Kosmopolito Hotels International set to expand along 'Chinese wallet' trail

Kosmopolito Hotels International plans to cash in on mainlanders' wanderlust by expanding its portfolio of rooms by 45 per cent to 7,000 over the next three years in favoured holiday destinations.

"Our expansion strategy will focus on Chinese wallets as we go to areas where there is strong growth in mainland tourists," said Winnie Chiu, president and executive director of Kosmopolito Hotels, Hong Kong's biggest hotel owner by number of rooms. "We are also interested in extending our reach to Taiwan and [South] Korea, but prices [for hotels] are still high there."

Chiu - whose father David Chiu is chairman of Far East Consortium International, which owns 73 per cent of the hotel company - said nearly 70 per cent of Chinese tourists picked holiday destinations in Asia, while 13 per cent preferred Europe.

Kosmopolito owns and operates 4,873 rooms in 18 three-star and four-star hotels. Ten of the hotels are in Hong Kong, including its flagship Cosmopolitan Hotel in Causeway Bay and Lan Kwai Fong Hotel in Central, three are on the mainland and five are in Malaysia. By 2015, the company plans to add 2,191 rooms in Hong Kong, Zhongshan, Singapore, Malaysia and London.

Chiu said Kosmopolito definitely would benefit from the mainland authorities' plan to further ease travel requirements from Shenzhen. Last Friday, Shenzhen authorities announced that multiple-entry permits to Hong Kong and Macau would be available to four million people living in the border city without local household registration documents.

Chiu said that nearly 42 million tourists came to Hong Kong last year, two-thirds of them from the mainland. And "demand far outstripped supply as the city only has 62,000 rooms," she said. She described the segment for three- to four-star hotels as "defensive with growth", meaning resilient to market uncertainty but with the potential to grow.