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SCMP Reporter

Shangri-La Asia, the region's largest luxury hotel and resort operator, is targeting to own or manage 100 hotels by 2010 with 50 per cent in the fast-growing mainland market.
Senior vice-president Barbara Pang was upbeat on the demand for luxury hotels on the mainland as the forthcoming Olympic Games triggers more  foreign interest in the mainland and  travel  by wealthier domestic consumers also increases.
'China  offers  a lot of potential. It's natural for us to open in the largest cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, but we are already in tertiary cities like Wenzhou, Baotou in Inner Mongolia,' Ms Pang said.
She said the luxury hotelier  was also exploring opportunities to expand  further afield,  including to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region or Tibet, as more people  show interest in these places, especially after the Olympics Games.
However,  recent reports indicated that stringent security measures  had dampened tourist interest in  visiting Beijing to watch  the Games, which  would affect the city's hotels.
Ms Pang said that would not be a worry for Shangri-La as most  of its rooms in the city  had been reserved by the  Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.
The hotelier is also expanding into  Europe and North America. It projected that  30 per cent of its 2010 target of 100 hotels and resorts  would be  outside Asia.  Next year, it will open its first Shangri-La hotel in the west -  a flagship hotel in Vancouver, a key  destination for Chinese travellers.
Jill Killeen, director of communications at the Vancouver hotel, said the hotel's target customers  would be an equal split  of leisure and business travellers.
According to  the World Tourism Organisation, China is set to become a giant source of tourism with more than 100 million citizens expected to travel abroad as tourists by 2020.
The hotelier said  future outbound travel trends from the mainland would play an  important role in Shangri-La's expansion,  comparable with the  growth of  United States-based hotel companies in the late  1960s and early  70s when they expanded beyond  North America to  cater to US travellers  overseas.
Shangri-La Asia  owns or manages  55 hotels under the Shangri-La brand and secondary brand Traders. It also has 50  projects in the pipeline  at destinations  including Bangalore, Chicago, Doha,  Las Vegas, New York, Paris and Zhoushan.
In recent years the company has  followed a general strategy of  expansion through equity positions on the mainland, while pursuing hotel-management contracts overseas.  It is part of the Kerry Group, which, through  SCMP Group, publishes the South China Morning Post.



Shangri-La sets sights on global expansion