Face-to-Face: Yngvar Stray, General Manager, The St. Regis Beijing
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1) Please can you give our readers an outline of your hotel and its key selling points?
The St. Regis Beijing is one of the finest hotels in Asia positioned to serve the most upscale customers while exemplifying luxury, elegance, and bespoke service. It is the first St. Regis hotel to open in the Asia Pacific region when launched in 1997, before undergoing a US$27 million renovation and re-launch in July 2008. The lineage of the aristocratic brand is being continued in the room style of this 258-room hotel, of which 102 are suites, featuring an opulent residential touch.
The hotel’s line-up of distinguished dining establishments includes Danieli’s, voted “Beijing’s Finest Italian Restaurant”, while the hotel also features a luxurious natural spring water spa, more than 13,114 square feet of meeting and event space and the iconic St. Regis Butler Service.
For more than a decade, the St. Regis Beijing has offered discerning travellers an unrivalled dimension of seduction, refined craftsmanship and bespoke service at the heart of China’s bustling capital city.
2) The hotel industry in Beijing has experienced a mixed couple of years, in terms of occupancy levels and revPAR. Has The St Regis’ ultra-luxury status helped or hindered your performance during this period, and what measures have you taken to maintain performance levels?
The style and status of the property has definitely helped the property to perform better than its competitors. Our guests value the fact that we have maintain all exceptional services and benefits while room rates have certainly decreased substantially. This development is often described with “affordable luxury”. At the same time, a strong focus has been given to target and attract Chinese High Net-worth Individuals and who have weathered better than their Western counterparts through the global economic crisis. These individuals have already learned about and experienced the quality of the St. Regis service and style during their travels abroad to for example New York or London.
3) China’s tourism industry has done well this year, largely due to strong domestic demand. In terms of your clientele, how important is the growing market of affluent Chinese travellers becoming to your hotel, and what measures are you taking to target this sector?
The Chinese market has seen constant growth during the past years. In addition to our regular approach, we shifted our strategy and focus to the Chinese market since the last quarter of 2008 when international travellers’ arrivals declined as a result of the global financial crisis.
With anticipation of the fact that both corporations and leisure customers were spending less and staying fewer days, we followed our strength of recognising and addressing the customers’ needs through extraordinary care for existing guests. While achieving a high return rate, we reduced the reliance on traditional markets by replacing them with Chinese and regional accounts. We worked closely with our Global Sales Offices in order to develop more national accounts and SOEs (state-owned enterprises). We also visited multi-national and national accounts and discussed with high-end business travellers and municipal or provincial business delegations the value of ‘Elite Executive and Suite Benefits’ packaged to meet the needs of Chinese top executives travelling. These Chinese top executives will also appreciate an F&B approach which has as stronger focus on Chinese cuisine.
4) Beijing is experiencing a construction boom, with new luxury hotels opening and over 6,000 new hotel rooms in the city’s pipeline. Is this rapid growth good news for the St Regis Beijing, and what steps are you taking to take on this increasing level of competition?
Beijing has been experiencing a fast-paced development. From the year 2007 and throughout today, the inventory of luxury five-star hotels in Beijing has increased by 7,500 guestrooms, or 59.1%. This in-balance of supply and demand is a great challenge to every hotel.
As part of the heritage of The St. Regis brand and the hotel’s tradition, leading the hospitality industry with state-of-art technology, bespoke service, beyond expectation experience and social hub lifestyle is always our daily pursuant. Leveraging from our experience of 12-year operation, we initiated a US$27 million renovation project in late 2007, re-establishing a hardware following the brand legacy of classic distinction while staying current with timeless elegance
5) What are your predictions for the hotel industry in Beijing in 2010, and what plans do you have for the next 12 months?
There is no doubt that the hotel industry in Beijing will recover throughout 2010. We have already seen an upswing, which probably started as early as July 2009. Business travellers have increased their travel frequency again and will continue to do so with the Chinese economy showing high growth rates. Meetings have also seen a higher number of requests. Overseas Incentive Travel however will probably take well into the 3rd and 4th quarter to show proper signs of a recovery. This will partly coincide with an increase of Leisure Travel traditionally focusing on the summer and fall holidays.
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