City hotel development planning underway

The tourism authority of HCMC has begun drawing up a plan to build more hotels until 2015 to meet the future demand of travelers.

Truong Vinh Tho, head of the Hotel Division of the Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said the plan would include a vision towards 2020.

The current hotel rooms are enough to meet the demand of local and foreign visitors to the city but the tourism authority wants to move ahead, Tho said.

Many investors are building hotels in the city while others are exploring opportunities to get involved in hotel projects. So the forthcoming hotel development plan will provide much-needed information about the market for investors to make decisions.

“We are working with the tourism sector to map out the plan and making projections on local and foreign visitor arrivals in the city in years to come,” Tho said. He added the plan would be ready late this year or early next.

The city has 836 hotels with more than 25,000 rooms at the moment. Of these hotels, 596 are of one-star standard with some 9,700 rooms, 167 of two-star standard with more than 6,000 rooms, 47 of three-star standard with nearly 3,700 rooms, 13 of four-star standard with 1,760 rooms and 13 of five-star standard with over 4,200 rooms.

Last year saw 3.1 million foreign visitors coming to the city, and the number is forecast to rise to around 3.5 million this year. No projection of local visitor arrivals is available.

Tho said the three- to five-star hotels were still doing good business in the city with average room occupancy of around 70 percent last year. Almost all one- to four-star hotels belong to local investors while foreign investors dominate the five-star hotel segment.

However, local investors will supersede foreign ones in the luxury hotel segment with many hi-end hotel expansion and construction projects underway in districts 1, 2 and 7.

Saigontourist Holding Company alone will have thousands of additional luxury hotel rooms when its projects are finished. – SGT

Posted by VBN on May 12 2011. Filed under Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry