As Singapore courts new kinds of tourists, enterprising developers are coming up with niche hotels aimed at specific types of travellers, located in specific catchment areas.
The trend has even coined a new term - ‘hub hotels’. And it looks like they will spring up all over the island - from Changi Airport and research hub one-north to Novena and the Central Business District (CBD).
The hotels are located where their customer base is likely to be.
Owners of some of them are banking on government plans to develop hubs - such as a medical cluster in Novena, a research centre at one-north and the upcoming Sports Hub on the Kallang waterfront - to pull in customers.
Other hotels, such as the proposed hotel at Changi Airport’s Terminal 3 and Hind Development’s boutique business hotel which opens in July in Seah Street where the former Metropole Hotel used to be, are counting on an expected increase in transit passengers and the government’s push to boost Singapore’s meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (Mice) segment.
Hotels can be located in any area where human traffic is expected to grow, industry players reckon.
‘For a hub to have a live, work and play concept, you need a hotel to bring in contained human traffic, buzz and 24/7 liveliness,’ says Jackson Yap, chief executive of United Engineers (UE), which is developing a hotel at one-north and bidding for a hotel at the proposed Sports Hub as part of the SingaporeGold consortium.
In particular, the Novena area is expected to benefit from such synergy as the government works to bring more medical tourists to Singapore.
In January, a hotel site aimed partly at medical tourism was sold to Far East Organization for $131.1 million. The Sinaran Drive site is close to Tan Tock Seng Hospital and Far East’s Novena Medical Suites.
‘As the medical tourism sector develops, more properties such as that proposed by Far East could be contemplated,’ says Scott Hetherington, Asia managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels.
This, he says, will allow Singapore to compete with Thailand, which has many facilities that combine medical procedures with tourism.
Elsewhere at one-north, which will be home to corporate headquarters of many prominent biotech and pharmaceutical research companies, UE has started building its Park Avenue Vista hotel.
Scheduled for completion by 2011, the hotel, which is expected to have about 370 rooms, will mainly serve travellers for nearby educational institutions such as the National University of Singapore, medical institutions such as National University Hospital (NUH), high-tech corporations and biomedical research institutions.
And it also hopes to cater to general tourists. ‘We anticipate demand from the growing number of medical tourists at NUH and also students attending short-term, postgraduate courses at nearby educational institutions,’ says Mr Yap.
Another potential goldmine for a ‘hub hotel’ is the upcoming Singapore Sports Hub, with a ready catchment of spectators and administrators who can be expected to come whenever Singapore hosts a major sporting event.
But ‘hub hotels’ that get most of their patronage from certain types of tourists will not be able to survive unless they draw visitors from other, more common segments, observers say.
‘They (hotels) may have to focus on a particular direction, but that does not mean that business is going to come solely from one segment only,’ says Mr Hetherington.
Source : Business Times - 9 Jun 2007
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