InterContinental Hotels plans to double its number of hotels in China to more than 200 by the end of 2010. Take it as an average for the moment that each hotel takes 200 staff on average. Then HC has to be able to find 40,000 in something of a hurry.

InterContinental, which manages 84 hotels in China under four brands, will drive expansion mainly through its mid-range Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express brands which target China’s growing ranks of middle-class travellers,

Asia Pacific Chief Executive Peter Gowers (seen here) said, ”The future in China is about the mass market,’ And he is not aiming low. He said there will eventually be more than 500 Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express hotels in China.

InterContinental already has 51 hotels in Greater China under those two brands but you have to compare that with almost 3,000 in the United States.

The three main contestants in this area are InterContinental, France’s Accor and Wyndham Worldwide and they are all stepping up expansion in China which suggests the struggle for qualified staff will be horrendous.

China is InterContinental’s fastest-growing market and the focus of the company’s expansion in the Asia Pacific region and accounts for about 15 to 20% of global profit.

Gower expects Asia Pacific to catch up with rest of the world in the next five years although the United States will remain InterContinental’s biggest market for at least 10 years.

InterContinental, which also manages Crowne Plaza and its namesake brand in China, plans to introduce the less expensive Indigo brand to China and is looking for properties and partners in Shanghai and Beijing.

Now we come to the problems.

Peter Gowers said, ‘It’s very easy to add new hotels in China. You simply get your name, and you screw it on the door of a hotel. But we’re very careful about growth. We’re building a business in China to last 50 or 60 years, but not building just to get headlines for one year.’

And you need all those people to stand behind the name screwed on the door and make quite certain the customer is served to a certain standard.

For hotels, these are interesting times.
Source: The Guardian

The hotel business is now rivaling film and television in the number of awards offered. This does not happen in journalism. In Australia, where this is being written, there is for journalists one award, grudgingly awarded once a year.

Now we note that InterContinental Hotels has, certainly deservedly, won a number of industry awards in China.

At the 2007 China Hotel Starlight Awards, IHG was named Best International Hotel Company. Its Priority Club Rewards, which has 37 million members worldwide and three million members across China, was named Best Loyalty Program in China.

Edmond Ip, chief operating officer of IHG Greater China, was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition, IHG was named Best Employer in China’s Hotel Industry by the China Hotel Annual Forum.

The China Hotel Starlight Awards are sponsored by several leading media organisations in China. Winners were selected based on readership votes and professional assessments by industry experts.

IHG was the first international hotel group to enter China in 1984, and is currently the largest international hotel operator in Greater China with a portfolio of 82 hotels. The company invests heavily in training and development.

In recent years, it has launched the IHG Academy in five Chinese cities, in collaboration with key colleges and vocational institutions. The IHG Academy is expected to supply 2,000 graduates to IHG’s hotels every year.

Other awards IHG received at the Starlight Awards include:
Crowne Plaza Fudan Shanghai — Top 10 Business Hotels
Crowne Plaza Chengdu — Top 10 Business Hotel
Crowne Plaza Chengdu — Top Employers in China
Theodore Durham, general manager, Crowne Plaza Chengdu — Top 10 Foreign General Managers in China

Source: 4 Hoteliers

True, it will not happen until the end of the year, but InterContinental Hotels will launch its 125th hotel in China by the end of 2008.

Peter Gowers, chief executive of IHG Asia Pacific said the group has already opened and run 107 hotels under the group’s various brands in China. And, as an international hotel group, IHG runs the most hotels in China.

Of all the hotel deals signed by international hotel operators, 47% of them are with IHG.

The group operates seven hotel brands, namely InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites.

It is all a remarkable story and perhaps more so because of its uneven start. InterContinental began in 1946 when Pan American Airways decided that there was a lack of quality hotels in many of its destinations. The first hotel, the Hotel Grande, opened that year in Belem, Brazil.

The company grew and grew and the marketing people decided it would be known as Inter.Continental and were most insistent about the full stop in the middle of the name.

Pan Am started to lose the plot about 1973 although its inflight service in first class — the dining room in the air — put, say, Emirate Airlines to shame. Sadly, often a flight would only have a dozen of so passengers. There was a story, probably an urban myth, that one flight, New York to Amsterdam, only had one passenger. And the airline lost his luggage.

The airline, to keep going, milked money from the hotel company. Eventually, to raise cash Pan Am sold the company even though every person in the hotel company — and the writer was involved with both companies at the time — said sell the airline and keep the hotels.

