From leftL Michelle Gregory,director of Marketing, Sunway Lagoon Malaysia,Calvin Ho, Fredrik Kasiepo and David Wooi. Ho and Kasiepo hold up the MoU agreements they had just signed.
Sunway Lagoon Malaysia has inked an MoU with Garuda Indonesia as it targets a 20 per cent growth of its Indonesian visitor volume.
Indonesia’s national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia and Sunway Lagoon Malaysia signed the MoU on behalf of Sunway Lagoon while Garuda Indonesia was represented by Fredrik Kasiepo, general manager of Garuda Indonesia (Malaysia).
From left: Sunway Lagoon Malaysia’s Michelle Gregory, Sunway Theme Park’s Calvin Ho; and Garuda Indonesia’s Fredrik Kasiepo and David Wooi
Calvin Ho, senior general manager of Sunway Theme Parks, shared: “We wanted to make visiting Sunway Lagoon more appealing for our neighbours from Indonesia, which led to this development with Garuda Indonesia.”
Under the new agreement, Garuda Airline passengers flying into Malaysia will get to enjoy a 20 per cent discount off published admission rates into Sunway Lagoon. The offer is valid through November 2020.
The deal will be promoted through the airline’s website, inflight magazine as well as at the back of boarding passes, Garuda Indonesia’s account manager sales & marketing, David Wooi, said.
To enjoy the offer, passengers need only to show their boarding pass or GarudaMiles card at Sunway Lagoon’s ticketing counter within seven days of arrival to Malaysia.
According to Ho, the theme park was not just eyeing the leisure FIT and family segment, but also Indonesian business travellers and the MICE market.
In 2018, tourist arrivals from Indonesia to Malaysia grew by 17.2 per cent to 3.3 million, while in 1Q2019, tourist arrivals from Indonesia recorded a growth of 17.1 per cent over 1Q2018, to 924,916 arrivals. Ho shared that Indonesian visitors to the park contributed between 20 to 30 per cent of the 1.4 million total visitors received last year.
“This is the beginning of a relationship which we hope to expand further to also cover Sunway Lost World of Tambun in Ipoh as well as Sunway Medical Centre and the hotels at Sunway City,” Ho said.
The theme park has similar agreements with Emirates, AirAsia and Malaysia Airlines.
Royal Caribbean International has announced a US$97 million modernisation of the Voyager of the Seas, which will set sail as the company’s first ship in Asia to be transformed under the Royal Amplified fleet modernisation programme come October 21.
The company revealed that the modernised ship will feature three-storey-high racer waterslides, reinvigorated Vitality Spa, and redesigned kids and teens spaces.
A close-up rendering of the Voyager’s rear
Battle for Planet Z laser tag, the glow-in-the-dark adventure that has become a staple on Royal Caribbean ships, will be introduced to the Voyager of the Seas.
In addition, younger guests from babies to teens will enjoy a top-to-bottom redesign of their dedicated spaces. A fresh take on Adventure Ocean, for kids of three to 12 years old, brings a modern, free-play approach in the form of a new, open layout with activities at every corner.
In addition to a new nursery for babies and tots, the ship’s hangout area for teens will be updated, along with the addition of an outdoor deck.
Moreover, the Vitality Spa and Fitness Center will be enhanced and relocated to the aft of the ship, offering a signature menu of services including massages, acupuncture, manicures, fitness classes and personal training.
The poolside Solarium for all-day, adults-only tranquil vibes will also be refreshed.
Other highlights of the transformation include 72 new inside and balcony staterooms, a Suite Lounge and outdoor area – exclusively for guests in Grand Suites and above; and the Diamond Lounge for members of Royal Caribbean’s Crown & Anchor Society loyalty programme.
As well, travellers can enjoy a better app experience, with mobile check-in and other on-board conveniences such as itinerary planning, management of bookings for dining, shore excursions and show reservations.
Voyager of the Seas will be the fourth ship reimagined as part of the Royal Amplified fleet modernisation effort built on research and guest feedback.
The cruise line’s investment of more than US$1 billion spans 10 ships in four years.
