Olive Green Hotel had a silent opening at the beginning of the fall, but it's already a hit with its first guests. "We only stayed one night but had we discovered it sooner, we would have stayed longer and explored Heraklion. The rooms are absolutely lovely. Modern, efficient, well appointed," writes Lee T. from Sydney, Australia, in his TripAdvisor review.
Timo E. Kettern is the IT Director at Lapithus Hotel Management and a respected professional in his field. In anticipation of HITEC Amsterdam which will take place next year in March in Amsterdam, we spoke with him about shadow IT activities, technology, and devices that fall outside the traditional IT funding.
The way that British holidaymakers like to pay has been changing for many years, but it's become clear that Brits simply don't like having to bring large quantities of foreign currency on their travels. They worry about taking it out with them for fear of being a victim of a crime in a potentially unfamiliar city, but they also worry about leaving any in their hotel rooms. Research that we carried out in association with CensusWide this summer found that 1 in 8 Brits opted to keep all of their foreign currency with them at all times so that they didn't have to leave any in their room, while 1 in 3 said that they made a conscious effort to keep the amount of cash taken on holiday to an absolute minimum.
Back in July I covered a story of International Space Station (ISS) crewmembers re-acclimating on Crete, for Sputnik International. This month ISS cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka spent mission critical time on the island, ending their reentry mission at the magnificent the Aldemar Thalasso Resort in Hersonissou. I had the opportunity to speak with the Director of Aldemar Resorts, Alexandros Angelopoulos about how these Roscosmos monitored programs for cosmonauts came about, and how the initiatives can benefit Crete tourism.
HITEC Amsterdam will bring together the best of hospitality financial and technology professionals next March, in an event that will show advances in the trade with access to innovative resources, industry experts, and vendors. The European version of HITEC (Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference) which takes place in North America every year, HITEC Amsterdam is a premiere on the continent and promises to be the hospitality event of the year, with some 60 booths exhibiting advanced solutions and innovative industry-specific technology. In anticipation of the conference taking place next year, Hospitality Net conducts a series of interviews with HITEC Advisory Council members discussing relevant industry issues and offering expert insight on key technology topics.
At the Filoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia key hospitality and tech decision makers are gathered today for the Digi.travel Cyprus Conference & Expo 2016. Organized for the first time with the collaboration of the Association of Cyprus Travel Agents ACTA, the summit puts leading technology providers alongside travel and hospitality professionals in the region.
Narratives are powerful in moving, inspiring, making feeling unique, orchestrating emotional connections and qualifying a link between the most top-notch hotels and their guests. Today more and more hotels reconfigure their hospitality strategies towards the adoption of an experiential orientation through stories. They script namely unique, extraordinary narratives and stage escapist events, individually customized and personally meaningful for each guest persona.
The debates that are stirring up the French population and are being fed by the beginning of the presidential campaign have cast a pall over the image of a welcoming country. Any demonstration of cultural diversity seems to purposefully goad the perfect model of a secular republic.
Investor interest in fixed-income hotel real estate is at unprecedented levels. Fund managers increasingly see leased hotel assets as an attractive portfolio option amid the current low interest rate environment. The scale of investor appetite was underlined by CBRE Hotels' inaugural Fixed-Income Breakfast, where attendees representing leading UK and European investor groups debated the key challenges and opportunities within the European hotel sector.
For several years, the term Brexit has become a household name in not only countries in Europe but also countries around the world, being the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. In 2012, UK Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls for a referendum on membership in the European Union. However, he did not rule out a referendum happening in the near future. Fast forward to 24 June 2016, the people in the UK gathered and voted after a heavily publicised and contested pre-referendum period by both the 'Leave' and 'Stay' camps. In the end, 48.1% of those who voted preferred to stay and 51.9% preferred to leave. The vote was largely split by the greater London area and Scotland being in favour of 'Stay', whereas most other parts of the UK voted in favor of 'Leave'.