In 1991 Pan Am finally went down the gurgler while InterContinental Hotels pottered along dropping the full stop in its name on the way. Finally the company was purchased by Bass Hotels & Resorts of the United Kingdom (now InterContinental Hotels Group) in 1998 and became one of the largest and most successful hotel groups in the world. On the official site of InterContinental the Pan Am connection rates one sentence: InterContinental, another of our brands, was created by Pan Am in the 1940s, when hotels were built in many of Pan Am’s destinations. One sentence is probably all that Pan Am deserves.
Source: Hotels and research.

With the Olympic Games scheduled to hit Beijing next year, major hotel companies have scrambled to get new properties in China open in time.

Hilton Hotels operates six hotels in China (the one in Beijing is shown here), but will more than double that in the next few years. In late August it announced an agreement to manage a new Hilton in the Wangfujing district of Beijing, set to open next year, and also has scheduled to open in 2008 a Doubletree in Beijing, a Conrad in Shanghai and a Doubletree in Kunshan, as well as a resort and spa in Chongqing. Three other Hiltons are set to open in China by 2011. In June, a joint venture of one of Deutsche Bank’s investment arms and private equity firm H&Q Asia Pacific agreed to create and manage more than 25 hotels in mainland China under Hilton’s mid-price Hilton Garden Inn brand.
InterContinental Hotels now has 67 hotels open. IHG plans to nearly double that by next year, and future growth is particularly focused on Crowne Plaza.
Marriott International now has 27 properties in China, according to company spokesman John Wolf, and by 2010 will have 15 more: six under the Marriott brand, three under the Renaissance brand, two under the JW Marriott brand and four under Marriott’s mid-price Courtyard brand. In addition, the company will open six of its luxury Ritz-Carlton properties in China by 2010.
Hyatt Hotels & Resorts has announced plans to open in China 15 new properties — three Park Hyatt hotels, three Grand Hyatt hotels and nine Hyatt Regency hotels. China already has more Hyatt properties than any other country outside of North America.
Wyndham Hotel Group has announced an Asia-focused investment management firm is investing $50 million in the master franchisor of the Super 8 brand in China, Tian Rui Hotel Corp. The franchisor already has opened 49 Super 8 properties in China and has agreements in place to develop 67 more.

Even with all those growth plans in place, however, travel managers said the region would continue to be a challenge as travel to the region increases. Travel managers often have to look outside of hotel offerings when planning Asia/Pacific travel.
Source: Business Travel News Online

China’s rapid expansion as an economic powerhouse, coupled with a growing and affluent workforce, is driving a new wave of investment into the Chinese hotels and leisure sector.

The figures are remarkable:

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHT) is well on track to open 125 outlets in China by the end of 2008.
Hilton Hotels has teamed with Rreef, the property arm of Deutsche Bank and private equity firm H&Q Asia Pacific, to develop 25 hotels at a cost of £272 million.
French hotels group Accor plans to open 80 hotels in the country over the next two years.
Starwood, the operator of the Sheraton and Westin chains is looking to open at least 12 new hotels in Shanghai alone this year.

IHG’s chief executive Andrew Cosslett said, ‘China has unmatched market potential. IHG has the largest pipeline of hotels in the industry and we are on track to meet our objective of between 50,000 and 60,000 new net room additions by the end of 2008. This is equivalent to opening one new hotel a day.’

Apart from the flagship InterContinental Hotel brand, the group also operates the Holiday Inn, Express by Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotel chains.

China is currently IHG’s third largest market with 22,665 rooms and 67 hotels. Its current pipeline envisages an additional 84 hotels and an extra 29,771 rooms.

So all those rooms have to be filled. IHG, like other hotel groups, is banking on a sharp increase in overseas visitors to China and more internal travel as the country opens up.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, the number of inbound tourists is expected to climb from 50 million in 2006 to between 150-180 million by 2020. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China the number of domestic trips is expected to reach three billion by 2020.

China’s internet penetration is now second only to the US, with 137 million users — 10% of all hotel rooms are booked through the internet — while China will spend $17.2 billion on improving its airport infrastructure network between 2006 and 2010.

Road spending is also soaring with the number of highway kilometers set to double to 85,000 by 2020.
Source: Birmingham Post

Shares of InterContinental Hotels rose after the hotel operator detailed its expansion plans for China.

InterContinental has close to 30,000 rooms planned for China more than doubling its size.
China is the fastest growing hotel market in the world, with 177 cities each housing a population of more than 1 million people.

