy rate was 61 percent in the first nine months of this year, the same as the year-earlier period and the lowest in Asia after India among 15 countries tracked by STR Global, a consulting and research group. In Shanghai, only about half of hotel rooms were filled, compared with more than 80 percent for Singapore and Hong Kong, it said.
China's hotel market is expected to overtake the United States to be the world's largest from 2025, according to a report issued by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the largest hotel company in the world by number of rooms. It is estimated China will have 6.1 million hotel rooms by 2025, the same as the United States by then. By 2039, the number of China's hotel rooms will reach 9.1 million, four times of the size it is today, said the report, which was based on the figures from the National Bureau of Statistics in China and the United Nations World Travel Organization.
Major hotels in Bangkok are already feeling the pinch from the worsening flood situation, even though the city center remains mostly dry. “We are only running at 30% of our capacity, out of 802 guest rooms,” said Rashana Pimolsindh, Director of Communications for Bangkok’s Shangri-La Hotel. “We usually are filled at about 70%-90% of our capacity during this time of year.”
China's growing middle class is buying new cars and heading off on the country's freshly built highways. And those travelers want clean, affordable places to sleep. Two U.S. hotel giants are hoping to fill that need, launching midpriced brands in China for the first time to capture part of the fast-growing domestic travel market.
The cylinder-shaped hotel tower housing the Casino Lisboa was what defined gambling for decades in this 17-square-mile former Portuguese colony parked on the shore of the South China Sea. Lacking amenities, flash and class, it lived in Las Vegas’ shadow. But all that changed over the past decade after Las Vegas got a piece of the action. Steve Wynn built Wynn Macau across the street from Casino Lisboa. MGM Grand Macau moved in just down the block from Wynn.
This week, the nearly 2,000 faculty and students starting classes at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's School of Hotel & Tourism Management (SHTM), are getting a whole new $100 million "lab" to play in. For the first time, courses have been redesigned to incorporate the school's brand-new Hotel ICON into students' learning experience. General Manager Richard Hatter explained that they didn't want to throw the usual lavish hotel grand opening party. Instead, in keeping with the mission of the hotel as an integral part of hospitality teaching and research, the ICON is celebrating with a Hospitality Design Conference on the 21st of this month.
If India’s domestic hotel industry adds the expected 10,000 plus room capacity in the next two to three years, it may face a severe shortage of skilled manpower. As compared with a potential demand of 60,000-70,000 skilled individuals in the next two to three years, only 15,000 hotel management graduates are expected to be available, said Manish Khanna, managing director and chief executive officer of UEI Global, a unit of Berggruen Holdings, USA. Hotel industry officials believe the situation will worsen, if not improve in the near future.
InterContinental Hotels Group PLC, owner of the Holiday Inn, InterContinental and Crowne Plaza hotel brands, plans to expand further with a new upscale brand in China and another midmarket brand in the U.S. IHG executives spoke about their preliminary plans for the new brands while detailing the U.K.-based company’s second-quarter results on Tuesday. Those included a 6.5% gain in revenue per available room globally. More recently, IHG posted for July a revenue-per-room gain of 5.6%, including a 2.7% increase in the average rate.
After palace hotels and liveried doormen, India's hoteliers and developers are warming up to the possibilities of Spartan rooms with a bed and a television but minimal services -- no bell boys, no newspapers and no pampering. India is at the start of its second round of hotel development, this time focused on the needs of the domestic traveler. The change in strategy is attributable to India's own storyline – the growth of a middle class that spends a lot including on travel, increased business travel, and a scarcity of rooms to meet the demand of 675 million domestic travelers last year.
No one needs reminding of just how keen Chinese consumers are on branded goods. Hong Kong’s Louis Vuitton stores seem perennially beset by queues of mainland Chinese tourists and super cars parade the streets of second-tier Chinese cities. But this obsession with brand names also extends to travel. According to a survey released last month by leading publishing group Hurun Report, 64 percent of the 463 Chinese millionaires and billionaires interviewed admitted that ‘brand’ was an overriding factor when it comes to choosing hotels.
Nasdaq-listed Home Inns & Hotels Management Inc. (HMIN) is close to buying the company that owns China's Motel 168 chain from Morgan Stanley (MS) and other shareholders for about US$500 million in a cash and stock deal that will fetch around half what the owners originally sought, according to three people familiar with the transaction.
If there's one U.S. industry that's found a home in China, it's the lodging business. The 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo offered obvious, one-time incentives for expansion in marquee destimnations. Now the growth is especially visible in so-called second- and third-tier cities most Americans have never head of, but where more Chinese are joining the middle class and staying overnight for business or pleasure — some for the very first time.
I mentioned last week that the Prince Hotels group had opened rooms at its Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka to refugees from the tsunami. That got me thinking about the impact that the ongoing crisis and travel advisories is having on the hospitality sector. The news isn’t good. Start with the Prince Hotels group, which even before the crisis was suffering from overcapacity, a legacy of bubble-era expansion. According to the Nikkei newspaper, the group is now reporting that 90 percent of reservations made by foreign visitors at its 44 hotels have been cancelled.