Amid a recovering economy and an influx of Chinese tourists, Taiwan’s hotel industry is booming, with another five-star hotel set to open its doors on Sunday.
Located in the bustling Taipei Railway Station district, Palais de Chine Hotel (君品酒店) expects to see occupancy rates as high as 70 percent by the end of the year, marketing communications specialist Emilie Hsu (許瀚云) told the Taipei Times yesterday.
The hotel, with its French-themed design, spans 13 floors and is part of a property consisting of the Q square shopping mall (京站時尚廣場), a top-class residence, a gym and a cinema complex.
“We would put the hotel in the same class as the Sheraton Taipei [台北喜來登] and the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel [晶華酒店],” Hsu said, citing its counter check-in rates, which start at NT$11,000 (US$333) excluding taxes.
The hotel is joining tour agencies and travel Web sites to offer better-value packages as part of its strategy to boost occupancy rates, she said.
L’Hotel de Chine Group (雲朗觀光) — the owner of Palais de Chine — has four other hotel brands under its belt: Maison de Chine (兆品酒店), Chateau de Chine (翰品酒店), Fleur de Chine (雲品酒店) and Chinatrust Hotels (中信旅館系統).
The opening of Palais de Chine is among a series of hotels set to open in Taiwan as ties between Taipei and Beijing have warmed and more Chinese tourists are allowed to enter the country.
Formosa International Hotels Corp (FIHC, 晶華國際酒店集團), Taiwan’s biggest listed hotel operator, which runs Grand Formosa Regent, has plans to set up the Silks Place (晶英酒店) in 2013 in the Xinyi District.
W-Hotel, backed by Uni-President Group (統一集團), as well as Le Meridian Taipei (台北寒舍艾美酒店), with investor Shin Kong Group (新光集團), are set to open by the end of the year.
Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控) is reportedly planning to bring the renowned Four Seasons Hotel to the Xinyi neighborhood, too.
In the middle of last month, FIHC beat 20 other global hotel operators by acquiring the Regent luxury hotel business for an estimated US$56 million.
The move paves the way for FIHC’s global expansion and marks Taiwan’s first hotel operator to own an international hotel brand.
The acquisition includes the ownership of the global Regent brand and all associated intellectual property, hotel management and lease contracts for 17 hotel properties in operation and under development, as well as the Regent Seven Seas Cruises license.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS