Holiday Inn takes over Aquila Prambanan hotel

JAKARTA (JP): PT Bakrieland Development of the Bakrie Group has selected Holiday Hospitality of the United States to manage, support and market the Holiday Inn Yogyakarta, a newly re-branded hotel in Yogyakarta previously called the Aquila Prambanan.

Under three agreements signed by the two companies here yesterday, Holiday Hospitality, which has set up its Indonesian- based subsidiary Holiday Inn Indonesia BV, would operate the hotel for 10 years.

Bakrieland's president, Iwan Hendradi, said that Holiday Hospitality had been chosen for its famous international reservation system dubbed Holidex.

"We expect the occupancy rate of the hotel will be up in the coming years under the new management," he said.

The five-star hotel, located on a 5.5-acre plot on Jl. Adisucipto, has 191 rooms including some suites. Opened in 1992, the property was initially operated by Aquila, a hotel chain company of businessman Hindoro Budiono Halim who formerly controlled the hotel under PT Elang Realty.

Elang Realty was acquired in March this year by PT Bakrie Capital of the Bakrie Group. The publicly listed Elang Realty was then renamed Bakrieland Development.

Hendradi said that the Bakrie Group currently ran eight hotels managed by different hotel chains including Choice, Le Meridien, Hyatt, Intan and Soneva.

Holiday Inn Yogyakarta's general manager, John W. Beresford, said that the hotel had been healthy and saw last year an average occupancy rate of 60 percent.

Yogyakarta has seen in recent years a significant growth of star-rated hotels. But the average length of stay per foreign visitor in the city totals less than two days, much less than some 10 days nationwide.

Overseas hotel operators like Sheraton, Accor, Melia, Hyatt, Radisson and domestic chains such as Santika, Sahid and Natour have been operating star-rated hotels in Yogyakarta.

"We'll see a tough time in the next three months after the forest-fire haze crisis, but we'll work hard to face it," Beresford said.

Holiday Hospitality's director of operations for Southeast Asia, Mahmood Masood, said it would be more challenging for his company to operate a taken-over hotel rather than a new hotel.

"But we'll combine the goodness of the hotel with what we can offer. Next month we'll launch a new approach and a program which will not conflict with previous ones," he said.

He said that there were five Holiday Inn hotels in Indonesia, located in Jakarta, Bali, Lombok, Bandung and Yogyakarta.

"Next month we'll make a soft launch of a new Holiday Inn in Semarang, Central Java. In total, we'll operate about 1,000 rooms in Indonesia," he said, adding that another hotel was under construction in Surabaya, East Java.

He said that Indonesia was one of the major nations his company wished to expand in after India, China, Australia and New Zealand.

Holiday Hospitality today runs 2,300 hotels worldwide. (icn)