Hilton Hotels Corporation has signed a cooperation agreement with a local company to open in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province as well as an economic hub in China’s western region.

The new property in southern Chengdu is Hilton’s sixth hotel in mainland China. It will have 515 rooms with mixed international and Chinese features. The hotel is expected to start hosting guests in 2010.

The market in China’s western region has been growing rapidly in recent years, especially Chengdu.

Atkins Co, which is the designer of the famous sail-shaped Burj Al Arab, will design the luxury property. After the opening of this hotel, the number of five-star hotels in Chengdu will rise to 12, making it first in luxury hotels in western China.

Our illustration is a somewhat idealized view of part of Chengdu. It really is not all like that.
Source: Alibaba.com

Olympic organizers in Beijing have announced that there are 132 official reception hotels for this summer’s games. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games said there are 120 contracted hotels for the event providing 30,000 rooms for the duration of the games.

The organizers said 38 are five-star hotels, 45 are four-star, 22 are three-star and 15 are not yet star-rated. The average room rate for a double room in a five-star hotel in Beijing will be $383 and $295 on average in a four-star hotel.

The other 12 official reception hotels are in six co-host cities, including Hong Kong, Shenyang, Tianjin, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao, and Shanghai.

In 2007, during the inaugural ‘Good Luck Beijing’ event, more than 40 designated hotels were given to some 8,000 athletes, officials and media staff. The event was designed to test the games organizing committee’s efficiency and readiness.
Source: AHN

The Shenzhen Grand View Hotel, in south China’s Guangdong Province, has lost all of its five stars. This has become China’s first five-star hotel to lose its star status after a re-evaluation by China’s tourism authority.

Partially the fall from grace is the result of serious amounts of money being misused by a previous manager.

All of which is a warning to other hotels for the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) has begun re-evaluating the star ratings of Chinese hotels. Previously, once you won your stars you had them forever.

The CNTA started re-evaluations of star hotels last year, and hundreds of hotels, with four-star status or below, were blacklisted. The story is that the re-evaluations of star hotels will be conducted every five years but there is evidence that, in fact, it is a continuing process.

The Shenzhen Grand View, which was founded in 1999, was the first five-star hotel to lose its status in a re-evaluation.

General manager Deng Jingchen said, with great and praiseworthy honesty, ‘Our hotel failed the re-evaluation on account of substandard facilities.’

He explained the hotel was unable to refurbish because its previous general manager ran away with tens of millions of renminbi in funds last year, seriously affecting the hotel’s operations.
He said the 221-room hotel was still open for business, and was making improvements to meet standards.

A staff member of the China Hotel Management Association said, ‘The CNTA’s move could help consolidate standards in the hotel sector, and the canceling of permanent star status will prompt hotels to make more efforts to build their reputations.’
Source: English.eastday.com

Sofitel Riverside Qingyuan is claimed to be the first internationally-branded 5-star hotel in Qingyuan, in the Pearl River Delta.

A hour’s drive north of Guangzhou, Qingyuan is the fastest-growing city in Guangdong Province. It has broken records for GDP growth (up 23.3% in 2006), foreign trade, foreign investment, fixed-asset investment, and productivity growth.

By the end of 2006, 221 projects with a total investment of RMB50 billion were underway in Qingyuan and there are more than 1,000 foreign enterprises, processing and assembling enterprises operating within the urban district. The region is also a popular tourist area.

The Sofitel Riverside Qingyuan has 368 guest rooms and suites, with half overlooking the Beijang River. This is definitely a MICE hotel with extensive meeting facilities and over 1,800 sq meters of function space, including a Grand Ballroom and three smaller meeting rooms.

China World Hotel Beijing, Garden Hotel GuangZhou, and Portman Ritz Carlton Shanghai (our illustration is of its platinum swimming pool) were recently approved as China’s first batch of ‘platinum five-star hotels’.

Shao Qiwei, head of the State Tourism Administration, awarded certificates and plates to the three hotels at a ceremony held in Beijing.

Hotels can apply for the title in future, but only a limited number of them would get approved.

The question is whether there is any value to these grading systems apart from publicity. In some countries the situation has approached the levels of farce with some hotels claiming they are seven star hotels — whatever that might mean. For the record this is a seven star site — which means absolutely nothing at all.

This escalation in classifications means that, eventually, the classifications beginning to lose their validity. What point is there in being a five star hotel if someone can claim they are a five star platinum hotel. And where do you go from there? Escalate the number of stars or look for a more precious substance.