The newly transformed ship will set sail on a series of three- to five-night South-east Asian itineraries with seven sailings from Singapore to Penang, Phuket and Kuala Lumpur (Port Klang). This is followed by a season down under with nine- to 12-night South Pacific cruises from Sydney, starting on November 30.
The Residence Maldives at Dhigurah, Maldives
The Residence Maldives at Dhigurah has opened its doors in the Gaafu Alifu Atoll, adjacent to The Residence Maldives at Falhumaafushi, another property under the Cenizaro group. The all-inclusive property has 173 beach, lagoon and water villas sprawled across a 2km-long island, with each villa boasting its own private pool, indoor and outdoor showers, and king-size bed. Facilities include a Spa by Clarins, dive centre, kids’ club and fitness centre.
Guests also have access to six restaurants and six bars across both resorts, as well as non-motorised sports such as kayaking and windsurfing. Between the two resorts also lies a sandy castaway island – accessible by ladder – where guests can sit on their own private sunbeds. Exclusively for guests at Dhigurah, a second castaway island is a 10-minute speedboat ride away and is complimentary to guests, with food and drinks at an additional cost. A personalised service, guests are provided with a phone and can arrange to be dropped and collected when they choose.
Taj Rishikesh Resort & Spa, Uttarakhand, India
The iconic Taj brand now has planted its flag 30km from Rishikesh, a city in India’s northern state of Uttarakhand. Spread over five hectares of terraced gardens on the banks of the river Ganges with the Himalayas as a backdrop, the resort offers 79 keys ranging from Deluxe rooms to villas. Guests have several eateries to choose from: an all-day diner, a speciality restaurant offering cuisine inspired from the Himalayan belt, and an open-air pizza bar. Other amenities include a yoga pavilion and the 1,850m2 Jiva Spa.
JW Marriott Hotel Qufu, China
Located in the old city of Qufu – better known as the birthplace of Chinese philosopher Confucius – is the first JW Marriott hotel in Shandong Province. The hotel features 197 keys, comprising 188 individual guestrooms and nine complex suites. There are six categories of rooms, spanning from the 45m2 Deluxe to the 98m2 Executive Suites with 3.2-meter-high ceilings.
Aside from the four F&B options, recreational facilities include a 24-hour fitness centre, spa and indoor heated swimming pool. Event planners may avail the property’s seven multipurpose function spaces, such as the 800m2 Grand Ballroom with a 9m-high ceiling or the 200m2 Function Room.
Best Western Prime Square Hotel, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Best Western has opened its first midscale boutique hotel in Chiang Mai. Located in the centre of the city, there are just 48 rooms ranging from the 24m2 Superior Rooms to the 36m2 Deluxe Rooms, with the larger rooms featuring bathtubs. Aside from the all-day Prime restaurant, facilities on the grounds include a fitness centre, outdoor swimming pool, and a small meeting room for up to eight people.
Quinby: tours and activities sector expected to grow faster in APAC than other regions in the world (photo credit: Facebook/Arivaltravel)
The tours and activities marketplace has been one of the hottest and most closely watched segments in travel and tourism in recent years, with growing acquisitions and investments pumped into the segment.
At Arival’s inaugural Asia event in Bangkok earlier this week, co-founder and CEO Douglas Quinby said the tours and activities sector in Asia-Pacific has been “significantly growing faster” than other regions and is expected to post an average of seven per cent in the 2017-2022 period, versus four per cent in the US and three per cent in Europe for the same five-year period.
Quinby: tours and activities sector expected to grow faster in APAC than other regions in the world (photo credit: Facebook/Arivaltravel)
“Asia-Pacific will add US$150 billion in gross market value over this five-year period – this is equivalent to the entire travel markets of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. This is extraordinary,” Quinby remarked.
As the fourth largest tourism sector in the region after airlines, hotels and rail, gross bookings for tours and activities in Asia-Pacific is expected to reach US$45 billion in 2019.
