Deutsche Hospitality will plant its first hotel in South-east Asia when the Steigenberger Hotel Riverside opens in Bangkok in 2019.

“The hotel is our gateway to the market in Thailand and allows us to establish a brand presence in a city of superlatives,” explained CEO Puneet Chhatwal. “This also strengthens the presence of Deutsche Hospitality in our target growth market of Asia.”

Located on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, the hotel will offer 259 rooms, including deluxe rooms, suites, superior suites, honeymoon suites and a presidential suite. Its conference and banqueting facilities will extend over an area of 900m².

Its F&B concept will boast features such as a pool restaurant, a roof terrace bar and restaurant and a VIP lounge. A 1,200m² spa and gym area will contain both an indoor and an outdoor pool. There will also be shuttle boat tours.

The hotel will be operated via a management agreement, under which Thai company River Garden will be property owner and contractual partner.

Deutsche Hospitality encompasses more than 125 hotels across three separate hotel brands – Steigenberger Hotels and Resorts, Jaz in the City and IntercityHotel – of which over 25 are at the development stage.

Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) has launched its global cruise accreditation programme Learning Academy in India, giving the country’s agents access to over 50 training modules covering all facets of the cruise industry from a frontline consultant’s perspective.

The training programme arose from the “increasing demand for formalised training in the cruise sector” from agents throughout Asia in the past five years, said Peter Kollar, CLIA’s head of international training & development, who launched Learning Academy at the Singapore Tourism Board’s (STB) recent ‘Cruising ahead with Singapore’ event in Mumbai. The event was attended by over 150 Indian travel agents.

Kollar launching Learning Academy in Mumbai

GB Srithar, STB’s regional director, South Asia, Middle East, Africa, commented: “India is a key source market for cruising out of Singapore. STB will continue to work closely with in-market partners to raise awareness of cruising as a great holiday option and sustain the growth of Singapore as a cruising hub in South-east Asia.

“According to a consumer survey conducted in Mumbai, 34 per cent of young Indian families are willing to spend on a cruise holiday and 98 per cent are open to a cruise from Singapore. There are exciting opportunities ahead and we will continue to partner with our travel trade and cruise partners to grow Singapore’s cruise industry and promote its strong destination appeal,” he added.

CLIA’s partnership with STB will also see the introduction of CLIA membership in Singapore and Indonesia this month.

The combination of the cherry blossom season, visa-free travel and cheap flights have propelled Japan to become the leading destination for Thai travellers during the upcoming Songkran period, traditionally a peak outbound travel period for Thailand as travellers make use of the long holidays during the annual water festival.

Mongkol Thitawannoned, manager of Miracle Time Travel, observes more Thai travellers heading abroad during Songkran this year, with 60-70 per cent of its tours booked for the holiday period.

Japan and South Korea are hot favourites for their cherry blossom season, while Italy and France are popular for longhaul Thai travellers, he shared.

“Most customers booked medium-haul tours of around five days, four nights, while others take holidays for as long as their companies allow during Songkran,” Mongkol said.

Veeraya Veerasupakarn, a planning staff of H.I.S. Thailand, told TTG Asia that the top outbound destination for Thai travellers is still Japan and the company’s group tours to Japan are fully booked.

“During Songkran, most of our customers chose six-day, four-night tour packages while others would not holiday beyond five days according to the national public holiday calendar,” Veeraya said.

And even as Japan is seeing more FITs from Thailand, the revenue for H.I.S. – which focuses on Japan tours – has not declined as the agency also offers other products such as flight ticket and hotel reservation to customers, she added.

Getting all sorts of questions and requests are part of a travel agent’s job. Ahead of April Fool’s Day tomorrow, we got our agent friends to spill some of the most ridiculous, over-the-top and absurd requests they have received. Here are 10 weirdest requests agents had to dealt with.

1. “A client asked: ‘If I don’t pay for a seat reservation on my flight, will I have to stand?'”

2. “After informing a client that a visa is needed to travel to Vietnam, he responded: “I have a MasterCard, will I need to speak to my bank and change it over?”

3. “A guest complained that he didn’t get a seaview room in a Kuala Lumpur hotel.”

4. “A Middle Eastern guest staying at a luxury property in Langkawi facing the rainforest asked me the following day if I wanted to kill him. His theory was that trees gave out carbon dioxide at night and so he thought I was trying to suffocate him.”

5. “Many years ago a man from Yorkshire greeted me at the beginning of a tour and said: ‘I don’t like fish. Now don’t get me wrong I like fish but I don’t eat them.’ There was no ‘Hello’ or ‘How do you do.’ I was, of course, non-plussed by his abrupt statement, particularly as we were in Japan. This set the tone for the rest of the tour as his wife would quickly remove any fish from his plate at mealtimes. When she failed to do this quickly at one dinner, he immediately returned to their room not to be seen for the rest of the evening.”

