Annie Chng-Luchau, regional director of sales, Asia-Pacific, Design Hotels

ANNIE Chng-Luchau, a veteran with 15 years of sales experience in the hospitality industry, has joined Design Hotels as regional director of sales, Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore.

In her new role, she will be in charge of developing and implementing sales strategies for the hotels under Design Hotels’ portfolio in order to maximise opportunities, drive revenue and boost brand awareness in the region.

Most recently, Chng-Luchau was regional sales director at The Collektion, a sales representation company for independent hotels.

Some of her other prior hotel experiences include serving as assistant director of sales at The Lanesborough in London, global director of group sales at Preferred Hotel Group and regional group sales manager at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company in London.

KUALA Lumpur City Hall has unveiled a new destination brand for the city yesterday, as well as committing to between two million ringgit (US$512 thousand) and three million ringgit in funds on advertising to promote the brand in Malaysia first, before going global.

Titled Kuala Lumpur a City of Contracts and Diversity, the branding seeks to represent the diverse populace, architecture, cuisine, accommodation and shopping options that can be found in the capital of Malaysia.

“The branding exercise will help expand our marketing capabilities with promotional campaigns and eye-catching logos to set Kuala Lumpur as the region’s forefront destination for business and leisure,” said Mohd Amin Nordin Abdul Aziz, mayor, Kuala Lumpur City Hall.

He added: “By successfully branding Kuala Lumpur, we will be able to stimulate an increase in tourism, investment, job opportunities, business development and events hosting.”

According to Amin, the campaign hopes to boost three key indicators – visitor arrivals, average spend per night and average length of stay.

In the government’s Kuala Lumpur Tourism Masterplan 2015-2025, targets are for Kuala Lumpur to reach 16 million foreign arrivals and to generate 79 billion ringgit in receipts by 2025. This translates to about five to six per cent annual growth.

Branding of the city is also in line with the masterplan which had prescribed that to position Kuala Lumpur competitively, it needed to have a distinctive brand.

QATAR Airways is celebrating 10 years of Hong Kong operations with a series of events and the launch of new flights.

A sale took place in late March offering promotional fares to 10 destinations worldwide, and Qatar will be holding the sale again in this year-long celebratory affair, according to Chan Cheong Eu, greater south China country manager, Qatar Airways.

Other consumer engagements are also in the works, including street performances throughout the city.

Additional flights from Hong Kong are set to launch as well, with this year’s first, a Doha route, established since February after Cathay Pacific gave up the slot, stated Chan, adding that a Boeing 787 Dreamliner is being used to ply the daily service.

He further said that more route launches can be expected later this year, including to lesser-known European destinations.

Hong Kong was Qatar’s 70th destination when it launched its maiden flight there a decade ago. The Doha-based carrier currently operates the second largest fleet of Boeing 787 aircraft with 27 on hand and 16 more on order.

THE recent Songkran season in Thailand gave only a brief boost to hotels in Pattaya, where a price war is grinding on, sources tell TTG Asia e-Daily.

Songkran, which ran from April 13 to 18, failed to bring enough crowds to the resort city famous for its nightlife and entertainment, according to Sanpech Supabowornsthian, assistant managing director, Unchaleewiwat Group.

“Hotels (did not do too well) on April 18 and 19, with big tourist volumes gotten only from April 13 to 15, and (occupancy) was only at 80 per cent from April 15 to 16,” said Sanpech, who is also president of the Thai Hotels Association Eastern Chapter.

Hotels in the main tourist area of Pattaya City are faring worse with only 60 per cent occupancy despite having already slashed prices. “Most of them cannot (afford to) dump the price anymore,” exclaimed Sanpec.

He attributed the double slump in rates and occupancy to the declining centricity of Pattaya as a tourist destination, adding that the once popular town is experiencing the effects of “tourist sharing” as Thailand continues promoting other destinations in the country such as cities in the northeast.

Also a bane are shared economy players like Airbnb and apartment hotels, where “even the Chinese use them and they do not overflow into small hotels”, said Sanpec.

Further explaining the difficult situation, Bill Barnett, managing director of consultancy C9 Hotelworks, said that it is due to the absence of Pattaya’s traditional Russian source market. Domestic travellers have declined severely this year as well due to the heatwave.

Thibault Viort, chief disruption and growth officer, AccorHotels

ACCORHOTELS has appointed a ‘chief disruption and growth officer’, signalling its continued drive to change with the times.

The C-level role, a first for the global hotel industry, is held by Thibault Viort, “a serial entrepreneur who built up his first business at age 22”, according to an AccorHotels statement.

His ventures included creating Facebook’s first online games under IsCool Entertainment in 2008 then specialising in tourism from 2009 after creating Wipolo and transforming City Vox.

Viort’s role is to track down new growth opportunities in order to foster the emergence of new entrepreneurs within and outside the group; oversee investments or acquisitions in emerging activities; and reinforce interactions with start-ups that re-invent the sector “at a time when the current networking of humanity shakes up every sector (including) the hospitality industry”, said the AccorHotels statement.

Its chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin said he was building up “new streams of activity…to create value and enhance creativity in the way we conduct our business”.

