CONTRIBUTORS Asia’s new Regent
Raini Hamdi, Group Editor, TTG Asia
CLOSE to a year after he acquired Regent, Steven Pan, chairman of Regent Hotels & Resorts said a new global infrastructure to support the brand would roll out in June, including a worldwide reservations system under Sabre and a new website. In a one-on-one interview with TTG Asia in Singapore, Pan said a lot of time in the past 10 months was spent on building the sales and marketing and operations team, which he hoped to complete in the second half of the year. A search for a head of operations for Regent has started.
Regent was the defining Asian brand when it was launched some 20 years ago by Adrian Zecha, Bob Burns and George Raphael. Pan agreed the high Regent standards had become the norm in luxury hotels today. “The Regent hotels we’re conceptualising today will go into the market in three to five years from now and will compete for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Old standards will not make it. Hence it is important to implement the new concept.”
The Regent in Bali, expected to open in 2012, would be the closest idea of the new Regent, he said, “but the real, 100 per cent new Regent won’t happen until three years later, probably in Austria and Sanya”, he said. Asked to describe a new Regent hotel, he likened it to a handmade piece of work which was so unique it would be difficult to benchmark the competitor set.
It is also smaller, 200 rooms or fewer in urban locations and 100 rooms in resort locations. “Those days of luxury hotels with 500 rooms – that’s gone,” he said. Branded residence will also be part of most of the new Regent
properties.There are five Regent hotels in operation, and “seven to eight” in the pipeline. “We expect to open three to five Regent hotels per year in the next five years. So we should have no more than 30 to 40 Regent hotels in five years,” Pan said.
When asked when Regent would return to Hong Kong, where the former Regent is today the InterContinental, he said: “It’s a question I think about every day.”
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