On the first day of March in 2011, I received a phone call from a reporter from a local paper to let me know that the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in King's Cross was going to open its doors to the public soon and he asked me if I could write a feature on this iconic building for his newspaper. I was in Mumbai when I picked up the call, travelling in an auto-rickshaw outside the Victoria Terminus now known as CST - a building that bore an uncanny resemblance to the one housing the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel except that it was made of sandstone whereas the one in London was made of bricks. I'd like to have been back in London to tour the building that had intrigued me for years whenever I visited the British Library. I didn't know the reason for it being left empty. The clock tower of this Victorian Gothic building actually dwarfed that of the recently-built British Library.
Hotel occupancy in London showed its sixth consecutive quarter of year-on-year decline with Brexit poised to subdue the sector further, according to the latest Hotel Bulletin: Q2 2016, published this week by HVS, AlixPartners and AM:PM. Hotel occupancy in the capital, in common with other major European cities, continues to be affected by increased global terrorist activity. London has also seen a decline in the number of US tourists travelling because of the impending presidential election. The impact has been a 2% decline in London's RevPAR compared with Q2 2015 and average rates failing to increase for the second consecutive quarter. 'Whilst this is significant in the short term, London is, and will remain, a huge magnet for inbound tourism so the longer-term future of the capital's hotel sector is still positive, even when taking into account the new hotels in the pipeline and the potential impact of the Brexit implementation causing economic wobbles,' commented HVS chairman Russell Kett. Across the UK the picture was more varied; although, with overall demand sluggish, average RevPAR growth reached only 2%. This is seen as further evidence that we may be approaching the top of the property cycle in some locations. Performance of hotels across the 12 UK cities reviewed varied significantly in Q2. Birmingham was top with RevPAR growth of 16%, while hotels in the Roman city of Bath saw RevPAR up 11% year-on-year on the back of a boost in international tourists. In contrast, Newcastle recorded another quarter of RevPAR decline, down 4%, as the combined effects of a 10% increase in hotel supply over the past 12 months and strong comparators last year came into play. Aberdeen saw RevPAR decline 24% year-on-year as hotel occupancy continues to suffer from the city's exposure to the oil and gas industry. If predictions that oil prices will continue to fall are correct, this will further suppress demand for the city's hotels. 'Performance has always been very location-driven,' commented Kett, 'with localised supply and demand issues having an impact on hotels' operating performance. UK-wide averages tend to hide these fluctuations and even the performance within an individual city can vary quite markedly from hotel to hotel,' he added. Apart from the £575 million acquisition of Atlas Hotels by London & Regional, mergers and acquisitions in the sector have also been subdued throughout 2016 owing to uncertainties surrounding Brexit, weaker economic growth in China, terrorism in France, Belgium and Turkey, and the US election. Now the outcome of the referendum is known and Britain gears up to leave the EU, there is cautious optimism that the hotel sector will remain an attractive source of investment for global investors interested in the medium- to long-term growth perspective. However, this is reliant on the UK remaining an investor-friendly market post-Brexit. 'The Brexit decision is having the double-impact of weaker sterling and a reduction in anticipated economic growth. This is both good and bad news for the sector in that Britain becomes a cheaper destination for overseas visitors, dampening outgoing UK travel but potentially increasing the F&B costs as some suppliers pass on price rises. Hotel transaction activity is also likely to slow down as investors assess the outlook of future trading, but in the longer term we are optimistic the UK will remain an attractive source of investment for global investors,' Kett concluded.
Bastian Becker is the GM of Meliá Vienna. One can immediately tell that he possesses the strengths of many German characteristics as well as the Austrian charm. He is well-organized, methodological, determined, frank, and charming all at the same time. He claims that he is impatient and that he needs to work on it. Most hotel executives I've interviewed, and I've interviewed more than 60 worldwide, consider themselves to be a patient lot . . .
After months of preparations EURO 2016 has started. With 24 countries participating, it is the largest EURO Tournament both in terms of teams and in terms of foreign visitors expected to come for the event: over 1 million tourists.
