City tourism authority proposes locations for new hotels

City tourism authority proposes locations for new hotels

The HCMC Department of Tourism has proposed 21 locations for developing hotels until 2020 to deal with the severe shortage of quality rooms sparked by growing international tourist arrivals.

 More than half the sites are located in Districts 1 and 3 within the city center. The smaller locations cover nearly 940 square meters; the larger locations, about 10,000 square meters.

Some of them are unoccupied at the moment; others currently support various business sectors like restaurants, factories, and showrooms.

The tourism authority has worked with related departments such as the Department of Planning and Investment and the Department of Natural Resources and Environment to create the list.

"We expect these locations to be developed into three to five-star hotels," said Truong Vinh Tho, head of the hotel management division under the city's tourism department.

Devising this list is one thread in the department's long-term plan to develop the city's hotel system between the current year and 2020.

Other components of the long-range plan include upgrading extant hotels, and supporting projects to build and expand hotels quickly.

The department has also produced a report about the city's current hotel situation. HCMC has 3,599 five-star rooms, 1,281 four-star rooms, 1,671 three-star rooms, 3,394 two-star rooms, 2,027 one-star rooms, and 10,068 other rooms.

In the first three months of this year, the average occupancy rate of a three to five-star room reached 85.2%.

The report says the number of international arrivals in the city, excluding tourists traveling domestically, went up from 1.1mil in 2000 to 2.35mil in 2006 but the average number of rooms available grew a mere 34% in the period.

"Demand is much stronger than supply so we must be faced with a shortage of rooms," Tho said.

The department has reckoned that by 2010, the city will need more than 12,000 rooms, including 7,000 of three to five-star standards, to cater to 7.3mil tourists, including 2.8mil international travelers.

The city has planned to welcome nearly 10mil tourists by 2010, including nearly 3.6mil from abroad. "We just calculated that visitors have the demand to stay at the hotels," Tho said.

He said that if the city carried out the long-term plan of the tourism department and developed hotels at half the suggested locations, HCMC could have 6,000 more rooms for visitors in the coming years.

"We calculated very carefully the guests who will arrive in the city and the trend of tourism development to make sure that the city will not face the redundant crisis of hotel rooms if we build new rooms," Tho said.