Speaking from Wyndham, I'm excited because we continue to be one of the fastest growing companies in the world, and we're the biggest, so I think we're going to deliver on our promise to ensure that there's a hotel in every place that our consumers' want to stay. It's really exciting, we've acquired the Dolce brand, uh Dolce is the planning, the meeting planners brand of choice, so it's 27 hotels globally, and 7 in our part of the world, it gives us the opportunity to both add a important brand to our stable of brands, but also, to have a a management infrastructure in Europe, so now we can actually manage other- other brands within Germany and- and the markets here.

You know, the real challenge for us in Europe isn't so much which market, but finding opportunities. We'd love to be in Paris and London, and you know, in Rome – the key markets – but the biggest challenge is finding hotels to buy that meet our return requirements. So we tend to look for high returns, 15-20% return on our money, and although I'd love to be in those markets, what's available really dictates what we buy. So the first hotel we bought was in Monaco, the one we're looking at now is in, you know, we're looking at things in Amsterdam, so it's very much driven by what's available, rather than where we'd like to be.

For Club Med a new development is a pristine, extraordinary piece of land that's basics. It needs to be fifteen hectare, because we need to offer an extremely good product to our guests. Three hundred and fifty rooms, that's our target. Upscale resort, er, that's four and five star resorts. That's our positioning. With quite a strong sport and public facilities inside the resort, because we like people to be together, that's our strategy, and the places where we are looking for developing these resort is ski in the US, we are currently working on a project in Le Massif, Canada, but in the rest of the US of, in the US, is something that we're looking at right now. Caribbean, we're looking at a few projects there. Brazil also. We are looking in the French Alps at developing further Club Med resorts, target as being one resort per year, we're looking at East Africa also, because we believe a Safari Club Med would be a very interesting product. Middle East, and then Asia, obviously China, we have three resort there and we're continuously developing, we'll open two to three resort per year in the coming years, and our prospection places in Asia, where we already have resort are Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia - all these countries are dream countries for Chinese, Asian guests and where we also had the capability to bring European guests. That's the best situation, where in the same place, you can bring, during the year, at some periods Chinese, at some period Asian, and at some period Europeans. That's the way to increase your occupancy, your ADR and to, at the end of the day, make money for the owner, because we're asset light, we are the owners with us, and make money for Club Med and the resort operator tour operator. That's the best way to be a successful company.

Why we’re leading it from the wireless perspective; very simply, that's getting to be the number one or number 2 reason for most hotels as to why people choose to stay somewhere else. I think if you go and ask any of the major hotel chains to look at their customer satisfaction reports, you’ll find that they’re all on there and we also did our own survey independently and we came up with that finding. It depends on geographies, so in place like the UK, places like France, Scandinavia, very high. In some of the other geographies, in the Middle East and Africa, slightly less so – that probably reflects the use of the internet in those places as well.

In Germany and in central Europe, we don't get involved in a lot of hotels, unless they're in a mixed use scheme. But, you know, we have similar concept, we have customers, that have to be satisfied, whether they be hotel guests or private tenants occupying our PRS units, and there's the issue of design, which is very similar, there's similar concepts on design, but obviously what a hotel guest wants and what a private rented sector tenant wants - who's likely to be occupying the room for a - well the room, the property - for a lot longer their needs are different, and so you know, there's a process one goes through in terms of design to make sure you've got the right, you've got the right concept there. The other piece is the sale of ancillary services. So, you know, hotels will, in most instances, have swimming pools, you won't have, you won't have that in a private rented sector block, unless it's prime central London. But actually, you know, there are rather, dry cleaning services, kiosks, there's all those sorts of things, you can learn, which is what the tenant want. But it's the communication piece, actually, with the customer and the owner, that's very, very important. And there is, for the private rented sector, there's a lot to be learnt, because the private rented sector is in it's infancy. The closest to that is serviced apartments. The serviced apartment industry is for, it there to serve sort of longer term guests, and is very close to the PRS, and there are some learning points there.

The serviced apartments hospitality sector is gaining more prominence in the industry. In this TV show Marcel Lindt discusses Frasers service apartments.

An expanding hospitality sector

So Frasers is a leading operator of serviced apartments, we have about ninety properties and about fourteen thousand units under operation and in the pipeline at the moment, we are from Singapore originally, and so we have a very strong presence in Asia, but we also have a good presence in Europe, and in the Middle East. More recently we have also started to look at Africa as a region to grow. So, I would say the main difference to a hotel is, that you get larger rooms, you have a separate living area, you have a separate kitchenette, sometimes even a full blown kitchen, we often have a separate bedroom, essentially we've giving more space to the traveller. On the other hand, you have less, open spaces, so you have less public areas, typically. So, we are - we tend to be in areas where there's lots of restaurants around, so we feel we don't need to have a lot of F&B offering in our properties. Same with conference and banqueting, you probably find is more in a hotel, for us that’s more sort of, you know, we have a small meeting rooms for - for smaller events, but we are not doing big conferences, like the one here now at the moment.

Hospitality TV will continue to feature shows about serviced apartments and other hospitality sectors. Why not take a look at who else has been featured in the Hospitality250.

The European market has different characteristics to the market in the US as John C Wagner of Cycas Hospitality explains in this TV show.