“Investors of all types have poured US$1.2 billion into start-ups of all types in our industry since 2017. Where has all the money gone? You guess it – Asia,” Quinby added. This, he says, is a nod to how the in-destination sector is becoming a key and growing revenue generator in the region.
“But not all this investment has gone to one particular OTA in Hong Kong,” he quipped, alluding to the fresh injection of US$225 million that Klook has snagged in its latest funding round.
Wilfred Fan, chief commercial officer at Klook also attests to the “excitement” that investors are seeing in Asia’s tours and activities segment, even as the tours and activities sector is characterised by “fragmentation” in terms of connectivity, suppliers, operations, transactions and payments.
In Asia, a “newcomer” to the tours and activities sector, “connectivity is just at the beginning,” noted Fan. “Most service providers are not yet connected or still rely on physical bookings… The infrastructure and technology platforms are already there, but operators don’t know where to go. There is huge amount of untapped potential.”
Blanca Menchaca, CEO and co-founder of Singapore-based B2B technology and distribution specialist BeMyGuest, agreed: “We are just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to online distribution. In Asia, the majority of tour operators are just starting to sell online, and a lot of activities are not even online.”
With a mobile-savvy travel population, tour operators and suppliers more used to legacy booking systems, and OTAs hungry to scale up their content and marketshare, all these point to an imbalance in demand and supply in Asia – and that disruption in a fast-growing but fragmented industry is probably not too far off.
Renato Domini, CEO, Panorama Destination, certainly thinks so. “The next two years are going to be disruptive,” he said. “DMCs have to reinvent and continue to invest in product innovation, not just offer sightseeing tours.”
In anticipation of unrelenting changes in the tour operating space that the digital travel economy will bring, Panorama Destination has already restructured the company with a new department to look at OTAs – which has been a “good distribution channel” for the DMC so far, Domini revealed.
While tours and activities sector in Asia is comparatively less mature than the US and Europe, travel consumers in the region are ahead of other regions in its mobile usage – a key factor that will enable the region to pivot its growth and unlock further opportunities in the in-destination marketplace.
The connectivity gap underpinning the tours and activities sector have also spurred the growth of a vibrant reservation technology development, Asia and worldwide. BeMyGuest, for instance, will pump its undisclosed amount of Series B funding into improving its technological initiatives as it enters its next stage of growth.
Global players in online travel have also moved into the space, as evident in TripAdvisor and Booking Holdings announcing their respective acquisitions of tours and activities tech providers Bokun and Fareharbour last year.
What’s clear is that Asia’s exciting tours and activities sector is just starting to sizzle.
Sabre has added new features to its first-to-market Sabre Commercial Platform for airlines.
The year-old platform will now feature a Schedule Exchange solution and a refreshed Irregular Operations (IROPS) Reaccommodation solution, Cem Tanyel, president of Sabre Airline Solutions, announced at the Sabre Technology Exchange in Las Vegas this week.
Schedule Exchange helps airlines minimise costly passenger disruptions using a more sophisticated method to schedule publication and distribution of flight information, and lays out the foundation for end-to-end dynamic scheduling.
The refreshed IROPS Reaccommodation product features a redesigned and intelligent interface as well as enhanced algorithm that determines the best solution for flight disruptions based on airlines’ business rules and traveller details, and then automatically rebooks passengers.
The new product runs twice as fast and offers better resolution for large disruptions.
This intelligent platform “enables airlines to better meet their customers’ shifting expectations, while (increasing) revenue”, said Tanyel. He added that there will be “more (solutions) on the way this year” for the Sabre Commercial Platform.
Sabre will soon also catapult the hospitality industry towards intelligent advanced retailing with SynXis Intelligent Retailing, which is slated for an early-2020 launch.
Jeff Henley, manager, solutions consulting, Americas at Sabre Hospitality Solutions, introduced the upcoming solution in a teaser presentation at the Exchange, and described it as a model for “retailing beyond the room, or even without the room”.
SynXis Intelligent Retailing will enable hoteliers to sell not just room ancillaries, but also present a guest with related and highly targeted products – from tours to clothing – in real time during the booking process.
