Best Western plans 50 Mideast hotels by 2015

American hotel company Best Western International (BWI) is upbeat about the Middle East market and targets to expand its existing regional portfolio to around 50 hotels in the next five years, says a top executive.

Glenn de Souza, Best Western’s Vice-President International Operations-Asia and Middle East, said they are now developing five hotel projects in the Gulf region, which would offer nearly 1,000 hotel rooms when completed.

The firm operates two properties in the region – the Best Western Doha Seef Hotel in Doha, Qatar and the Best Western Juffair Hotel in Manama, Bahrain.

Among the new developments in the pipeline, a 96-room hotel in Kuwait currently under construction; two hotels in Oman (one with 185 rooms and another with 201 rooms) set to open by end-2011; a 250-room hotel in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia tentatively scheduled to open in 2013; and its second hotel in Bahrain, for which construction will begin in June.

De Souza believes their target is achievable considering the growth potential of the region’s tourism industry, particularly the Saudi market. He added that they are also keen on re-entering the UAE in the near future.

“We had two properties operating previously in Dubai, but the agreement was terminated. We’re looking at something here, but we’re not in a hurry. We understand the overbuilt situation in Dubai and we’ll probably come back and revisit the area in the next two or three years,” says De Souza.

He added that they are quite pleased with the performance of their GCC properties despite the tough economic climate. At a time when average occupancy rates in their Asian hotels dropped by about 10 per cent, their properties in Qatar and Bahrain both maintained high occupancy rates of above 90 per cent.

“Like everyone else in the industry, we’ve also been affected by the crisis. Our hotel room rates in Asia fell by about 15-20 per cent so we had to go for volumes. We had to drive the occupancy rates as high as possible in order to keep our cash flow. But our properties in the Gulf were running high occupancy rates,” he said.

BWI has a stronger presence in Asia where it has 159 hotels offering 25,000 rooms in countries such as Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam.

“We’re constructing a lot of new properties and rebranding several others. We want to take the brand up to 300 hotels or about 60,000 rooms in Asia by 2015,” he said.