European market: Cycas developments

Space is a bigger consideration of course in the UK and Europe than it is in the States, no doubt about that, but the demand is there, the demand from the customers for this long stay product is absolutely there and so, it's our challenge as an industry and indeed our company in Cycas, it's our challenge to try and figure out - how can you, how can you develop, how can you build a product that makes economic sense? One of the the things that we've done, and we're quite successful in the couple of properties we're doing this way, is combining a traditional hotel, and then putting a serviced apartment or an all suite hotel component as part of the hotel - for example, our Stratford hotel has a Holiday Inn at the bottom, and a Staybridge suite's on top, we're under construction now in Manchester, where it's a Crown Plaza at the bottom and a Staybridge on top, we've got a number of other developments across Europe and in the UK, where there're two hotels in one, the mix of that allows, the the land to get a bigger bang for the buck to get more rooms on the site than might otherwise be possible, and of course you've got the operating efficiencies, of you're got more rooms so you can spread staff - housekeeping, maintenance, engineering, accounting, - all those things can be combined behind the scenes, so where you still have distinct brands for the guests out front, but behind the scenes, you've really only got one big hotel versus two small ones. So the efficiencies work.

Hospitality TV will continue to feature shows about the European market and the hospitality market in other regions. Why not take a look at who else has been featured in the Hospitality250.

Digital platforms have changed the way the hospitality industry works. In this TV show Frank Fiskers discusses how distribution has changed for Scandic.

Intermediary digital platforms

So Scandic is a Nordic hotel group. We operate approximately 230 hotels, primarily in 4 Nordic countries with a little bit of business in Germany, a little bit of business in Benelux. We are 13,000 team members and we have a of approximately 11 billion Swedish kroner. I don’t know if it has disrupted distribution but I think it has changed distribution dramatically and that's of course the shift from, in principle, all other channels to the internet both through digital intermediaries and through our own web sites. I think for Scandic it is like most other hotel companies, you know, we started working with these intermediaries back in – after it was 9/11, I think we never really realised whom we went into bed with and I think that this relationship has grown tremendously over the years but also it has its challenges and this is what we’re seeing now, that we are trying to cope with these challenges and trying to determine what should we do with these challenges that these intermediaries present.

Keep browsing the Hospitality Channel for more great TV shows about digital platforms, distribution and OTAs. Look out for the next 10 industry experts to be announced as part of Hospitality250.

Market conditions in European countries are somewhat interdependent. In this TV show Ewout Hoogendorn of Horwath HTL discusses some similarities and difference between the Dutch market and the rest of the continent.

Market Conditions in Netherlands and Germany

Over the last 12 months we have seen that the Dutch economy is a very open economy, so very much related to particularly UK but even stronger to Germany.  And since the German has been quite strong over the last within the last 12 months or even longer than that.  There was a good impact to the Dutch market, not as much as we expected actually.  You would expect that because the German market has  been growing a couple of percentages, much more than other markets.  You would expect the Dutch market to grow for similar, they didn’t, but it’s doing well.  And so it took up quite well.  But then again also that’s related back to, well that’s not only related to Amsterdam, you get Rotterdam and Utrecht, Rotterdam is also quite an international location, have picked up to the German market as well.  And if you don’t look at the rest of the country for the Amsterdam market which is as I said quite a one off market for the Dutch market .  And there’s the larger cities, we’ve got Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, but also Maastricht.  Those markets are doing well.  But also they have different characters, if we look at the Rotterdam market, one of the expansions also been done. But perhaps too much, too much for this time around, I mean so much being expanded and not the market itself, the demand is not growing with similar percentages.  So that market is going to be quite heavy.  The other market which is interesting is the Utrecht market because that has one of the expansion plans but they haven’t materialised for over a decade more or less. And still the demand has grown quite substantially, so the Utrecht market is one of the interesting markets for the moment.

The Hospitality Channel will continue to feature shows about market conditions in different regions. Look out for the next 10 industry experts to be announced as part of Hospitality250.

Hospitality trends are more positive as regional markets recover from the recession. In this TV show Anne Walsh shares her insight into the Irish hospitality market.

Ireland, banks, and hospitality trends

What we are definitely seeing now is we’re seeing more transactions. So say in 2008, 2009, 2010 we saw very few asset sales. But in the last year alone we saw 200 million Euros worth of asset sales in Ireland. And we’re foreseeing a lot more of that going forward because seen now that we release assets into the market, we have banks, some foreign banks are exiting the market. And we’ve also a bank that’s currently being liquidated, IBRC. So we’re going to see hotels change hands. So I think the structure of ownership is going to be very different. You know, we’re seeing hoteliers maybe buying back hotels but we’re also seeing a lot of international money coming in. So definitely the profile on ownership, we’ll see new brands come into the market I think in terms of management contracts and franchising. And we’ll also start seeing more recovery in the regional markets whereas in Dublin we’ve been seeing double digit RevPAR growth for the last three years but that hasn’t been reflected in the other regions. But we’re starting to see a lift there as well. So hopefully in three to five years’ time all regions will have recovered and it will be a stronger market.

There will be more interesting discussion on regional hospitality trends on the Hospitality Channel. Keep an eye out for the next experts announced as part of Hospitality250.