These recommended products are determined through machine learning based on a customer’s own preferences and the consumption patterns of similar users.
The result is a shopping and booking process that is dynamic, personalised and transparent about product expectations, said Henley.
Sabre is currently working with Langham Hotels in Hong Kong to pilot this solution this year, after which it will run on a test-and-learn phase for the next two quarters. The ready-to-market launch is slated for 2020.
Sundar Narasimhan, senior vice president, Sabre Labs and Product Strategy Vision, asserted that Sabre is casting a heavy focus on intelligent advanced retailing, and that SynXis Intelligent Retailing is one of its first concrete steps towards the goal of making it an industry-wide mainstay by 2025.
Nipatorn Singhagan, manager of the new Special Leisure Department,
Thai Airways International (THAI) is targeting the fly-cruise market from Thailand through the launch of a newly established Special Leisure Department, which will soon roll out promotions combining flights and cruises in the UK, Singapore, South Korea and Japan.
With the move, the airlines is hoping to ride the growing popularity of cruising to expand to new markets, as well as gain a competitive edge on tougher routes.
Nipatorn Singhagan, manager of the new Special Leisure Department
Nipatorn Singhagan, manager of the Special Leisure Department, said the promotions will be launched within the year.
She is upbeat about the appeal of fly-cruise packages in the Thai outbound market, with the product still relatively novel in comparison to land holidays.
Sumate Sudasna, managing director of Conference and Destination Management (CDM), said cruises sell because they can be the more cost-effective and fuss-free way to travel, bringing entertainment, F&B and more together in one place.
“Cruise itself is not new for the market. But people (take repeat cruise holidays) because they are priced 30 per cent cheaper than vacations on land,” Sumate said.
Meanwhile, Nipatorn shared that the new department is also focussed on other non-leisure segments. To target the meetings and incentives segment, for example, the department is offering options like seat upgrade, onboard welcome announcement, and fast track lane at immigration.
Ubud in Bali could become the first gastronomic destination endorsed by the UNWTO, fanning Indonesia’s hopes to develop gastronomic and culinary tourism.
Arief Yahya, Indonesia’s tourism minister said Ubud’s run for UNWTO recognition is part of the country’s overarching strategy to develop gastronomic tourism. “The richness of culture and tradition in Indonesia produces interesting gastronomic diversity. If gastronomy is properly developed, it can be (an important tourism asset).”
Sun rising over a paddy field in Ubud, Bali
According to data from the Ministry of Tourism data, around 30-40 per cent of tourist spending goes to food-related consumption. The ministry also projects 35 per cent of overseas travellers will visit the country to explore gastronomy by 2030.
Vita Datau, chief of the tourism ministry’s acceleration and tourism development team, said that Ubud is picked due to its readiness for gastronomic tourism and support from the regional government.
Vita added: “Another consideration is that the culture of local wisdom is still very strong in Ubud. Each dish presented (tells a story). This is important because one of the UNWTO assessment points is (the food’s ability to reflect) the diversity of cultures and local (produce and ingredients).”
To become a UNWTO prototype for gastronomic world destination, there are five standard criteria that must be met, including lifestyle, local products, culture and history, the story behind the dish, and nutrition and health.
Roberta Garibaldi, lead expert from UNWTO, explained that there are three stages of assessment, namely “inventory of assets and attractions, verification and analysis, and stakeholder recommendations”.
Aditya Amaranggana, project specialist at UNWTO, added that there are four objectives of the programme carried out in Ubud – building the image of Ubud as a gastronomic tourism destination, creating a gastronomic tourism cluster in Ubud through the participation of local communities, developing innovative products and experiences in terms of gastronomic tourism, and encouraging integration between individuals and companies in Ubud and the rest of Bali.
She said: “UNWTO will see how gastronomy is developed so that it supports sustainable development and creates new jobs.”
After Ubud, the Ministry of Tourism hopes that Bandung, Yogyakarta, Solo and Semarang will become the next gastronomic destinations in Indonesia.
