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Hilton plans more UK sell offs
Hilton Hotels is planning to sell off a further 14 UK properties because it does not feel they are reaching the standards required by the group.
At the Institute of Travel and Tourism conference in Barbados, Hilton group chief executive David Michels said it had already sold 11 out of its 70 properties and would soon put more on the market.
“We had a review in the UK and realised that 25 out of 70 properties were not really Hiltons, they were a result of takeovers,” he said.
“So far we’ve sold 11 and will now sell some more. We found in these places that the service was good but the fabric of the hotels wasn’t and was damaging to our brand.
“But we will also open what I call six or seven new big, fat hotels in places like Tower Bridge, Manchester, Liverpool and Ireland.”
Michels added that by 2006, Hilton would have properties in 100 countries but there were still 120 countries where it did not have a presence.
“It is our job to make sure that we are not slow to get into these countries,” he said.
Michels said hotel bookings were gradually getting back to pre-2001 levels but would not fully recover until 2006/7.
“Americans are not getting on aeroplanes, although they are staying closer to home and going to places like the Caribbean,” he told delegates. “It is getting more prosperous, but it’s never been a great industry to earn a lot of money.”
Michels said that people were getting more used to global terrorism and it no longer put them off travelling. In October last year, a bomb in a Hilton hotel in Taba, Egypt, killed five staff and 25 customers, but did not stop people holidaying in nearby Sharm El Sheikh.
“If this had happened five, six or seven years ago, the whole region would not have had tourists for many months and maybe years.
“Sharm El Sheikh has 27,000 rooms, four Hiltons and is an hour and a half from Taba. We only had four cancellations in Sharm. Tourists have become acclimatised to this kind of tragedy.”
Report by Jeremy Skidmore
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