Accor just bought onefinestay on April 5 for €148 million (US$167 million), after acquiring a 49 per cent stake in Squarebreak and 30 per cent in Oasis Collections in February. This gives it a foothold in the sharing economy space, which has grown exponentially since Airbnb was founded in 2008.

Last year, it also acquired France-based Fastbooking, which gives it yet another new stream. Fastbooking provides more than 4,000 hotels with website development, channel management, digital marketing, revenue management and competitive intelligence.

Accor is also completing its acquisition of FRHI Holdings, announced last December, which will bring the Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel brands into its fold. This plugs the luxury/upscale gap for the chain.

Asked what he would like to buy next, Bazin, in an email interview, said: “AccorHotels has an opportunistic approach in M&A in every area of action: asset-light hotel companies, hotel real estate, but also digital, F&B….provided this is accretive and in line with what AccorHotels has implemented over the past three years.

“On the digital side, we are looking at start-ups that are developing state-of-the art technologies following two angles: either to improve hotel performances or to enrich customer experience.”

Singapore’s Marina Bay Cruise Centre

IN LIGHT of recent lacklustre tourism performance, the Singapore government will be injecting S$$700 million (US$517 million) to aid the industry over the next five years.

Announced by the minister for trade and industry, S Iswaran, at the Tourism Industry Conference 2016 yesterday, this third tranche of the Tourism Development Fund will focus on three areas – developing tourism products, improving productivity through technology and enhancing manpower capabilities.

Acknowledging that the tourism sector for the past two years has been “more challenging”, Iswaran said: “We must contend with periodic fluctuations caused by uncertainties in the global economy, adverse developments in key source markets, growing competition in the region and domestic resource constraints.

“Against this backdrop, we need two types of responses; strategies that will best position us to benefit from long term growth opportunities; and tactical measures to deal with volatility and challenges in the short term.”

Iswaran pointed out that some of the funding will be directed to “niche sectors with high growth potential” such as the cruise industry, which generates “significant spillover economic benefits” for ground handling services, bunkering and ship repair.

To keep abreast with new technology, Iswaran pointed out that big data and predictive analytics present significant opportunities for the tourism sector.

“It can revolutionise the way we understand our visitors, their tastes and preferences, how we reach out to them, and tailor our products and services to meet their needs,” Iswaran said.

He added that the the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) will expand the scope of support under the Business Improvement Fund with a time-limited Hotel Retrofitting Grant for hoteliers seeking to redesign their premises to implement productivity-enhancing solutions.

STB chief executive Lionel Yeo also shared that as part of STB’s marketing strategies over the next five years, they will be “intensifying trade engagement and marketing efforts” to attract visitors from the top five source markets of Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Australia and India.

STB will also be ramping up efforts in “high-growth secondary cities” such as Surabaya and Medan in Indonesia, Tianjin and Chongqing in China and Ahmedabad and Hyderabad in India, as well as enter newer markets like Myanmar, said Yeo.

Interior of the Tourism Management Institute of Singapore

THE National Association of Travel Agents Singapore (NATAS) will be stepping up training courses and releasing an enhanced accreditation programme for agents from June and July respectively.

The improved training courses, aimed at upgrading agent skillsets and increasing the productivity of agencies, will be conducted by the Tourism Management Institute of Singapore (TMIS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of NATAS.

Meanwhile, the new three-tier accreditation framework by NATAS hopes to better recognise the skill competencies of travel agents and is aligned with Singapore’s Workforce Skills Qualifications Tourism Framework national standard.

“(Travellers) are growing to be more sophisticated and have higher expectations of what they want in a vacation. We therefore need to train the staff of travel agencies to be knowledgeable in handling these customers and be able to sell travel experiences professionally,” said Fiona Lim, chairman for manpower and training, NATAS.

Commenting on the new initiatives, Ong Ling Lee, director, travel agents and tourist guides, Singapore Tourism Board, added: “The current travel landscape is increasingly disrupted by changing consumer habits on travel research and booking.

“Within Singapore, manpower constraints also call for travel agents to remodel their business and operations to increase productivity. Thus, it is important to invest in people development to ensure our travel agent workforce has the right set of skills to transform the industry.”

SHANGHAI Hengfu Investment & Development has appointed Capella Hotel Group Asia as the operators of Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li, an all-villa resort in Shanghai’s last remaining cluster of historic shikumen (stone warehouse gate) estates.

The resort is expected to open in March next year, accompanied by serviced apartments also in early 2017.

Originally built in the 1930s by French real estate company Foncière et Immobilière de Chine, the estate is located within the Hengfu historical and cultural preservation zone of the Xuhui District.

The estate will house the 55-villa Capella resort, complemented by the Capella Library, the Auriga Spa, a French brasserie, event venues and the 40-apartment Capella Residences. The Gallery, a collection of niche retail lifestyle brands which forms the façade of the Jian Ye Li estate, will also be part of the development.

Commenting on the partnership, Zhu Jingsong, general manager of Shanghai Hengfu Investment & Development, said: “It is our common goal to transform Jian Ye Li into a vibrant and charming landmark that symbolises the protective utilisation of Shanghai’s beautiful historical architecture.”