China to Power Global Hotel Development in 2023

25.08.2023 - 14:09 / skift.com / Sean Oneill / Tommy Bahama

Here are some excerpts from Daily Lodging Report from the past week. If you’re not a subscriber, you should be. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here, now.

Oxford Industries is partnering with Lowe to revive the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa, in Indian Wells, California, which Lowe has owned since 2020. The two will spend $8 million renovating the property and adding several timely Bahama touches including a Tommy Bahama Restaurant and retail store. Lowe has already spent $10 million updating the property, which is open. When the latest round of upgrades is complete, the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa, in Indian Wells, California, will have 215 rooms including 23 suites, 35,000 square feet of meeting space and a spa.

In Chicago, a West Loop site that was supposed to be a hotel could instead be used for a high-rise apartment building under a new developer’s pitch. The Standard Hotel was supposed to bring 250 rooms, a fitness center, event space and multiple restaurants and bars to 1234 W. Randolph Street, all funded through real estate crowd-funding platform Prodigy, which filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Now, developers want to build apartments there.

Skift Take: Consumer brands like Tommy Bahama that have hotels as brand extensions are fascinating.

STR said during the seven-day Lunar New Year holiday period, China’s hotel average daily rate surpassed 2019 levels. STR, the gold standard for hotel performance benchmarking, said that, overall 36 of 43 markets in China saw growth in revenue per available room (RevPAR) when comparing the seven days to the holiday period in 2019. Hainan and Sanya shined the most. Other hot destinations included Xian, Quanzhou, and two cities in the Yunnan province: Lijiang and Xishuangbanna. Hong Kong on the other hand saw its RevPAR during Lunar New Year still well below 2019 levels, indexing at 52, despite a reopening of the border with Mainland China on January 8.

In the recently released China Construction Pipeline Trend Report from Lodging Econometrics, analysts report the country’s total hotel construction pipeline, at the close of the fourth quarter, stands at 3,581 projects/675,074 rooms. Projects presently under construction in China are at 2,618 projects/472,396 rooms. Projects scheduled to start construction in the next 12 months stand at 404 projects/79,048 rooms and projects in the early planning stage closed the quarter at 559 projects/123,630 rooms. Cities in China with the largest pipelines are Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Xi’an. Franchise companies topping China’s construction pipeline at the Q4 close are led by Hilton Worldwide with 680 projects/123,403 rooms, InterContinental Hotels Group