Shangri-La Hotel, Ningbo is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2008 (exact date not yet confirmed) and it has announced who’ll be running the place.

Lim Boon Kwee (pictured) — General Manager. Previously GM of Shangri-La Golden Flower, Xian. He is a Singapore national and has worked in the hospitality industry for over 23 years. Held senior management positions at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Sedona Hotels International and InterContinental Hotels.

Darren Wong — in charge of the money as Financial Controller. Has 20 years’ experience at Marco Polo Hotels Group (Hong Kong). Founded the Hotel Controller and Accountants Association of Hong Kong.

Rachel Zhou — Director of Marketing. Joined Shangri-La group in 1992 and has since worked at its hotels in Xian, Changchun and Changzhou.

The hotel lies in Ningbo’s commercial district and will have 564 guestrooms, four restaurants and bars, and over 6,000 square meters of MICE facilities. Ningbo is a port city in the south Yangtze Delta Region in Zhejiang province. Shangri-La already has one other property in Zhejiang — Shangri-La Hotel, Hangzhou.
Source: Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts

Shangri-La plans to open two hotels in an affiliated company’s development in Shanghai in 2011.

The Jing An Shangri-La will have 347 rooms on 24 floors of a 58-story Grade A building. Shangri-La will also have 600 rooms in the new 43-story Jing An Kerry Centre. Both hotels will be in a development on Nanjing Road in the city’s Puxi section.

Shangri-La is expanding beyond Asia into North America and Europe. The group runs 55 hotels and has more than 48 projects in development in 15 countries including India, the United States, Austria and Maldives. Kuok is also the controlling shareholder of Kerry Properties, the real estate developer active in Hong Kong and China building the hotel, office and shopping center project in Shanghai that will be home to the two Shangri-La hotels.

The illustration is of the Shangri-La in Bangkok but it gives you the idea of what to expect.

Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts has opened a new hotel — the Shangri-La Hotel, Chengdu the group’s first hotel in Southwest China.

The hotel is a 25-minute drive from Chengdu International Airport and a 15-minute walk to the Chunxi Road Pedestrian Precinct shopping area.

It is on the historic site of the Swell Fun, the oldest wine lane in the world according to Guinness World Records.

The hotel overlooks the Jinjiang River and is next to Hejiang Pavilion — built during the Tang Dynasty and now considered a lucky site for local residents.

The 593-room hotel also has 26 serviced apartments.

CHI, The Spa at Shangri-La — Shangri-La’s signature spa brand — offers treatments and therapies based on Chinese and Himalayan well-being rituals and traditions. With 11 treatment rooms set in an area of approximately 900 square metres, the Shangri-La Hotel, Chengdu features one of the largest spas among the city’s five-star hotels.

In addition, the hotel’s health club facilities include a gym, indoor swimming pool, outdoor tennis

This is a MICE hotel with a floor space of 2,100 square meters and a nine-meter-high ceiling. Plus a selection of 16 additional function rooms and an auditorium.
Source: Asia Travel Tips

Business Traveller China magazine’s readers’ poll has called Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts ‘Best Business Hotel Brand in China’ for the third consecutive year.

The poll was conducted between July and October this year among the magazine’s readership of frequent travelers based mainly in China.

Business Traveller China is the China edition of Business Traveller magazine which has ten editions around the world.

There is a temptation to dismiss these polls because there are, first, so many of them and, second, the subscriber list is, by definition, restricted.

In fact, they serve an useful purpose. If anyone is willing to vote for any hotel as being suited for business travelers then it probably has a fair amount going for it. The magazine, which is published by a company called Panacea (it also does a medical journal), is based in London but has editions pretty much all over the world and is quite authoritative.

Shangri-La Asia, the hotel arm of Malaysia’s Kuok Group, plans to raise at least $662 million via a rights issue to pay back debt and fund expansion plans in China’s booming world of hotels.

Shangri-La, Asia’s largest listed hotel chain by market value and controlled by billionaire Robert Kuok, runs 19 hotels across China and intends to double that number by 2010.

It said it would issue between 287.2 million to 290.1 million rights shares. Shareholders will get one rights share for every nine shares held. Trading in shares of the hotel operator had been suspended since June 29, pending details of the issue.

Last year, Shangri-La teamed up with Kerry Properties and Allgreen Properties to develop a site in China’s northern city of Tianjin into commercial, office and residential property.

The move by the hotel chain — named after the mythical utopia made famous by British author James Hilton — is part of a general heating up in this area which was hardly luke-warm to start with.

