Gostelow Report, May 2007

The modern country-house resort craze is catching on in England. There have been successful openings of The Grove and Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire—both less than an hour’s drive from London

By Mary Gostelow, Contributing Editor -- HOTELS Magazine, 5/1/2007

Send your news via e-mail to Mary Gostelow, Contributing Editor

The modern country-house resort craze is catching on in England. There have been successful openings of The Grove and Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire—both less than an hour’s drive from London. Now Tampa, Florida-based Buena Vista Hospitality plans to convert Tottenham House, home of the Earl of Cardigan. On the southern edge of Savernake Forest, two hours’ drive west of London, the project has been given full planning permission. Buena Vista plans a three-year development costing about £120 million that will see the house, built in 1820 in Palladian style, renamed the Savernake Club. It will have 260 guestrooms, a conference center with facilities for 600, a luxury spa and a PGA tour-standard golf course.

The southwest African nation of Namibia is where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie hung out, with government assistance, at the Hansa Hotel in Swakopmund, on the Atlantic Coast, before the birth of their baby Shiloh. Now the country is finally receiving more serious industry attention. IFA Hotels & Resorts, Kuwait, is partnering to the tune of US$75 million with Namibia’s largest conglomerate outside of the mining sector, Ohlthaver & List. This company, founded in the capital city of Windhoek in 1923 by Hermann Ohlthaver and Carl List, already owns the Namib Sun Hotels brand of hotels and lodges, set up initially as sales outlets for their own Namibia Breweries’ drinks. As part of the arrangement, three Ohlthaver & List properties will pass quickly to Kempinski Hotels & Resorts management, with another to be developed in Windhoek.

It just does not seem enough merely to do a hotel project in Dubai. You need a theme. Polo is one such theme, and following the opening of the Per Aquum Desert Palm, which has 13 Polo rooms with balcony views over four polo fields, Southern Sun, Johannesburg, will manage the Plantation Hotel and Spa that Arthur FitzWilliam is building in Dubai, together with five working polo fields.

Peter Leitgeb, president of The Leela Palaces and Resorts, Mumbai, will soon see his first casino boat opening in the form of a 50-ft. (15-m) catamaran in the River Sal adjacent to The Leela, a GHM-managed resort in Goa. Leitgeb, who works closely with the founding Chairman/CEO Captain CP Krishnan Nair, says that with 17 properties in operation (all, apart from Goa, in the Kempinski network), now it is time to expand. With the exception of Calcutta, Leela will soon be in all major Indian cities, so the company is ready to look further afield. Leitgeb would have liked Singapore, which would have been a natural hub, but he is seriously exploring nearby countries, namely the Maldives and Mauritius, and the UAE (Abu Dhabi and Dubai). The Leela would prefer not to put in any equity, but funds are available if necessary.

Will Kingdom Hotel Investments, Riyadh and Dubai, look at what is happening in the Maldives and decide to enter the small-island resort sector? The Chief Economics Minister of Indonesia Boediono says that his President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono offered Prince Alwaleed development possibilities of some of Indonesia’s myriad islands (the Indonesian Naval Hydro-Oceanographic office calculates that the nation has 17,508 islands in all).

One Indonesian island that is ripe for development is Bintan, a two and a half hour ferry ride from Singapore. Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., which had been rumored to be involved with the conversion of the Tanah Merah Officers’ Club on Singapore’s own resort island, Sentosa, already has signed for a Bintan project. If Bintan finally gets its own airport, that particular Indonesian island will be ripe for development.