Guoman Hotels Group plans 40 to 50 new hotel openings in Asia over the next five years, with the majority in China, as it takes an aggressive step to tap the high-growth market, chief operating officer Sanjay Nijhawan said.
The British hotel group that operates the luxurious Guoman-branded hotels in London's heritage locations such as Charing Cross said it would target the less competitive four-star segment on the mainland as tourism booms.
'We believe China's four-star hotel sector has less competition,' Nijhawan said, adding that opportunities beckoned in second-tier cities as domestic demand soared.
The number of new openings in Asia by Guoman - which also owns the four-star Thistle brand - will surpass the 41 hotels the company operates in Britain. Its first hotel outside Britain, Guoman Hotel Shanghai, opened recently.
The rising affluence of mainlanders has been a huge spur to tourism in the past decade. According to Jones Lang LaSalle, visitor arrivals on the mainland grew 10 per cent last year to reach 2.03 billion.
Of the 2.03 billion tourists, the mainland received 126 million foreign visitors, down 2.7 per cent from a year earlier.
