Wanda Hotels & Resorts, the hotel management unit of Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group, expects to become the biggest five-star hotel investor in the world in 2015.
Bao Bo, vice president of it, said in an interview on June 13 that it was the biggest five-star hotel investor in the Chinese mainland currently and expected to become the biggest in the world in 2015.
Liu Xiaofeng, general manager responsible for market at it, said that it was formally established in July 2012 and grew fast from then on. It had invested in and opened 32 Wanda Hotels with leading global hotel management firms as well as six self-branded hotels by the end of last year. This year, it would open 18 ones and the figure for next year would stand at 18, too. It would open 35 ones in 2015 and by then, it would see the number of hotels under the wing hit 104 in total.
Bao reiterated that there were two major reasons for Wanda Group to establish a hotel management unit. One was that it saw numbers of hotels under the wing rise sharply in recent years and the other was that most of the hotels spread in third- and fourth-tier Chinese cities including Dandong and Fushun and were not luring to talents of leading global hotel management firms. Thus, it was a must for it to establish a self-owned hotel management firm and this would do good to both it and the firm in terms of profit in the long run. It had three hotel brands, namely Wanda Realm, Wanda Vista, and Wanda Reign currently. Wanda Realm was a five-star one and hotels under it mainly spread in third- and fourth-tier cities including Huaian, Weifang, and Jinhua. Wanda Vista was a super five-star one and hotels under it mainly spread in second- and third-tier cities including Changsha, Shenyang and Kunming. Wanda Reign was a six-star one and hotels under it would spread in Wuhan, Chengdu and Shanghai. The first Wanda Reign hotel was scheduled to start formal operation in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, in March 2014. And as more Chinese people traveled overseas, it would attach more importance to a go-global strategy.
Actually, c had stretched out its merger and acquisition reach to hotel management overseas since it put US-based AME Entertainment into pocket for USD 2.6 billion in September 2012. And at the end of last year, Wang Jianlin,chairman of it, disclosed that it was in close talks with a famed US hotel management firm and would invest USD 10 billion in the US market over the following decade.
(USD 1 = CNY 6.13)
