Mövenpick makes its move into Asia

SINGAPORE: Leading European hotel brand, Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts is making its long-awaited expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.

With one resort under its belt in Phuket – it rebranded a 350-room hotel on Karon Beach – the group has announced a new resort development on Sentosa, Singapore.

Its current focus on Asia-Pacific comes at a time when the group feels it has solidified its position enough in the Middle East.

“Our strategy is to develop our brand in clusters rather than dilute all over the world. We have developed our brand in the Middle East from 16 hotels five years ago to 30 in operation. We have a further 18 hotels under construction and another 10 projects in the pipeline,” said Andreas Mattmuller, senior vice president, Middle East & Asia for Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts.

“Most key strategic destinations are covered in the Middle East and we now wish to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and continue our expansion in a strategic fashion while at the same time continuing to opportunistically evaluate other projects.”

Movenpick opened a regional office in Bangkok at the start of this year.

“We shall further expand our operation in Asia with the appointment of a development director to continue to strengthen and build on our growth in line with the signing of additional management agreements,” said Mattmuller, who lived in Singapore for a few years as General Manager of the Mandarin Oriental.

He said that the group would step up development efforts in key strategic locations in Asia, targeting both city and resort destinations.

Mattmuller believes that the cluster development approach will allow the company to capitalise on domestic travel and “will hopefully also bring us additional hotels in India and China, both of which are huge countries with strong domestic markets”.

He said that he was not perturbed by the fact that Mövenpick is a rather late entrant into Asia, considering the number of global brands that have already taken root in the region.

“We haven’t entered the Asian market until now because we wanted to focus on doing this right. We have successfully managed to build very strong brand awareness in the Middle East within a relative short period of time and we intend to repeat this success in Asia with additional hotels in the future.”

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