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

Hotel InterContinental group has launched an apprenticeship program to fast-track frontline staff into supervisor and manager roles.

About 100 workers will undertake an NVQ (National Vocation Qualification) in hotel management, with a guaranteed promotion on successful completion.

This has two great benefits.
First it buys loyalty to the company from bright staff ready for promotion.
Second it helps relieve the desperate shortage of qualified frontline staff.

Tracy Robbins, executive vice-president of global HR and shown in our illustration, said she was asking general managers to star-spot — a new phrase which may have it uses — among frontline staff.

She said, ‘Common sense and the right attitude are often all it takes to get noticed. Our focus is not just on bringing in new people, but on engaging and motivating existing staff.’ Indeed, it is a twofer.

She added that staff shortages in the hotel industry are particularly acute in provincial areas because there is a higher concentration of experienced workers and foreign nationals in large cities.

Intercontinental plans to more than double its Chinese workforce as 107 new hotels open in the country over the next three to five years.
Source: Personnel Today

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

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the world’s largest hotel group by number of rooms, recently opened a new outlet in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. Two years ago, the hotel giant signed a deal with Chengdu Travel and Exhibition Group to manage six hotels in Chengdu and Jiuzhaigou in the southwestern province. It plans to have 125 hotels in China by the end of the year.

Andy Cosslett, chief executive of IHG and seen in our illustration, said: ‘There is an enormous opportunity for us to grow here.We’re well spread out, and we have enough talent. Our strategy is to develop on that basis and grow faster than in the past.

‘Obviously west China is going to expand very quickly.’

When asked what he thought were the problems of opening a hotel he said, ‘I think the beginning is difficult because people don’t know who you are and in China it is very important that you have a history and a record of success. You need to be seen as a company that has endurance and stamina and is also committed to investment.

‘The biggest challenge is probably the people. Finding people is easy. Finding the right people is harder.

‘Most of our senior managers are Chinese. All the way through it is really a Chinese business, which helps.’
Source: English People’s Daily Online

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.

Accor Asia Pacific boss Michael Issenberg, is packing up and moving the company’s regional headquarters to Singapore. He said the siren call of China and India — where Accor is now developing 100 hotels with plans for many more — has proved impossible to resist.

Michael Issenberg said, ‘It was inevitable and could not be put off any longer. The weight of development is now in Asia — we now have more than 330 hotels through the Asia-Pacific region, with more on the way.’

Issenberg sees the biggest opportunities in China.

He said, ‘China is unbelievable — what a future it has. I know my own industry is booming but that is only one small part of a very large picture — I can’t even imagine what is happening elsewhere.’

More than anything else, Michael Issenberg says it’s the speed of change that is most confronting.

He cites an Accor development near Hainan Island in which a 440-room ‘absolutely deluxe five-star hotel’, a 1,500-seat convention centre, a road and bridge were built in just 11 months.

He said, ‘In other places you are shown master plans and it may or may not happen, but in China it always does.’

Accor is putting its own money into the country and wants to own 200,000 rooms in China by 2010. It’s already well on the way, with 60 Ibis budget properties under construction in high-growth areas.
Source: The Australian

InterContinental Hotels Group has announced plans to open 30 Tea Tree Spas in the next two years, tripling the group’s current network of Tea Tree Spas around Asia.

More than half of the new Tea Tree Spas will be located in China, where consumer demand for a spa experience is increasing dramatically. (Possibly due to the efforts of the excellent magazine SpaChina with which we are closely associated.)

Gregory Payne, spa director, IHG Asia Pacific, said ‘IHG spoke to 18,000 customers in all major markets worldwide, and we are using the knowledge gained to differentiate our spas and brand through innovation and improved experiences. Insights from the survey — the industry’s largest-ever hotel customer research exercise — have helped to align our services more closely to the needs of our customers.’

IHG is establishing two centers of excellence in Shanghai and Beijing to train and upgrade the skills of therapists.

The new Tea Tree Spas offer up to 15 treatments to cater to the varying needs of customers. A series of express treatments, where two therapists work together to provide facial, hand and foot pampering simultaneously in just 30 minutes, maximizes results for business customers pressed for time. (There is plainly a conflict of ideas inherent in this sentence.)

Ultimate indulgence packages such as the 150-minute Tea Tree Signature Experience combines the lot to provide relief to individuals and couples on holiday.
Source: Hotel News Resource

Major companies such as Marriott International, the Intercontinental Group, Accor of France and Shangri-La of Hong Kong have built networks and are expanding aggressively through the country.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council the China market — now the sixth largest — is expected to become the world’s second biggest in ten years.

Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said, ‘It’s irresistible. It is a tremendous market for hotels. And the opportunities are enormous.’

Bruce McKenzie, regional VP for Greater China at Intercontinental, the oldest Western hotel operator in China, said, ‘There’s no doubt that it is an absolutely key market and we have a comprehensive growth strategy.’

IHG, which has been in China for 23 years, currently has 67 properties there. It plans too open 125 more by the end of 2008. The company’s workforce will almost double to 43,000 over the next three years.
Accor already operates 50 hotels there under its Sofitel, Novotel and Ibis brands, has announced plans to open or start developing more than 180 hotels by 2010 most of which will be under the Ibis, one star, brand.
Shangri-La, Asia’s biggest listed hotel chain, plans to raise at least $662 million to add to its 19 hotels in China.
Marriott International, which opened its first hotel in China in 1989, plans to go from 25 to 48 properties between now and 2010 and to 100 within the next five to six years.
Wyndham Worldwide by the end of this year will have 20 Ramada Inns, 13 Howard Johnsons, 11 Days Inns, 50 Super 8s.
Best Western will double its stable of hotels to 28 by end of this year.

Source: CNBBC

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