MANDARIN Oriental Hotel Group has clinched management rights for a luxury hotel in Shenzhen, Southern China.

Due to open in 2017, the Mandarin Oriental, Shenzhen will form part of Shum Yip’s UpperHills mixed-use project – comprising offices, residences, retail and outdoor space and parkland – located minutes away from Futian Central Business District and close to the main customs and immigration checkpoint to Hong Kong.

The hotel will feature 190 guestrooms including 17 suites, offering views of the city and the surrounding city parks.

Guests will have access to an exclusive executive club lounge and enjoy F&B outlets such as a rooftop specialty restaurant and bar, a Chinese restaurant with extensive private dining rooms, an all-day dining venue, lobby lounge and a signature Mandarin Oriental Cake Shop.

A 1,200m² Spa at Mandarin Oriental with six treatment suites, and fitness facilities including a heated indoor swimming pool will also be available.

Meeting spaces at Mandarin Oriental, Shenzhen include a 1,000m² grand ballroom, 830m² junior ballroom and a variety of multi-purpose function spaces.

CENTARA Hotels & Resorts has signed a management contract with Adler Group for Centra Bangtao Resort Phuket, which is slated for an August 2016 opening.

The new-build project is the hotel group’s eighth property in Phuket and second Centra value brand hotel – the first being Centara Ashlee Hotel Patong – and will be built within the Laguna resort complex.

Centara’s senior vice president for sales and marketing, Chris Bailey, said the hotel company had a strategic expansion plan for Phuket, where the group currently had four different brands to cater for specific market segments.

Said Bailey: “We have at present properties in Patong, Karon Beach, Kata Beach, and Mai Khao Beach…We also have a resort at Khao Lak, and two in Krabi.

When completed, the hotel will have 150 guestrooms, a swimming pool, a sundeck, a restaurant, a Cense by Spa Cenvaree, a mini-gym, a business corner and a kids’ corner.

*The earlier version of this article reported that Centara Hotels & Resorts was to open the Centra Laguna Resort Phuket in 2016, as per information from the hotel group. This has found to be inaccurate and corrections have been made to reflect the latest information.

BLUE Sky Group last week opened its third property in Indonesia – the Blue Sky Hotel Petamburan Jakarta.

The hotel has 96 guestrooms across five categories: Single, Superior, Deluxe, Super Deluxe and Executive Suite.

Facilities include Golden Palace Suki & Oriental Restaurant, a lobby lounge, a fitness centre and a swimming pool. The hotel’s three meeting rooms each accommodate between 12 and 100 pax.

The first Blue Sky property, Blue Sky Hotel Balikpapan is situated in East Kalimantan while the second, Blue Sky Pandurata, is also located in Jakarta.

THIS year’s Shanghai Tourism Festival will light up the streets of the Chinese city between September 14 to October 6, with a parade, music festival and markdowns at Shanghai’s attractions.

For the duration of the festival, Shanghai’s tourism suppliers will offer a range of discounts for customers, with 51 of the city’s most-visited attractions, such as the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai Wild Animals Park and Shanghai Science & Technology Museum, cutting admission prices by half between September 14 to 18.

New events joining the lineup of festivities include the Shanghai W-Bank Music Festival, which will be held from October 1 to 3 at Xuhui Riverside Lawn.

Shanghai Tourism Festival’s float parade makes a return featuring performers from Belgium, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria and the Bahamas for the first time. In total, 29 troupes and 20 floats from 25 countries will take to the streets.

The English version of the festival’s website is due to be launched soon.

SINGAPORE Changi Airport is set to undergo a massive facelift over the next decade, adding a mixed-use development codenamed Project Jewel and two more terminals in order to stay ahead of regional competitors.

The project was first unveiled by Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong during the city-state’s national day rally over the weekend, with details revealed by Changi Airport Group in a press release today.

Project Jewel, to be constructed on the 3.5-hectare car park site fronting Terminal 1 (T1), was designed by a consortium of design consultants led by the renowned Moshe Safdie and will boast an external glass and steel façade, and a large-scale indoor garden with a waterfall.

Visitors would find in Project Jewel aviation and travel-related facilities, retail outlets and leisure attractions meant to draw not just travellers but also Singaporeans, said Lee in a report in The Straits Times.

To make up for the loss in parking space, Project Jewel will also come with a multi-storey basement car park. The complex will also serve as a node linking the terminals and in due course, provide a central communal facility for the airport community.

T1 will be expanded to allow more space for the arrival hall, baggage claim areas and taxi bays, boosting the facility’s passenger handling capacity to 24 million passenger movements a year.

Meanwhile, Terminal 4 (T4) will be constructed on the site of the old Budget Terminal, which shut on September 25 last year (TTG Asia e-Daily, August 31, 2013). T4 has a planned capacity of 16 million passengers a year, and construction is set to begin end-2013 and complete in 2017, according to The Business Times.

On the other hand, construction on the airport’s fourth runway located in Terminal 5 and the terminal itself, should be wrapped up in a decade, doubling airport capacity.

The Business Times places Changi Airport’s capacity at 73 million currently.

ZEST Air has responded publicly to the suspension order issued on Friday by the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) grounding the budget carrier’s operations, saying it was “surprised”.

In a press statement released on the same day as the grounding, Zest Air said it was “surprised that (the suspension order) was issued without giving us an opportunity to properly respond to their issues raised”.

The airline said its management had been “in full cooperation with CAAP in ensuring that the maintenance programmes and policies of Zest Air are in place” and asserted that “all 11 (Zest) aircraft are safe and airworthy”.

CAAP had last Friday banned the LCC from flying over incidents that had compromised several flights as well as other violations of air safety rules, according to news agency AFP.

In a letter to operator Zest Airways, CAAP pointed out that five Zest Air flights had been grounded in the period spanning July 22 and August 13 due to problems such as fuel overflow, and another plane had been found refuelling on Wednesday with passengers on board.

The airline’s pilots were also found to have exceeded the flying time limit of 100 hours per month, and no “accountable manager” had been appointed after the resignation of its previous executive in July, reported AFP.

Responding to CAAP’s charges, Zest Air said: “The reason why management in the past weeks have decided to voluntarily stop our aircraft from flying is to proactively ensure that any issues discovered, are rectified or properly addressed before we use the aircraft for commercial operations.”

It added that its reports “reflected this and is confirmed by CAAP inspectors that no procedural lapses were committed and that the aircraft concerned is not subject to any technical problems”.

“Our accountable manager is ambassador Alfredo M Yao, who is the president and CEO of Zest Air.

“Furthermore, none of our pilots or crew are exceeding their duty time limitations,” insisted the airline.