It’s Time for a Global Luxury Chinese Hotel Chain - for the Chinese

You’ll recognise some of these brands: Crowne Plaza; Holiday Inn, Hotel Indigo. They are all owned by InterContinental Hotels Group and you’ll find them in just about every major city in the world, from Chicago to Munich; from Mumbai to Sydney. IHG is a global hotels group with more guest rooms than any other hotel group in the world – over 645,000 rooms in more than 4,400 hotels in over 100 countries. But have you heard of Hualuxe? You might do soon…

This is a good example to use when teaching emerging markets and globalisation.

IHG has announced that it is to launch a new upscale hotel chain in China.

IHG’s aim is to become the hotel chain of choice for increasingly-wealthy Chinese travelers at home and abroad. So the new hotel brand will be designed to incorporate specific elements of Chinese luxury hospitality experience apart, including noodle bars, VIP lounges and Chinese gardens. InterContinental’s chain of Chinese hotels will be called Hualuxe, with the first scheduled to open in late 2013.

Marketing Magazine provides some useful data to give us a sense of the scale of opportunity being pursued by IHG:

- IHG said the number of domestic travellers in China is expected to reach 3.3 billion in 2015, while the Chinese hotel market is projected to grow by 5% to 8% annually by 2030.

- Outbound trips from China are expected to leap from around 10 million journeys to more than 100 million over the next 10 to 15-years.

- IHG is already the largest international hotel operator in China, with over 160 hotels in 60 cities, which the group hopes will extend to a total of 100 cities in the next 15 to 20-years.

Here is a useful short video which outlines the Hualuxe launch: