Westin plans to open more hotels here

JAKARTA (JP): Westin Hotels and Resorts, a U.S. hotel management firm based in Seattle, plans a major expansion in Indonesia, its Surabaya hotel's general manager said yesterday.

Rolf Salomon, said the firm was building a second hotel in Jakarta. He said it was negotiating with its prospective partners to run two more hotels in two Indonesian cities.

"We will announce the locations and our partners in the two hotels before the end of this year," he told The Jakarta Post here Thursday.

Westin, founded in 1930, runs 104 hotels and resorts in 23 nations, with additional projects under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne and Manila.

Salomon refused to give further information about the planned hotels in Indonesia.

Hotel industry sources believe that Bandung in West Java, Yogyakarta and Bali would be attractive to Westin and other international hotel chains catering to business clientele.

Westin runs the 418-room Westin Surabaya which opened in June 1996. The five-star hotel owned by PT Ramasari Surya Persada joins Surabaya's other luxury hotels, the Hyatt, Shangri-la, Sheraton and Mandarin.

Westin expects its second hotel, a 39-story property in Jakarta, to open in 1999. Westin Jakarta, is on Jl. Thamrin, Central Jakarta, the former Hotel Kartika Plaza site.

The 500-room Westin Jakarta is owned by PT Wisma Kartika, a joint venture between the Federation Cooperative of the Armed Forces and PT Luminary Prima.

Director of sales and marketing for Westin Surabaya, Jim Boyles, said Indonesia was still attractive to hotel operators because of the country's tremendous economic growth.

"Indonesia is one of the fastest growing nations in Asia. The country has great potential compared to its neighbors," he said, adding that Indonesia still needed additional hotels.

Boyles and Salomon were here to promote Westin Surabaya's incentive program, called Westin's Executive Secretaries Team (WEST). The program offers benefits to guests and those who encouraged them to stay at the hotel.

Boyles said WEST was to attract more guests given the stiff star-rated hotel competition in Surabaya.

There are five five-star hotels in Surabaya, the country's second biggest city. It is better known as a business center than a tourist destination.

Surabaya also has at least five four-star hotels. Most of star-rated hotels in Surabaya are run by overseas hotel chain firms. The excessive number of star-rated hotels in Surabaya had sparked a rates war between the five five-star hotels.

But Boyles said the war was over. He said it began because there was small demand for rooms and a lot of hotel development.

"The occupancy rate of five star-hotels in Surabaya is estimated to be 45 percent on average for the whole of 1997, about similar with last year's figure," he said. He said room rates ranged between US$78 and $80 a night on average.

Surabaya's five-star hotel owners had agreed to end the war and planned to develop, hand-in-hand, a convention center to promote Surabaya as a convention city, he said. (icn)