Face-to-Face: Luis Riu
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Following the recent opening of RIU Hotels & Resorts’ first ever property in Asia, Riu Sri Lanka, Travel Daily chats with the Spanish hotel group’s CEO, Luis Riu…
Q) Riu Hotels & Resorts recently opened its first property in Asia; how do you think the all-inclusive concept will be received by Asian guests?
Riu Sri Lanka is our first hotel in Asia and we are very excited about this new project. We have over 60 years of experience specialising in holiday resorts. We started with a very small hotel on the island of Majorca, Spain, in 1953, and are now present in 18 countries with more than 100 hotels.
The all-inclusive has grown in popularity over the years. It has become a way of travelling for many customers who value the variety, the quality and the freedom that a RIU All Inclusive hotel offers them. We are sure that our traditional clients coming from different countries in Europe will value the opportunity of exploring this fascinating new destination with the well-known RIU All Inclusive offer, and we hope that our Asian guests will be pleasantly surprised and satisfied with our All Inclusive programme.
Q) Why did you choose Sri Lanka for your first Asian resort, and were other countries considered?
We had been looking into investment opportunities for years. We knew that entering the Asian continent was the next step in our expansion strategy, but we wanted to find the right opportunity. We finally decided to invest in Sri Lanka because we thought it had everything to be a great holiday destination. It has a wonderful landscape and beaches, a rich culture and hospitable people, as well as all of the infrastructures needed; and it is a great complement to our portfolio, very attractive to our loyal clientele and to new customers.
Of course, there are many attractive destinations we have considered, such as Vietnam, Singapore and Thailand, where we still look for investment opportunities. And there are destinations where we already have projects underway, such as the Maldives and Dubai.
Q) What do you expect your main markets to be, in terms of guest nationality, and are you expecting many guests from Asian countries like China and India?
We will strive for two very different types of clients. On the one hand, we will bring guests from our most traditional European markets, thanks to agreements with our long-term tour operation partners. These clients will come from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium and Holland. On the other hand, we will try to attract clientele from India, China and other Asian countries, as well as local Sri Lankan guests.
Q) What efforts are you making to educate the Asian travel industry about the resort?
We have a local sales team working to promote the hotel in Sri Lanka and on the rest of the continent. We are participating in the main trade events, meeting the different local operators and working hard to grow our local network, as well as working closely with our long-term partners in promoting the hotel in traditional and new markets.
Q) You are planning to debut in the Maldives in the coming years; how are these developments progressing, and are you considering any other Asian destinations in the future?
RIU purchased the islets of Kedhigandu and Maafushi which will contain two hotels, a Riu Palace with 174 rooms and a Riu Classic with 248 rooms. The project is currently in the design phase and the hotels are scheduled to open in 2018. These new hotels will make RIU the first Spanish hotel chain with a presence in the Maldives.
We are also working on a hotel in Dubai in the new Deira Islands development, set to open in 2019.
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