Some indicators:

U.S. private equity firm Blackstone Group will buy Hilton Hotels for about $26 billion in cash — the richest in a series of recent private equity offers for hoteliers. And, before you ask, yes, Paris Hilton gets a slab of that. Possibly to spend on mental and physical recovery treatments after her short spell in the slammer.
Accor, Europe’s largest hotelier, expects to double the revenue it takes from Asia in three or four years by following its plan to expand across China. The firm hopes to have as many as 160 hotels in operation or under development across the country by 2010, up 55% from the current 103.
InterContinental intends that half of the 50,000 to 60,000 rooms it plans to build globally by 2008 will be in China — in time to benefit from an anticipated tourism boom during the Olympic Games.

Source: Reuters

The Shangri La company will operate a new Traders Hotel, located on Xiao Yun Road, in Upper East Beijing.

The Traders Hotel, opening early August 2008 just in time for the Beijing Olympic Games, will be the group’s second Traders Hotel in the city. This Traders Hotel will be in the north east of Beijing’s Central Business District by the 4th Ring Road. (The image is of the Traders in Kunshan but it gives the general idea.)

Designed by Barcelona-based Ricardo Bofill, the hotel will feature 419 rooms with a minimum room size of 33 square meters.

There will be a total 2,000 square meters of meeting and function spaces — MICE again — and a business centre. Recreational facilities will include a health club, indoor swimming pool and spa with nine treatment rooms.
Source: 4Hoteliers

From June 1 through August 31 this year, Air China is offering members of its frequent flyer program, ‘Air China Companion,’ special rates at Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts. Companion members will also receive triple mileage credit in their Air China frequent flyer accounts for their qualifying stays with Shangri-La.

Additionally, from May 14 to August 31, Air China will offer double mileage credit to Companion members for each second-night’s stay in any one of 3,650 hotels worldwide of the InterContinental Hotels Group.

Passengers will earn an additional 800-kilometer award for every qualified second-evening stay in any InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, or Candlewood Suites hotel. The fact that you need to carry a sophisticated computer to keep track of all of that is besides the point. These are credit points and you have earned them.
Source: Business Wire

Kingdom Hotel Investments, an investment company headed by HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Dubai, UAE, has bought an existing hotel in Kunshan, China, for approximately US$58 million. This is KHI’s first acquisition in China.

The 387-room hotel was opened in October 2005 and is the leading hotel in Kunshan, a fast growing economic and industrial hub near Shanghai.

Earlier this year, KHI announced the acquisition of the Four Seasons in Langkawi (Malaysia), the Fairmont Raffles in Manila (Philippines) and the Raffles hotel in Da Nang (Vietnam).

Sarmad Zok, Chief Executive Officer of KHI, said: ‘This hotel in Kunshan is ideally located to access major financial, commercial and tourist centers in the Yangtze River Delta.’

In fact, it has not been officially stated which hotel has been bought but there is little doubt it is the Traders Hotel in Qianjin Zhong Road as shown in our illustration.
Source: Hospitality Net

Shangri-La Hotels has opened its US$145 million hotel in Guangzhou. This is the city’s first newly built international five-star hotel since 1983.

It’s a 704-room deluxe hotel on Haizhu Island overlooking the Pearl River and will be followed by four other hotels of the same grade this year — a Grand Hyatt hotel, a Ritz-Carlton, a Westin and a Sofitel.

Then there is a Sheraton hotel scheduled to receive its first guests next year and a W Hotel and a Mandarin Oriental hotel set to join the competition for high-end customers in 2010.

Will they get enough visitors? Almost certainly.

UBS analyst Eric Wong said, ‘There has been no supply of top-tier hotels of an international standard for so long that demand is stagnant, or the other way round. But the sector will not be the same in the years to come as the robust economic growth in the Pearl River Delta region will spur travellers to stay in Guangzhou.’

Together with the Shangri-La, the new inventory in the five-star segment adds 3,400 rooms, or about a 70% increase, from the 5,000 rooms of the city’s six five-star hotels at the end of 2005.

The Shangri-La hotel has plans to build a new tower composed of guest rooms, serviced apartments and a shopping complex, depending on demand.

According to Jones Lang LaSalle, visitors to Guangzhou including those from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, stood at 5.1 million people, 16.7% higher than in 2004.
Source: EHotelier

The Shangri-La Hotel, Suzhou has now had it grand opening. It is the first international deluxe hotel in Suzhou’s National New and Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. The hotel, which is especially suited for MICE as in Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions, provides 390 spacious rooms and suites.

There are 100 rooms in the Horizon Club plus a Horizon Club Lounge on the 48th floor with sweeping views of the city. And six restaurants offering a range of Asian cuisines and a Club Red Bar with upbeat music.

This is very much a MICE hotel with meeting and banquet facilities including a 1,310 square meter pillarless Grand Ballroom with a ceiling height of eight meters. This can hold up to 1,200 guests for cocktail receptions or 800 for dinner banquets. There is also the 478 square-meter Metropolitan Ballroom, an auditorium and five function rooms.
Source: Asia Travel Tips