6.”A client, whose zodiac sign is Virgo, asked whether her husband and their s on could also cruise on board Superstar Virgo even though they are Aquarian and Capricorn, respectively.”

7. “A well-coiffed lady arranging a trip to Africa for her and her husband asked whether we could arrange a one-way ticket for her husband and do whatever it takes for him to never (come home). We never found out whether the lady was serious or was merely joking.”

8. “A man asked for the telephone number of a pretty Vietnamese lady he met on his Vietnam holiday. He just couldn’t remember where or when.”

9. “We run trips into the tropical jungle of Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains and we were asked many times to ensure there are no mosquitos or bugs in the jungle.”

10. “A client wanted to visit Dubai with family so I suggested a dhow cruise to him. When he came back he complained that it was not a cruise as he expected a big ship. He then tried to convince me that cruising can only involve large ships.”

This article was contributed by Adelaine Ng, S Puvaneswary, Marissa Carruthers, Rosa Ocampo, Julian Ryall and Rohit Kaul

A week into the large carry-on electronics ban, the Middle Eastern carriers are going all out to up one another. First there was Royal Jordanian’s tongue-in-cheek social media posts, then there was Emirates’ gate-check service for laptops and tablets.

Now, Qatar Airways is providing a complimentary laptop loan service for its business class passengers on all US-bound flights from next week. The loan device will be provided to passengers after boarding.

Qatar Airways Group chief executive, Akbar Al Baker, said; “By providing this laptop loan service we can ensure that our passengers on flights to the US can continue to work whilst on-board.”

The airline is offering a special service to collect all prohibited electronic items at the gate for all passengers. These will be securely packaged, tagged, loaded as check-in baggage and returned safely to the customer on arrival in the US.

Qatar Airways is also providing one hour of free Wi-Fi for all passengers and a special Wi-Fi package of US$5 on board US-bound flights.

US-based Dream Hotel Group (DHG) will be renovating the Dream Hotel Bangkok as it expands Dream and its other brands in Asia to ensure that properties keep with their models.

To some, DHG is having a ‘re-start’ in Asia. For 10 years, there has been just the Dream Bangkok, then Dream Phuket Hotel & Spa which opened two years ago, although this isn’t managed by the group but is a licence agreement with Singapore-based Castlewood Group which owns the property.

Dream Bangkok lobby

The deal with Castlewood, announced in September 2015, was to develop up to 20 Dream Hotels over the next 10 years. However, DHG recently set up its own Asia-Pacific development team in Bangkok led by managing director Kevin Wallace. This was part of the company’s new shift to expand globally through management than ownership. It now has development teams in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

DHG’s CEO Jay Stein, interviewed on the sidelines of the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin recently, said the group would not be doing any more licence agreements going forward. He declined to comment on the partnership with Castlewood in the future, only saying “there are discussions going on”.

Stein said Wallace to-date had opened new areas for DHG. Vietnam is a good example. Opening this summer or fall is a 351-villa Dream Oceanami in Long Hai Beach, Ba Ria province. DHG had also signed an Unscripted hotel in Danang and a Chatwal hotel in a location south of Ho Chi Minh City. Both are new constructions.

Two properties in the Maldives, Chatwal Maaga and Dream Gasveli, are slated to open in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

Stein: no more licence agreements for DHG

DHG’s four brands, Chatwal, Dream, Time and Unscripted, are positioned at upscale and upper upscale. Chatwal, named after the founder, is the group’s topmost brand, followed by Dream, whose model rests on a large number of F&B offerings. It launched Time to target hotels that want a Dream brand but are unable to have the vastness of F&B. Unscripted, as its name suggest, does not need to follow a script and lends itself to secondary markets such as Danang.

But it all started with Dream, recognised as an early lifestyle hotel brand which tries to inject life and excitement back into hotels, with the antics of Vikram Chatwal, the founder’s son, adding celebrity notoriety. The first Dream opened in 2006 in New York as a standalone hotel, followed by Bangkok in 2006 and Dream Downtown New York in 2011, which “created the new format of Dream”, said Stein.

Diverse, long-standing F&B and nightlife partnerships with such established names as TAO/Strategic Group, Jay Zhous, Geoffrey Zakarian are integral to Dream and have generated a consistent revenue stream over the years. Dream Hollywood, which is opening in a couple of weeks, has six to seven high-end, large-scale F&B concepts.

Stein admitted that Dream Bangkok wasn’t built to the current Dream ideal but a complete renovation would change that. Plans are to add another building to the existing two buildings of the hotel, which DHG owns. The hotel already has significant F&B, he said, including a rooftop bar, a second floor bar and restaurant, and full meetings and banquet space. “We’re looking at bringing an Italian concept into the first floor which will give a lot more energy to the lobby level,” said Stein.

The project is expected to span over 1.5 years.

Read more in the upcoming Analysis on new hospitality models in TTG Asia May 2017 issue