Times look good for the backpacker hotels. There are a lot of backpackers around.

Times look even better for the economy hotels especially in China. Offering a clean, well maintained room for the night with Internet access means boom times. Look to see the number of economy hotels expand by at least five times, perhaps more, over the next few years.

At the top, the super-luxury hotels where someone else is typically paying the bill all seems to be well. There are spas, shopping arcades, superior restaurants, concierges who seem to use telepathy to guess what you want. All of it comes at a price but there are apparently many willing to pay that price.

It is in the middle echelons that times are hard, where the independents, and to a lesser extent, the chains, face lean times.

Some of the mid-range chains are rebranding to make themselves more attractive.

Holiday Inn, the world’s biggest hotel chain, is spending, as a first stage, US$1 billion in rebranding.

Accor, the French hotel giant, is going to push Sofitel from being merely an upmarket chain to a luxury brand.

The writer had an amazing lunch in the Sofitel Wentworth last week — someone else was paying — where the food, the wine and the service were worthy of a good restaurant in Paris. Except no Parisian restaurant has, I promise you, a female Irish Japanese sommelier.

There is a problem. If a mid-level hotel spends enough money to push it up at least one, preferably two levels, you are talking very serious money. Most independents in China at this level cannot afford it. They will have to either repackage as a budget hotel or suffer.
Source: Times on Line

US restaurant chain Hooters, famous for its spicy chicken wings and busty waitresses in skimpy orange runner shorts (a sort of schoolboy fantasy serving food) is opening another two restaurants.

The chain targets mostly male customers who are somewhat childish in their dealings with the opposite sex. It calls its female servers ‘Hooters Girls’ and opened its first branch in China three years ago in Shanghai.

Hooters plans to open two new outlets — one in Beijing and one in the eastern historical city of Suzhou — before the end of the year to attract businessmen and expatriates. The fact that, almost by definition, the restaurants uses sex as the main attraction is not mentioned in the official publicity.

The Beijing outlet, near the Workers’ Stadium, will open first in the first half.

The Atlanta-based company, established in 1983, also plans to open a Hooters restaurant in Suzhou, near Shanghai, although it has not decided on the exact location in the city. Hooters made its debut in China in 2004 with a restaurant in Shanghai. Last April, the company opened its second outlet in Shanghai in the Pudong New Area.

Each of its outlets in Shanghai and Hangzhou currently employs around 10 Hooters Girlswho can earn about RMB3,500 a month. The company is also hiring part-time waitresses- mostly university students with fluent English — for about RMB2,000 a month. In comparison, a McDonald’s waitress in Shanghai earns about RMB1,000 to 1,500 a month.

The company currently owns or franchises some 435 restaurants in more than 20 countries.
Source: The Standard

The extent to which hotels and restaurants affect the total economy is surprising. Perhaps astounding would be a better word.

Total sales of hotels and restaurants in China in the first 11 months of this year were RMB936.4 billion ($120 billion), a net increase of RMB130.5 billion or 16.2 percent over the same period of last year. This from statistics published by the Ministry of Commerce on Friday.

To get this into perspective China is a boom country. Yet the growth in hotel and restaurant sales was 2.6% higher than the growth of consumer goods in the same time period.

The turnover of hotels and restaurants accounted for an astonishing 13.6 percent of the total of the country and 5.8 % of the growth of sales of consumer goods in China.

For November the figure was RMB 90.6 billion which is up 17.7 percent year on year.

In the first 11 months 978 foreign-invested hotels and restaurants were opened and that figure was down about 10.5 percent year on year.
Source: Xinhua