In Southeast Asia, Luxe ansd Super-Luxe as the Order of the Day

Chuck Abbott, Regional Vice President, Starwood Hotels & Resorts SEA , discusses: 

- Quick update on Starwood’s properties in SEA and how this compares with just 5 years ago? 

- Reasons - trends - Managed / UJV (187k rooms) and Franchised (129k rooms) form the vast majority of total rooms (341k worldwide)

- Why are these options preferred over the traditional owned and leased route 

- Explain this for us: under your Managed/UJV division, you have twice as many luxe-level St Regis hotels in Asia-Pacific (10) than in North America (4). Even Latin America (7) has more? 

- What's Starwood's reading of the US economic recovery? Are more dollars being redeployed Stateside now or is it still under evaluation? 

- Certainly, news of the big chains like yourselves, Marriott, Intercontinental and especially Hilton devaluing their respective loyalty programs for business travellers do not bode well .. 

- Certainly, the Asians and in particular the Malaysians (such as the Genting group) have some belief in the US: Miami and NY in particular .. whether Starwood and Genting are interpreting the same market differently 

- From a revenue management perspective how does Starwood interpret the SEA markets and is it greatly different from say a China interpretation - Occupancy rates

- Rest of Asia at around 75% a good deal better than Total Worldwide numbers of around 66% - whether these are good numbers- Realistically what are the best achievable occupancy numbers for a chain like Starwood

- Revpar: despite all the hype about this region: Q1 Revpar for ‘Rest of Asia’ (ie non Greater China) grew just 5.6%: not much higher than the Revpar growth for the whole group (4.7%). Reasons 

- Competition - especially in Asia, where the low barriers to entry under the franchise, fee-based model mean a whole bunch of new entrants with a potentially closer brand affiliation to Asia (Banyan Tree springs to mind) 

- Traditional real estate-based / owned route seems to be dead and buried: in Starwood’s case you are aggressively upping your fee-based business. What data points back your conviction? 

- From an operational standpoint what does this mean: adopting and honing new management skillsets in working with landowners and developers? What challenges do these in itself pose? 

- Biodiseases - recent SARS outbreak in HK and China - impact of 

- Recession / downturn - breakdown of visitors / guests from Europe and North America - impact of 

- Expansion: China seems to continue to be all the rage: to what extent does this affect SEA growth plans if at all.