French hospitality group Accor SA said Wednesday it plans to expand its network in India to 50 hotels by 2012, from five at present. The 50 hotels are likely to have 10,400 rooms and will be spread over 15 cities, the company said in a statement. The company has invested $130 million so far in the country, the statement said. Accor has hotels in 90 countries, with brands such as Sofitel, Mercure, Ibis, Formulae 1 and Motel 6.
Bombs tore through the Ritz Carlton and JW Marriott hotels in Jakarta, killing eight people and injuring at least 51 others in Indonesia’s first terrorist attack in almost four years. Two blasts at about 7:45 a.m. local time rocked the hotels in an up-market shopping and business district, killing eight people, ripping the façade off the Ritz, blowing out windows and showering the street with glass and debris. The dead included the New Zealand-born president of cement maker PT Holcim Indonesia.
Global travel may be ailing, but China's biggest city of Shanghai is pursuing luxury travelers with a vengeance, bent on restoring a reputation for opulence and elegance that once made it the Paris of the Orient. As it spruces up for next year's six-month-long World Expo, the metropolis of 20 million is transforming itself from a gritty industrial hub of crammed tenements into a showcase of glittering skyscrapers, quaint but quiet alleyways and meticulously landscaped parks.
Parent company has committed RM500mil for the expansion. SUBANG: Hospitality player Dorsett International Sdn Bhd aims to add 10 hotels to its existing chain of five hotels and resorts in Malaysia in five years, says president Eddie Tang. He said the parent company had allocated RM500mil for the expansion. Dorsett International, set up at the end of last year, is the Malaysian hospitality arm of Hong Kong-listed Far East Consortium International Ltd, which is mainly engaged in property development and hotel operations in China.
Executives of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc hope an oversupply of rooms this year will quickly turn around and normalize in countries like China by 2011. Miguel Ko, chair and president of the US-based hotel giant's Asia-Pacific division, told China Business Weekly that the global economic downturn is partly to blame for the lack of business and international travel. Ko also cited the addition of new rooms built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 contributing to the oversupply in China.
Even in the midst of Japan's deepest economic recession since World War II, the country's love hotel industry is thriving. "I'd hate to use the term "recession-proof," but it's certainly proven very resilient over the last six to nine months," said Steve Mansfield, CEO of New Perspectives, which operates six love, or "leisure," hotels in Japan. One of them, the Bonita Hotel in Isawa, boasts a 257 percent occupancy rate. Rooms can be rented for three to 24 hours. Mansfield's company estimates the industry in Japan pulls in $40 billion a year in revenue.
High-end hotels are being hit by a double whammy: The economic downturn and the H1N1 flu outbreak. In extreme cases, occupancy levels have fallen to just 3 percent of capacity, according to anecdotal evidence. In addition, wages are being slashed, staff are being laid off, the number of interns hired is increasing, employees are being told to move back into on-site accommodation and generous expatriate contracts are not being renewed.
New Las Vegas Sands Corp. President Michael Leven said the company plans to eliminate up to 4,000 jobs in its Macau casinos in an effort to "right-size the operations" in the Chinese gaming enclave. In an interview with Bloomberg, Leven said the company wants to reduce costs in Macau by September. Leven, who took over as Las Vegas Sands president on March 11, told the Review-Journal on Tuesday the company had stabilized its efforts at its two Strip casinos and was looking at a similar strategy in Macau. The company operates the Sands Macau on the Macau Peninsula and The Venetian Macau and Four Season Macau on the Cotai Strip. Construction was halted last year on six hotel-casinos under development on Macau's Cotai Strip region, the second phase in what had been planned as a $12 billion, 20,000-room complex of hotels and casinos.
THERE'S a silver lining to the economic downturn for major hospitality players who hold the reins to brands of different tiers. One such player is the Ascott Group, for whom the current climate has "brought opportunities: for it to launch more residences under its Citadines line. Citadines is Ascott's lowest-tier brand (the group has other serviced residences under the Ascott and Somerset labels) and it caters to "independent and savvy travellers who look for stylish and spacious accommodation that also offer good value and flexibility", says Gerald Lee, chief executive officer of Ascott Hospitality for The Ascott Group Ltd.