Newcomer on the four-star hotels market

Promotional Interservice, a Romanian private company, will invest four million dollars in a four-star hotel to be located in Baneasa Bucharest district, but competitors think it will have a hard time trying to attain a market share.

The hotel, to be opened under the Class Club Hotels brand, will be dedicated around October 1, 2001 and the new accommodation structure will become completely operational starting with December, Cezar Panait, the company’s chairman, told Mediafax.

The market of Bucharest-based hotels aimed at businesspeople is quite crowded, as ten hotels of five or four stars, such as Continental, Sofitel, Crowne Plaza, Hilton or Marriott are already operating.

“It is not the luxury hotels that are missing, but locations of two-three stars,” Corneliu Teianu, general director of the Department for Authorisations and Control within the Tourism Ministry, told Ziarul Financiar.

“For four million dollars we could have built a two-star hotel and a smaller one, for young people,” Teianu added.

“Class Club Hotels” will have 63 rooms with an accommodation capacity of 120 places, a basement, ground floor and four floors, a conference hall with 80 places, a restaurant, a bar and a separate building for recreation activities.

“The hotel is aimed at businesspeople conducting transactions in Romania or planning to spend a longer time here,” Panait specified.

Oana-Maria Stoicescu, marketing manager with four-star hotel Sofitel, does not believe that another such hotel will be successful in Bucharest. “I think they should have chosen something else,” she claims.

Nicolae Fertig, general manager of Continental SA, a network holding one four-star hotel in Bucharest, is even harsher: “There is no more room on the four-star hotel market.”

Moreover, Continental is already focusing on the three-star locations, as it has recently opened Ibis hotel (former Nord hotel), which operates under a management contract signed with French group Accor.

The new hotel will have about 60 employees, while revenues estimated for the first year of activity amount to 1.7 million dollars.

The prices will be lower than those charged by the other four-star hotels from Bucharest, says the company’s management.

Promotional Interservice wanted to invest the profits resulted from other businesses in the accommodation industry, the company’s official explained. The company registered 122 billion lei in turnover last year.