New Supply in London

There is a clutch of new  and exciting hotels opening in the next 2 years in the lead up to the Olympics, as highlighted nicely in The Australian here.

As a lot of hotels are right slap bang in the middle of their business planning, our London Hotels will surely be taking this new supply into account. A 1000 new rooms will make a difference to bedroom business, especially in the 5* sector where most of this new supply is coming in.

But a good question to ask is this: will these hotels have meeting space? And how will it affect the market?

We have now been collecting occupancy data since June last year. The total to the end of July for all of our London Hotels is 42% in meters square and 38% in occupancy of meeting rooms. Any seriously big new supply could have quite a dramatic effect on this.

Out of all of these hotels mentioned in the article, The Savoy has the biggest meeting space, and the rumoured “a la carte” banqueting for 300 + people certainly has got some of our London hotels thinking about their current banquet offering.

But what of the other properties coming into the market? From some quick research, a interesting competitor to the Savoy will be the new Corinthia Hotel.  As you will see from the site, this hotel will occupy a nice neat space by the River Thames, not too far from The Savoy. The meeting space in this hotel will not be a true competitor for the Savoy – the total area on plan is only 600 square metres at present, but it is an addition to the phalanx of luxury London hotels with meeting space.                

The last big entrant to the market to make a big splash in the conference market was the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza: With over 1000 bedrooms, and 2000 square meters of meeting space, this really shook up the meetings and events market in the city. For the established big events hotels, it added a new competitor with the number of bedrooms to really capture those great big group bookings that can be so lucrative.

An exciting time in The London Market without a doubt. 

July 2010 Data - Better Late than Never!

Due to a lot of clients being on holiday we bring you the July data a little later than we had hoped!

(Please click picture to enlarge)
Please find above the total Revenue Per Available Square Meter (RevPAS), by daily average and Revenue Per Delegate (RPD), and detailed Occupancy for the month for our Maturing Destinations. Please leave us a comment if you would like more information.

Green Shoots?

We have some more year to year data to share with you. The Month of July is a very quiet month in nearly all of our markets, so it is with great pleasure that we are able to publish growth in all three of our Year to Year Markets in Revenue:


London (based on 7, 5* properties)     +28%!
Dubai (based on 17 properties)           +9.69% 
Stockholm (based on 20 properties)  +6.51% 

As you can see the 7 London hotels continue to post impressive revenue gains on last year following on from June's 25% increase. Once the sample has grown and more hotels are included, it will be fascinating to see if the London Market is really recovering or not. The other question is this - How bad was 2009?  Is this why the year to year data is showing such big increases in London?

It is such a shame that hotels are not able to give us better year to year data - we will continue to collect it, and in turn that will provide us with better trend data.

Look out for July data soon for all of our markets! What do you think?  Do you feel there is more business coming through to your markets?  comment below!