Polish Hotel Company - Katowice com o 2º hotel

" Hotel developer Polish Hotel Company is now finishing preparatory work and will launch construction on a new hospitality project in Katowice, in Silesia, in April next year, said Miguel Martins, general manager of the firm. The scheme will be the second of a total of 17 new facilities that the Polish Hotel Company plans to deliver in Poland in the next seven to eight years in partnership with the international hospitality market giant InterContinental Hotels Group.

The first of those facilities, the Holiday Inn Express Warsaw Airport hotel in the Polish capital, recently held its grand opening. More openings in Warsaw, as well as in the other large Polish cities, are set to take place in the upcoming years.

The development process will be divided into two phases, the first of which will involve the construction of new hotels in the largest Polish cities including Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Poznań and Wrocław, Mr Martins said. In the second phase, the company plans to expand to some of the other major regional Polish cities including Szczecin, Bydgoszcz and Lublin. In the next two to three years, approximately eight new hotels will be opened, Mr Martins added.

While some of the planned hotels, which will mostly be targeted at business travelers, may be stand-alone buildings, the majority will probably be developed within larger office investments, a niche that has a future in the Polish market, Mr Martins said.

The already delivered Holiday Inn Express Warsaw Airport hotel, for one, is located within the Poleczki Business Park office complex in southern Warsaw and is the result of the Polish Hotel Company’s cooperation with the park’s co-investor UBM. For the investors and developers of major office complexes, Mr Martins noted, having a hotel partner means diversification and less investment risk. A 5,000-sqm hotel facility which, at least in the initial phase, acts as if it were an office tenant, also helps in the pre-leasing process.

According to Mr Martins, the situation in the hospitality market in Poland has not changed much over the last few years, with the country continuing to see strong domestic demand for high-quality hotel space and services. Asked whether the months after the Euro 2012 soccer championships, which Poland co-hosted earlier this year, saw a drop in hotel visits, Mr Martins pointed out that contrary to common belief it is actually domestic, rather than international clients, that drive the market.

For instance, at the Holiday Inn Express Warsaw Airport hotel, which has been in operation for more than three months now, Polish clients have so far accounted for around 70 percent of all visits, he said. What has been changing is the fact that clients are now expecting a higher standard and that, at the same time, they are becoming more cost-conscious. More CEOs are staying at three-star hotels, which would have been hard to imagine several years ago, Mr Martins said.

All of which makes him optimistic about the prospects for the budget hotel sector in Poland, especially since the country still lacks modern facilities of this kind. “Many of the existing hotels in Poland are old and not branded,” Mr Martins said. Businesspeople will continue to travel around Poland and stay at high-standard and affordable hotels. “We see our activities in Poland as part of the overall process of improving the country’s infrastructure,” Mr Martins added. "

Fonte: http://www.wbj.pl