Of the 360,000 new hotel rooms expected in China by 2010, approximately 60% are expected to be in the lower-end of the market. This is a plus for InterContinental as the company’s strength lies with its Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Crowne Plaza brands.
Source: Forbes

InterContinental Hotels Group has signed a management contract to operate three hotels and over 800 rooms in Changzhou, near Shanghai.

There will be one Crowne Plaza hotel and two Holiday Inn Express hotels within an integrated city centre commercial complex. The three hotels will be developed by Top Spring Group, a Hong Kong retail investment and real estate developer. Top Spring Group has also signed a strategic partnership with IHG which means IHG will be running all of Top Spring’s upcoming hotel developments across China.

The three hotels already signed up will be part of the Landmark International Commercial Center, located in the centre of Changzhou. The integrated complex with have over 580,000 square meters of retail outlets, offices, exhibition space, entertainment facilities, residences and hotels.

Changzhou is a key tourism destination, attracting more than 20 million tourists with tourism revenues of RMB400 million in 2006. It is also a significant manufacturing base, home to industrial parks that house various international and domestic companies.
Source: Hotel News Resource

Intercontinental Hotels will open the Crowne Plaza Sun Palace Beijing in early 2008. The hotel will be located in the city centre, close to the Beijing International Exhibition Centre.

This is the fourth Crowne Plaza hotel in Beijing. Sun Palace will have 540 rooms, seven restaurants and bars, and over 3,400 square meters of meeting space which takes it into the MICE category. (Note that our illustration shows the swimming pool in the other Crowne Plaza but rest assured the plans for this hotel call for the same level of luxury.)

IHG currently operates 65 hotels in China, with an additional 60 in the development pipeline.
Source: TTG

InterContinental Hotels Group has announced the signing of the Crowne Plaza Sun Palace Beijing, scheduled to open in early 2008. Which bring us to a portfolio of 125 hotels – 65 in operation and an additional 60 in the development pipeline.

A. Patrick Imbardelli, chief executive of IHG Asia Pacific, said: ‘China is set to become the world’s number one tourism market in the next 10-15 years. With 65 hotels in operation and a plan to have 125 hotels open by the end of 2008, we already have a good profitable business model.’

Crowne Plaza Sun Palace Beijing is being developed by Yunnan Metropolitan Construction Investment and will be managed by IHG. The 540-room newly-built hotel will be located in the city centre, close to the Beijing International Exhibition Centre.

The hotel, IHG’s fourth Crowne Plaza hotel in Beijing, will have over 3,400 square meters of meeting space which makes it a MICE hotel. The illustration comes from the other Crowne Plaza in Beijing but neatly gives the idea of the level of luxury.
Source: Hospitality.net

You are going to the Olympics and you have not yet booked your hotel room? Lots of luck, Charlie. Yes, there is more than a year to go but some of the best hotels are totally booked out. As in totally.

A simple example: at the 5-star Kempinski Hotel (seen here) not far from the main Olympic site, a delegation of Germans has already booked all 526 rooms. The hotel’s revenue manager, Graham Barlow, said the hotel was ‘in the midst of trying to secure bookings’ and said potential guests were being put on a waiting list. This does not augur well if you have hopes of staying in a luxury hotel near the venue.

City tourism officials and Olympics organizers are confident Beijing’s 700-plus star-rated hotels can absorb the onslaught of half a million foreign and domestic visitors expected each day for 17 days beginning August 8, 2008. But it will be a bit of a tight squeeze and luxury may have to come off some potential visitor’s agenda.

Some of the best hotels are already fully booked, and 122 of the three-, four- and five-star hotels closest to the Olympic venues are at least 70% filled after Olympics officials, sponsors and media locked up 30,000 rooms.

Xiong Yumei, deputy director of the Beijing Tourism Administration came up with the perfect slogan in answer to a question: ‘No need to wait. Book it now, hurry up.’

Sadly free-wheeling capitalism is already pushing prices well over double normal rates. City officials say they will not restrict hotel profits, and standard rooms being cited by travel agents surpass $325 a night at some 3-star hotels to $500-$775 at luxury 5-star hotels. This is what happened at the Athens Olympic. It will be many, many years before some visitors will include Athens on their travel itinerary. The Internet was full of complaints referring to the hoteliers as rip-off merchants. It was hoped Beijing would not fall into the same trap. The evidence is that it has.

Even if money is not an object do not even think about trying to book a room in the closest hotels. More than 95% of their rooms were snapped up by the Beijing Olympics organizing committee.

This is what Olympics organizing committees do. Why else be on the committee?
Source: Reuters