Six Continents Hotels will underline its position as a major global hotel company, and one of the leading hotel operator in the Middle East, with a major show of force at the Arabian Travel Market.
Senior management representatives will join owners, general managers and sales and marketing executives representing Inter-Continental, Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn properties around the world for the four-day travel trade showcase taking place at Airport Exp Dubai. Drawing hotel representatives from Cleveland to Casablanca, Manhattan to Madrid, and Sharm El Sheikh to Singapore, the Six Continents Hotels' team will be the largest yet assembled for ATM, the Middle East's leading travel trade exhibition. "This is an increasingly important international event for the industry, and the Middle East is an increasingly important market for the company," said Raymond Khalife, president, Six Continents Hotels, Middle East and Africa. "We will be taking the opportunity to highlight our plans for more expansion in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and also to highlight initiatives designed to maintain the highest levels of service for our guests worldwide." In the financial year ending September 30, 2001, Six Continents Hotels announced it had 69,000 rooms in its organic pipeline to join its global portfolio, and that more than 20,300 of these new rooms were planned for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Ever changing figures in the Middle East emphasise the company's commitment to more growth in the region. In the countdown to ATM, the company has 59 Middle East hotels and resorts under management, with eight more currently under development - seven of these to open this year - and many more in the pipeline. "Six of our new hotels scheduled to open this year are in Egypt and Saudi Arabia," said Khalife. "These two countries remain key markets for development, but we are actively pursuing new hotel projects in many other parts of the region, and expect to announce a number of new management contracts in the next month." Six Continents will announce more details of its regional and worldwide development, sales and marketing strategies during an official press conference on the second day of ATM. Meanwhile, the hotels to be represented on the company's re-designed ATM stand highlight the regional and global spread of the Inter-Continental, Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn hotel brands. The ATM line-up includes Inter-Continental hotels from London, New York, Malta, Hong Kong, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, Crowne Plaza hotels from Bangkok, Geneva and Istanbul, and Holiday Inn hotels from Phuket, Jordan and Bahrain.