Farglory Hotel Co Ltd (遠雄悅來大飯店) says Chinese tourists and the launch of a new hotel in the Taipei Dome Complex will be its major sales growth drivers next year.
The hotel unit of Farglory Group (遠雄企業集團) currently operates a luxury hotel in Hualien County where domestic tourists contribute about 90 percent of the almost 400-room facility’s annual revenue.
However, Farglory Hotel president Pi Shao-wu (皮紹武), who officially started in the job in August, has high hopes of raising sales contributed by Chinese visitors and tourists from other Asian countries next year.
TARGETING INBOUNDS
“Inbound travelers will be the target customer group for the hotel next year,” Pi told reporters yesterday following an investors’ conference in Taipei.
The government has been placing an increasing focus on the tourism industry in recent years, with the numbers of tourists from China, Hong Kong, Japan and Southeast Asia growing significantly.
Eyeing the growth in the Chinese tourists, who have accounted for a large proportion of the nearly 10 million inbound visitors to Taiwan per year, Farglory Hotel has signed an agreement with 15 major travel agencies in eastern Taiwan that it says will help attract more visitors from China to the Hualien hotel.
The company will boost its marketing campaigns to attract more travelers from Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macau in the near future, Pi said.
REARRANGING ROOMS
To maintain the growth momentum of domestic travelers — mostly families — Farglory Hotel said it has also finished a room adjustment plan, which reduced the proportion of its double rooms to 54.8 percent of Hualien facility and boosted the proportion of family rooms to more than 40 percent, Pi added.
Farglory Group is scheduled to open its second hotel, part of the Taipei Dome Complex that is being constructed on a build-operate-transfer basis, in June or July next year.
The new 408-room hotel is expected to be a sales driver in the second half of next year, Pi said.
Market watchers have said the current situation in the nation’s tourism industry is positive for high-end hotel demand, and the opening of more multinational hotels and tourist growth will drive up room rates.
NUMBERS
For the first nine months of the year, Farglory Hotel posted net profit of NT$86.64 million (US$2.8 million), or NT$0.83 per share, up from the NT$52.38 million, or NT$0.55 per share, recorded a year earlier, the company said in a statement.
Farglory Hotel’s shares rose 0.7 percent to close at NT$21.5 in Taipei trading yesterday, compared with the TAIEX’s 0.14 percent increase, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
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