Global wellness consultancy, development and management firm Goco Hospitality is developing a wellness resort within a former Soviet-era sanatorium in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Located on 100ha of forested land with vistas of the Alatau Mountains, Goco Life Alatau is scheduled to soft launch in July 2020.
Goco Life Alatau
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Aerial view of the resort
Rendering of the resort's exterior
Suite
Goco Life Alatau will have a gross floor area of 45,000m2 and 212 guest rooms or suites.
The heart of the resort will be the 4,000m2 medical and wellness centre. It will provide guests with access to medical diagnostics, imaging and treatment equipment, along with a team of medical and wellness professionals.
This will be combined with traditional Chinese medicine, a medical aesthetics centre, hydrotherapy, a dedicated spa and extensive heat and water experiences. Guests will enjoy tailored wellness programmes that support them in their goal of living their healthiest possible life.
A 2,000m2 thermae will provide family-friendly activities, with an aqua park, a thermal circuit and indoor and outdoor pools fed with natural mineral spring water.
Guests can also dine at any of the resort’s four health-focused F&B outlets, and the adjacent 18-hole golf course and extensive local hiking routes allow for leisurely outdoor recreation.
An indoor gym and “mind and body studio” are complemented by outdoor tennis and basketball courts and a jogging track.
Around 1,900m2 of meetings and events spaces will allow Goco Life Alatau to host a range of events, from conferences and business meetings to weddings and other gatherings.
VIP guests at Goco Life Alatau will also enjoy the privacy of their own wing, with luxurious accommodation, alongside dedicated meeting, medical and spa facilities.
Radisson signs first APAC hotel under the soft brand in Australia
The first Asia-Pacific hotel in the Radisson Collection is set to open in a restored historical building in Australia’s Blue Mountains come 2023.
Imperial Hotel, A Radisson Collection Hotel will mark the rebirth of one of Australia’s first major “tourist hotels”, which opened in 1878. In its history, it has hosted prime ministers and royalty, including King George V and George VI. It remains an iconic building today and the symbol of a prosperous era in Mount Victoria.
Radisson signs first APAC hotel under the soft brand in Australia
The original Imperial Hotel building will be restored and a collection of chalets will be built in the property’s 7,500m2 grounds.
Upon reopening, the hotel will feature 60 keys, an all-day dining restaurant, a lobby lounge, bar, gastro-pub and a fitness centre. The hotel will welcome visiting celebrity chefs, while a ballroom, outdoor terrace and marquee will serve as venues for events and weddings.
The hotel is located within a one hour and forty-five minutes’ drive from downtown Sydney via the Great Western Highway that connects the city with the Central West Region of New South Wales.
Imperial Hotel, A Radisson Collection Hotel will complement Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel Sydney and offer opportunities for two-centre holidays in New South Wales.
“The regional launch of the Radisson Collection, our newest brand, represents an important milestone in our Asia-Pacific expansion strategy… We look forward to creating a vibrant epicenter for visitors and the local community in the Blue Mountains. This will write a new chapter in the tale of this Australian icon,” said Katerina Giannouka, president, Asia Pacific, Radisson Hotel Group.
Radisson Collection is a soft brand bringing together one-of-a-kind properties that typically boasting uncommon locations, distinctive design, and a selection of local insider activities.
Ahead of its opening later this year, Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok has announced the appointment of Four Seasons veterans, Lubosh Barta and Jasjit Singh Assi, as general manager and hotel manager respectively.
Barta began his Four Seasons career 15 years ago at the company’s former location in Bangkok, where he was director of F&B. From there, he transferred to Chiang Mai before taking on his first general manager position in Koh Samui and later opening Four Seasons Hotel Seoul as general manager as well.
Barta (left) and Jasjit Singh Assi
A native of the Czech Republic, his career also includes positions in Europe, Australia and the Middle East.
Assisting Barta will be Jasjit Singh Assi, the hotel manager who will be responsible for day-to-day operations.
After joining Four Seasons in his native country of India, Assi rose through the F&B divisions in Chiang Mai and Sydney before returning to Mumbai in his first assignment as hotel manager.
