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How many hotels
of WORLDHOTELS are there in the Asia Pacific region?
We have 81 hotels in the Asia Pacific region, 10 are in
Australia and almost 30 are in China. We are in Japan, Thailand,
Singapore, Malaysia and Korea. In Thailand we have 14 hotels which
include the Amari group that joined us last year.
So we are well
present up to the Maldives. In India, we are looking for hotels
and that's one of the other reasons for my visit here in India to
find suitable member hotels in India. Overall we have 500 member
hotels in 70 countries and we serve 250 destinations worldwide. |
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Have you
identified where you plan to have hotels in India?
We are looking at the two core cities Delhi and Mumbai and
in the second tier we are looking at Goa, Bangalore and Chennai. |
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What is the
client profile?
60% are corporate travellers out of which over 80% of the
bookings are done by travel agents. We also have the high yield
leisure travellers and a lot of business travellers also link a
couple of days of their holidays to their business trip, so
that's one of the part of the business with the leisure
travellers. We also have the retired market especially from
America and Europe. 5% of the travellers are from the MICE
segment. |
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Tell us how did
Worldhotels evolve over the years.
WORLDHOTELS started as SRS or the Steigenberger Reservation
service, which was primarily a booking referral system way back in
1970 in Frankfurt, Germany. This was founded by Egon Steigenberger
who was the owner of the largest German hotel chain at that time.
Initially, we were just doing bookings and later we felt that if
we do sales we would get more bookings and we actually found out
that hotel sales team had good contacts locally but it was very
difficult for the sales team to offer long haul markets. There was
also a need for GSA services and that's how we thought of having
sales offices. Today we have 30 sales offices. If a you are a
member of WORLDHOTELS, you have access to these 30 sales office
and generate business, be it MICE, incentives or be it
contracts with multi-national companies or be it
e-commerce partners for different markets. |
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This is where we are strong and we pride
ourselves in giving hotels the same support like a Starwood, a
Hyatt or a Hilton with the electronic distribution system. Today,
we are not only a global services and marketing company but also
we offer procurement and training for our chain of hotels. The
reason for changing the name from SRS WORLDHOTELS to WORLDHOTELS
is to have a comprehensive brand of what we represent and it gets
easier to incorporate our hotels in the GDS system as well.
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How has
WORLDHOTELS done in the last year?
The sales revenue in 2005 has increased by 16%, the room rates
have only gone marginally up by USD 3 dollars across all
categories. 60 new hotels have been added. Our efforts are now
very much on India and we are talking to some small regional hotel
groups and independent hotels to offer 1000 rooms in India by next
year.
The room nights have gone up to 1.1 million rooms. |
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What are the
categories of hotels you handle?
We have classified our hotels into three categories - the
Deluxe Collection for the five star segment, the First Class
Collection for the four star and the Comfort Collection for the
3½ star. |
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What is your USP?
Our hotels are unique and independent. Every hotel keeps its
independent name and the owner expresses something personal
through the hotel property. We do have the three tiers - we have
hotels for each category and every budget and for every tier the
quality assurance is very strict, so you will find the best 5
stars in the deluxe collection, the best 4 stars in the First
class collection and so on. So when you see our directory, website
www.worldhotels.com or access the GDS, though all are commonly
under the WORLDHOTELS brand, you can choose whether you want the
Deluxe, First Class or the Comfort collection. |
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Our new logo of
dark burgundy and orange highlights our core values which include
excellence, reliability, openness, genuineness, approachability
and contemporary. This new logo was designed after an independent
survey was carried out by Enterprise I.G. to get feedback from our
customers about their experience they had with WORLDHOTELS.
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What is the
operating strategy of WORLDHOTELS?
WORLDHOTELS really operates like the chains. If the hotel
owner appoints Starwood or Meridien or Intercontinental, they
would give 30 odd sales offices, state of the art distribution
system. They would also give frequent flyer partnerships, global
alliances, marketing partnerships. We do exactly the same. The
difference is that with WORLDHOTELS, the hotel will retain their
own name in their local market thus maintaining its uniqueness and
independence. The owner can run the hotel as he would like to run
it . The only thing we make sure is that the quality standards are
stringent and are maintained with a level of consistency. |
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So how do you
help these independent hotels to compete with the chain hotels?
