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The Beijing Olympic Games are sparking fierce competition among hotel groups.

The US-based Hilton Hotels, which has five properties in China, hopes to have two more open by the end of July.
Marriott International has opened three hotels in the capital under the JW Marriott, Courtyard and Ritz-Carlton brands and increased its Beijing portfolio to seven. It is preparing to open two more, a Renaissance and a Marriott, in July.
InterContinental Hotels Group says eight more of its hotels will open this year in Beijing. The group already has nine hotels in Beijing.

Besides the new openings, many existing upscale hotels in Beijing, including New World Jing Guang Hotel, China World Hotel Beijing and Shangri-La Hotel Beijing, have redecorating and or expansion work scheduled for completion before the Games begin on August 8.

Lin Yuan, director of sales and marketing with Novotel Beijing Sanyuan said, ‘The Olympics is absolutely a golden opportunity, nobody would like to miss promoting themselves.’

There will be about 50,200 athletes, international workers, journalists, sponsors and their business clients who will be accommodated by 112 local hotels.

However, no hotel group is banking on just the Olympics. Sustainable economic growth is their goal.

The Beijing Tourism Bureau believes the number of overseas guests will grow at around 30 to 60% annually, rising to a peak in 2010, and the average occupancy rate will increase to more than 72% in 2009. A lot of hoteliers are praying that the Bureau’s projections come to fruition.
Source: China Daily

author Gareth Powell, source www.chinaeconomicreview.com

InterContinental Hotels, one of the world’s largest hotel groups in terms of rooms, has said it will open 100 more hotels in China in the coming two-and-a-half years.

The group also said it will expand its China staff from 30,000 to 50,000 in the next 18 months.

Note that the brand includes InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express under either management or franchising contracts.

IHG runs some 3,900 hotels with 585,000 rooms in nearly 100 countries and territories under seven brands.

The group added 70 hotels in China last year.
Source: Shanghai Daily

author Gareth Powell, source www.chinaeconomicreview.com

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

author Gareth Powell, source www.chinaeconomicreview.com

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

author Gareth Powell, source www.chinaeconomicreview.com