For anyone trying to run a business and plan ahead uncertainty is rarely welcome, particularly in the hospitality sector. Few things throw up more uncertainty than this week's referendum in the UK on the country's continued membership of the European Union. Polls show the two sides are neck and neck – and with Britain's recent run-ins with unreliable polling data, nobody is willing to make a call on which way this referendum will go until the votes are counted in the early hours of Friday morning.
This week a new kind of hotel experience debuted in Amsterdam. The opening of the very first Zoku concept represents a real turning point, one where trend becomes design, and design becomes the hype. For years hotel strategies have skirted the evolution mobile, tech, and a stoked Millennial Generation. Now Zoku makes a first-of-a-kind concept hotel, one where business dissolves into pleasure. We talk a lot about the space where high tech trends intersected with guest experience and progress, but this hotel seems designed to create, rather than to prognosticate.
Urgent responses from governments happen in parallel to a manifest will to demonstrate strength. Divided between the need to reassure the local population, the desire to prove that life goes on, and the need to not scare off those that feed the tourist economy, managers have been ensnared by critics from all sides.
Take a sector that brings together the leaders in the global ranking in its category. An economic activity that, not only participates in that country's international glory, but provides work for a million employees and feeds the economy with at least as many derived jobs. One would think that it would surely receive the careful attentions of the country's leaders to prevent such a productive machine from breaking down… Especially in these trying times. However, that would happen in a pragmatic country, in a country that values success and provides the support needed to get through difficult times or lay the foundations for development.
The UK's hotel market saw its first decline in average RevPAR (rooms revenue per available room) in four years during the first three months of 2016 adding further fuel to the suggestion that the peak of the hotel property market may have been reached. According to the latest Hotel Bulletin: Q1 2016, published by HVS, AlixPartners and AM:PM, a poor start to the year for hotels in Aberdeen saw RevPAR fall by 37% year-on-year, skewing overall results across the 12 cities analysed. Even excluding Aberdeen's results, the overall market grew by only 1%, its lowest increase since Q1 2012. While London remains a popular destination for Russian and Chinese visitors and investment continues to pour into the city, hotels in the capital saw RevPAR decrease by 2% in Q1 2016, their fifth consecutive quarter of flat or declining figures. 'These figures give us a strong indication that the peak of the UK's hotel occupancy market has been reached and the growth we are seeing now is rate driven rather than occupancy driven,' said HVS chairman Russell Kett. 'For the moment there continues to be strong interest in hotel investment in most parts of the UK, which could continue into 2017, but investors are currently delaying decisions because of uncertainty fuelled by a combination of terrorism concerns, the forthcoming Brexit vote, China's economic situation and the US elections. 'There is a risk that some operators will cut rates in an attempt to stimulate demand, forcing competitors to follow suit. Once room rates fall across the hotel sector the likelihood is that values will soften. This is a big concern for London's hoteliers, particularly with the large number of bedrooms due to open in the next 12 months unless demand starts to pick up again,' he added. According to Hotel Bulletin the best performing city in Q1 was Cardiff, with an average RevPAR increase of 8%, largely due to the World Half Marathon Championships in March. The fact that demand has not been constrained by new supply means that Cardiff has been in the top three best performing cities for the past four quarters. Since December 2011 only 18 new bedrooms have opened in the city. Birmingham was the second best performing city in Q1, with RevPAR growth of 7%, despite supply growing by nearly 800 bedrooms over the past two years. Investment in Birmingham airport means that this trend is likely to continue as new flight routes come on stream. The hotel sector has long been seen as a barometer of the wider economy, says Hotel Bulletin, albeit with inevitable regional variances. In recent months there has been a modest but perceptible shift in sentiment, especially in the investment community where a much greater sense of caution is being adopted over future growth prospects. Download the Hotel Bulletin: Q1 2016 by clicking here.
As VP of Marketing for Revinate, one of the things I love about my job is getting the opportunity to travel and speak with customers about the challenges and opportunities they face in 2016. In fact, we recently published a white paper that summarizes this.