Spanish hotel chain to manage new Aitken Spence hotel
View(s):Aitken Spence Hotels, Sri Lanka’s second largest hotel chain, is investing US$100 million in a 5-star, 500 room hotel to be managed by a Spanish hotel chain, officials said on Tuesday.
Construction of the RIU branded hotel will start in June 2014 and the facility ready for occupation by winter 2015. This is the first RIU hotel project in the Asia Pacific region.
Company Managing Director Malin Hapugoda told the Business Times by telephone from London where he is attending the World Travel Mart that the project is coming up on an 11-hectare site at Ahungalla in southern Sri Lanka where Aitken Spence had earlier planned to build a Six Senses hotel.
That project was called off in a company announcement in January 2013 as the Bangkok-based Six Senses Group was unable to raise sufficient cash to fund resort projects in Sri Lanka. An initial agreement between the two parties was terminated.
In a media release, Rajan Brito, Deputy Chairman of the Group, said the timing of the hotel’s opening will be right since the Southern Highway to Hambantota is expected to reach completion by then. It was also a new business model linking the highway and the southern airport.
Aitken Spence said that the Spain-based hotel chain also has a tie-up with Germany-based TUI to operate charters using a Boeing 787 Dreamliner which can carry 200-300 passengers at a time.
Charter flights are most likely to land at the new southern international airport which opened earlier this year.
The tie-up with RIU is also a first-time for Aitken Spence — which owns and manages hotels in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, India and the Middle East — in bringing in an ‘outsider’ to manage one of its own properties.
Officials said however that this was a one-off project for the company and was based on its long-term relationship with TUI, and prospects of increasing charter traffic to Sri Lanka.