Tag: owned hotels

16 January 2018 – Expansión

RIU will spend €650 million this year on the refurbishment, construction and purchase of hotels, and will make investments of €2.5 billion in total between now and 2022, according to explanations provided yesterday by the group’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Pepe Moreno.

In this way, the Mallorcan chain is accelerating the rate of investment seen over the last five years, in which it committed to undertake investments amounting to €1.95 billion. Specifically, the company reached a record last year with investment of €600 million, which was €200 million more than forecast at the beginning of the year.

During 2017, RIU opened two new hotels – the RIU Dunamar in Costa Mujeres (México) and the expansion of the RIU República de Punta Cana– and it refurbished five hotels in their entirety. Moreover, in June, it purchased Edificio España from Grupo Baraka for €272 million.

RIU recorded revenues of €2.156 billion in 2017, up by 7%, and closed last year with 92 hotels, 43,135 rooms and 28,894 employees.

In 2018, the chain plans to open four hotels and undertake five major refurbishment projects.

In terms of the focus for growth, RIU wants to continue strengthening its urban business, which it inaugurated in 2010 with a hotel in Panama, and which nowadays includes six operational hotels. Moreno said that the company will continue to analyse opportunities in the main cities of North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

The RIU urban brand has two new projects underway: the first urban hotel in Spain, located in Edificio España (Madrid), which is expected to open its doors at the beginning of next summer (2019) and its second hotel in New York, on which work is underway, very close to Times Square, which will also be inaugurated in 2019.

In addition, the chain wants to grow in Asia, where it already has two projects under construction, in the Maldives and Dubai.

Moreno said that RIU will continue to bet on growing its owned hotels – the firm currently owns 84% of the hotels in its portfolio – and he said that the chain is not interested in growing inorganically or debuting on the stock market.

Original story: Expansión (by R. Arroyo)

Translation: Carmel Drake