There are many people who would not want to stay in a hotel graded in that way. For many tourists it is off-putting.
Source: People’s Daily Online

China has a massive hotel expansion going on but it still needs more qualified budget hotels. Since 2000, more than 35 hotels have opened in Shanghai alone. The expansion into China, which has about 12,000 hotels, is part of a push by the major hotel companies to take advantage of comparative rising affluence and increased travel. Comparative, because in the United States the middle-class is bigger by an order of magnitude.

Nevertheless, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, based in London, China’s gross domestic product expanded 10.4% in the fourth quarter, making the country the world’s fastest-growing major economy. China already ranks among the top five countries in spending for business travel.

Stephen Holmes, chief executive of Wyndham who appears in the illustration above, said, ‘You have a rapidly growing economy, an expanding middle class and investment in infrastructure that makes those markets a great opportunity.’

• Industrywide, 481 hotels are under construction or planned for China; up from 316 and 161 last September according to the research company, Lodging Econometrics.
• Wyndham, based in Parsippany, New Jersey, operates or franchises 84 hotels under brands like Days Inn, Super 8 and Howard Johnson. It expects to double the number of Super 8s to almost 90 in the next year.
• Marriott’s chains, including Ritz-Carlton and Renaissance, have 39 hotels in China with more planned.
• Hilton Hotels plans to open 25 Hilton Garden Inns, a lower-priced brand.
• InterContinental Hotels Group expects to about double its Holiday Inns in China, to 125, in the next 22 months.

In China, much of the development involves large luxury hotels in urban centers, with 68% of all new projects four- or five-star hotels. An exception is Wyndham’s economy Super 8 chain, which is benefiting from the Chinese belief that eight is a lucky number. This concentration by the others on the top end may turn out to be a somewhat unbalanced development. There is plenty of room in the medium and lower levels.
Source: International Herald Tribune

In Malaysia Muda Holdings chairman Tan Sri Lim Guan Teik and businessman Tan Sri Ngan Ching Wen, are leading an initial group of 10 Malaysian businessmen to build a Sino-Malaysia International Centre in Xian Qujiang, Shaanxi province. The center will house a five-star and a four-star hotel.

Work will start soon and completion will take about four years.

An initial pact for the project was signed by Ngan and senior executives of Xian Qujiang New District Administrative Committee during the Expo Investment and Tourism Promotion of Qujiang New District in Kuala Lumpur. Ngan said a company named Xian Qujiang Properties had been set up in Malaysia to handle the project.
Source: Business Times

FastBooking has entered an IBE (Internet Booking Engine) agreement with Gloria International Hotels. Gloria is based in Beijing and operates 16 hotels and resorts throughout China. FastBooking will allow Internet users to book with Gloria.

Willie K. H. Ooi, Senior Vice President of Gloria International Hotels, said, ‘Many of our guests come from Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It was essential for us to offer them an online reservation service in their own language. FastBooking met this requirement, enabling us to offer our Internet customers the same quality of service as our telephone customers.’

Gloria Plaza Hotels are all four-star properties with common attributes such as an Atrium Cafe, a Sampan Seafood Restaurant and Plaza Floor for business entertaining and meetings.

At present the hotels are in Beijing (420 rooms), Dalian (211 rooms), Nanchang (327 rooms), Shenyang (269 rooms), Suzhou (294 rooms), Xian (340 rooms), Wanzhou Chongqing (208 rooms), Harbin (83 rooms).
Source: Travel Daily News

China National Tourism Administration wants to comprehensively develop domestic tourism and boost inbound tourism in line with the 11th Five-Year Plan. The goal is 68.8 million inbound overnight tourists and 1.78 billion domestic tourists with a total tourism income of RMB1,216 billion (US$156.5 billion).

One trade forecast is that the tourism industry in China will have an average annual growth rate of 10.4% in the next ten years. This rapid growth of the tourism industry has led to the increasing prosperity of hotels and subsidiary industries.

By the end of 2005, there were 12,930 star-level hotels in China with a year-on-year rate of growth of 18.75%. There were 1.37 million hotel rooms — an increase of 10.67%.
Source: Travel Daily News

According to the Beijing Tourism Administration the number of star-rated hotels in Beijing currently stands at 700, up from 658 at the end of 2005. Of this, 37 are rated five stars, 91 four stars, and 228 three stars.

BTA said the greatest growth in inventory this year would be in the two- and three-star sector.

Total room inventory in star-rated hotels was 110,000 at the end of 2005. This number is set to grow to 130,000, distributed among 800 star-rated hotels before Beijing hosts the Olympic Games in 2008.
Source: TTG Travel Hub