A fourteen-story hotel with 203 rooms, 4 meeting rooms, fitness centerbar and a restaurant distributed in more than 8,020 m² of construction and located in front of the Malecón Simón Bolívar It is the proposal with which the French hotel chain Accor Group will expand to Guayaquil this year.
The building which will bear the name of Ibis Styles Guayaquil will be located on Malecón Simón Bolívar avenue and Francisco María Roca street. Its opening is estimated to be between the months of September and October.
It will be inspired by Malecón Simón Bolívar, which they consider to be an emblem of the city, and the hotel spaces will pay homage to the local history and river culture of the city.
Franck Pruvost, Director of Accor Operations for Hispanic countries, mentions that the reason for locating a hotel of this line in Guayaquil is that they seek to arrive with an accommodation concept that offers a lot of modernity, different from what is available in the city.
“Accor’s strategy is to extend to all cities with more than 150,000 inhabitants, we have a portfolio of more than 40 brands, from the simplest to the most luxurious. In Guayaquil we want to acquire a presence in all market segments”, he points out.
Pruvost He also comments that with the arrival of Ibis Styles in Guayaquil An average of 50 direct and 100 indirect jobs will be generated and reveals that they are already analyzing the future of reaching cities such as Cuenca, Manta and Galapagos with their hotels.
This year Guayaquil will host the only final of the Copa Libertadores that will take place in the Monumental Banco Pichincha stadium on October 29, for this event the director mentions that they hope to be operational and receive those who visit the city.
Accor, a leading global hospitality group with more than 5,300 properties in 110 countries, plans to open another 24 hotels in the region this year, 17 in Brazil and 7 in other Hispanic countries, in addition to his interest in franchises for residences and coworking. In 2021, 22 new hotels opened in the region.
Until now, The French chain has more than 30 years of presence in Ecuador with three other hotels with different concepts.
The first hotel that opened is the Swissotel Quito 1991. The establishment has 275 rooms and is managed by the company HOV Hotelera Quito SA, which will also be in charge of the Ibis Styles Guayaquil.
Eleven years later, in 2002, the Hotel Mercure also opened its doors in Quito, which has 147 rooms and is managed by the Apartec company.
In 2018, the chain took another step forward with the opening of the 151-room Ibis Quito, managed by Equindeca.
The operations manager of Accor Group for Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador, Delfim Pinheiro, says that the hotels were affected by the measures taken to stop the coronavirus in 2020, such as the closure of borders, since the Ecuadorian market depends a lot on international tourismbut that in 2021 they could already begin to see a recovery and that they hope to soon reach the levels of before the pandemic.
For your part, Pruvost reiterates that the pandemic hit tourism and hospitality very hard and that occupancy remained low until mid-2021 not only in the region but globally.
“The reactivation began with domestic tourism in Ecuador with the Ecuadorians, in Colombia with the same Colombians, etc., since foreigners could not travel much,” he says.
The manager mentions that the first market that was reactivated was that of leisure activities and that in this segment Acoor already registers higher income than before the pandemic.
Nevertheless, He explains that even the corporate segment and that of international clients from countries further away from the region are two fields that have not fully recovered.
“We need the large multinational companies to withdraw all kinds of policies so as not to travel or the home office to recover this type of client, as well as to recover clients who come from far away, we see cases, for example, of Brazilian, Argentine, Peruvian tourists in Chile, but we do not see as many Americans or as many Europeans as before because they must still be afraid or reserve”, he explains and says that he is confident that the recovery will continue.
TO Despite the difficulties, Accor closed 2021 in South America with a turnover of more than $450 million.
Hand in hand with its expansion and growth, the hotel chain leads the Heartist Fund program, created to help employees and their families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the initiatives was the donation of food tickets.
In 2021, some 10,000 collaborators benefited from more than one million dollars in tickets. Heartist Fund in Ecuador helped more than 190 collaborators, the amount of aid in the country was more than $32,000 in tickets. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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