Caesar Park Hotels and Resorts (凱撒飯店連鎖) has opened two properties in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋) aimed at business and leisure travelers as it seeks to grow into the nation’s largest hotel chain, top executives said on Saturday.
Caesar Park Banciao (板橋凱薩飯店) features 400 guest rooms and Hotel Cham Cham (趣淘慢旅店) 337 in a complex on government-owned land near MRT Banciao Station that developer Hung Kuo Group (宏國集團) won the contract for.
“We’re upbeat about the long-term outlook of the hospitality industry” although peers have turned conservative about expansion due to an increasingly crowded field, hotel chain chairman Eric Lin (林鴻道) said on the sidelines of a grand opening for Caesar Park Banciao and Hotel Cham Cham.
Caesar Park Banciao aims to accommodate premier business travelers and tourist groups with daily room rates of NT$4,200, while Hotel Cham Cham is targeting young and fashionable independent travelers with budget lodging of NT$3,200 per night, company data showed.
The two hotels came online shortly after the grand opening last month of another cooperative venture with the government, Caesar Metro Taipei (凱達大飯店), which sits above Wanhua Railway Station and offers 758 guest rooms.
Caesar Park Hotels and Resorts intends to give away proceeds from all new properties, said Lin, who is also president of the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee, adding that the local hotel chain is to launch three new properties next year.
It has inked an agreement with Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc, a US hotel brand that pulled out of the local market 14 years ago, to operate another 400 rooms in the same complex as the Caesar Park Banciao.
In addition, Caesar Park plans to open a 139-room boutique hotel under the ArTree (阿樹旅店) brand to attract urban business travelers. The property is part of an urban renewal project to modernize Taipei’s Zhonglun Market (中崙市場) on Bade Road.
The group is also taking partial floors from the Jiangnan Market (江南市場) reconstruction project in the city’s Neihu District (內湖) and turning them into a hotel of 100 guest rooms under the Just Palace (凱旋酒店) brand.
Hotel operations could assist charity causes to advance with a 10 percent return, higher than the interest that charity foundations could gain by depositing their funds in a bank, Lin said.
“Charity foundations must be sure to have long-term sources of stable income to sponsor causes,” he said.
Caesar Park Banciao is to be the flagship property with an occupancy rate of 60 percent in the first year, while Hotel Cham Cham aims to have an occupancy rate of 75 percent, Caesar Park vice president Jack Wu (武祥生) said.
Competitive properties can emerge victorious as a result of the market’s ongoing corrections, he said.
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