We do contracting with corporates and large travel agency
chains. We do strategic partnerships with large credit card
companies, with rent-a-car companies and with airlines. We do
e-commerce strategy with web based travel agents who are brokers
and who send customers to our hotels. To ensure credentials of the
web based agents, our representative offices contact them first
and meet them and once we are convinced we forge alliances with
them so that they could book the clients with us. We help in the
growth of incentive business and here I know that India has
tremendous potential for the incentive markets especially close by
in South Asia. We do road shows and trade shows, the recent one
being our participation at ITB, Berlin where we had a large booth. |
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Our head office
is in Frankfurt, Germany and our Asia Pacific regional office is
in Singapore where I am located and in New York we have our
regional office for America. So through the head office and
regional offices, we coordinate with our other sales offices. In
India, we have a toll free reservation line where you can make
the reservations and the calls are handled by our Singapore call
centres and after office hours it goes to the European
reservation desk. We also have a representative office who does
the mailing for us and operates out of Mumbai. |
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How do you plan
to meet the challenges of distribution?
Technology has changed rapidly over the years and we are
connected to all the GDS systems and over 600000 Travel Agents
around the globe with fresh inventory and fresh rates. Everything
is live. We also have toll free lines and one can do online
bookings through our website. We are the first consortium of
independent hotels to have an umbrella code EW on the GDS. 3 of
our clients have a own GDS access code, such as the Stamford Hotel
group in Australia. |
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We also do promotions with American Express or BTI. We have recently launched fantastic promotions for Indian
travel agents jointly with Amadeus so that they can win digital
cameras, they can win trips - there are two tickets on offer on
Malaysian Airlines with one week stay in our hotel property. It
has been recently announced and we expect a very good response. We
are also looking at a global P.R. network so that more people know
about our products.
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We are the
preferred hotel chain for American Express and Carlson Wagonlit.
One of the major incentives for travel agents is that we pay
commissions twice a month in the local currency or a common
currency like the US Dollar instead of the agent receiving
multiple cheques in multiple currencies. We have just
implemented the best available rate with a guaranteed rate
assurance on the GDS system.
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What kind of
experience can one expect on choosing to stay at WORLDHOTELS?
We are about choice, quality and people. We bring unique
hotels and people together. We not only represent the 5 star or
6 star hotels and the family run 3 ½ star hotels. Let's start
with the deluxe collection where some of the hotels are
historical landmarks such as the Grand Visconti Palace Hotel in
Milan. A two year hotel which was a former mill and later
transformed into a hotel located in the heart of Milan, Hotel de
Sers is the new boutique hotel in Paris just off the Champs
Elysées. Another fine hotel is the Loong Palace Hotel and Resort
in Beijing and the newest hotel in Hong Kong is the Langham
Place Hotel, a 5 star property which is a very
hi-tech hotel. |
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Then we have the
Empire Hotel and Country Club in Brunei which we acquired last
year and is a 7 star resort in Brunei with palatial villas and
suites on the beachfront.In the First
Class category, there is the Myhotel Bloomsbury in London which
is very hip and trendy, the Steigenberger Hotel de Saxe in
Dresden is the newest property which will start in April this
year and the Cliffs at Peace Canyon in Las Vegas also is well
known in the First Class category. There are boutique hotels
such as the Seagull Hotel in Shanghai with a super dramatic view
of the Huangpu river. |
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In the Comfort
Class of Hotels we have a wide chain of Inter City Hotels across
Germany for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Most of the hotels in
Germany are conveniently located near the railway stations, as
you know that the stations in Europe are normally located in the
heart of the city. These hotels are normally 3½ stars and they
give a free pass to use the public transport and the trams
within the city. So it's a fantastic way to discover Germany.
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In Australia we
represent the largest luxury group of hotels - the Stamford
Hotel group across Australia. Besides, Europe and Asia Pacific,
we are very strong in America, with 15 hotels in New York. We
have a very good percentage of US travellers who stay at
WORLDHOTELS and book electronically. Our guests can redeem
frequent flyer miles - We have tied with 12 different airlines
ranging from ANA, Lufthansa, Thai Airways, Malaysian Airlines,
Delta, United Airlines and American Airlines to name a few. We
are hopeful of tying up with Indian partner airlines as well. We
also have partnerships with AVIS car rental company. |
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What is the
response from your visit and interaction with the travel trade
in India?
We've organized events in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai and
interacted with agents and the response has been spectacular. We
have got lot of requests for incentives, meetings and groups
from this market and a very positive response for the Amadeus
promotion as well as for our new brand WORLDHOTELS. I will be
back in India in April for the Hotel Investment Conference and I
will be coming back later as well to seek partnerships in India
for WORLDHOTELS. |
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Look out for more
information on K+K Palace Central, a First Class Collection of
WORLDHOTELS located in Prague, Czech Republic, in our
forthcoming issue of OPPORTUNITIES TODAY… |
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