WORKMEN have begun ripping the heart out of the Victoria Hotel in Sheung Wan, ready for its conversion into Grade A office space.
The 536-room hotel bid farewell to its final guests last month after 10 years of operation.
It is the latest in a string of Hong Kong hotels to bite the dust paving the way for more profitable office development, including the 742-room Hilton Hotel in Central, which closed in April.
The Victoria Hotel, which spanned the 26th to 44th floors of the left hand tower of the Shun Tak Centre, is to be converted into 700,000 square feet of office and retail space.
A large portion of the hotel has been sold to an unnamed mainland party for $4.3 billion by its trio of owners, New World Development, casino magnate Stanley Ho and his Sociedade De Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM). There has been no official announcement but 15 floors are reported to have been sold to a mainland consortium, which includes the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for its own use and for long-term investment.
Hong Kong will see a net loss of 605 hotel rooms this year, or 1.8 per cent of total stock, to 32,885 rooms.
