Another Melbourne hotel for Hilton

The Hilton Hotels group is planning another hotel for Melbourne and is looking to double its existing operations of 23 Australian properties within five years. 

Hilton sees Australia offering plenty of opportunitiesin Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

“We are reformatting the Australian business for new opportunities for growth as I am also doing in various markets in Asia- Pacific,” Hilton Asia Pacific president Alan Watts told The Australian.

“The Hilton spotlight is turned very much on the Asia-Pacific markets, with my joining of the business I have a strong mandate to accelerate growth,” the Singapore-based Watts said.

He said a full-time Sydney-based operations manager, Heidi Kunkel, had been appointed to grow the Hilton business.

“We believe the cycle has begun to change. We have not seen a lot of new build construction in this market in the past five to seven years.

“There’s a combination of improving occupancy and yields and the attraction of some of the (high) transaction prices that hotels have sold for. We are seeing more appetite, we are reweighting the leadership team to catch the current market, we are capitalising on the opportunities.”

He said that with 200 trading hotels across Asia-Pacific and more than 400 hotels under development, one in every four hotels under construction in the Asia-Pacific region is a Hilton hotel and in China it is one in every three hotels.

Apart from Melbourne, he said there were good opportunities in the Sydney and Canberra markets.

“I do think Sydney is a place where we could launch luxury and bring the Conrad brand and there’s opportunities to bring a Double Tree to Brisbane. Generally we deploy a Hilton to a city and then we go above or below it with a Conrad or a Double Tree. To me the only aspiration for a Conrad is Sydney and you could also argue Auckland,” Mr Watts told The Australian.

Leon Getler 1st May 2018.