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This article has
been published in Business Review magazine on June 20, 2006
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With Hotel Bucuresti set to be finished and opened under the Radisson SAS brand mid-next year, Centre Ville will become one of the largest all-in-one hospitality centers in Bucharest. Yaron Ashkenazi, Centre Ville general manager, talked to Business Review about the additional developments which will reach a total of some EUR 50 million when finalized. |
Yaron Ashkenazi
General Manager
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What will the Centre Ville complex comprise once all the construction work is finished next year? |
At the moment, Centre Ville apart hotel is one of the largest in Europe. It was built to answer a need and offer a solution for the long-term entrepreneurs coming to Romania to invest. In fact most of our clients are coming for more than 15 nights per month. If they are paying EUR 150 per night, this means they are spending a little bit more than EUR 2,200 per month. After only a few months of operations we were full of clients. We finished 2005 with an average occupancy rate of 95 percent, which is high, even compared to other destinations in Europe. The spa operated by World Class, which was launched a year and a half ago, now has over 1,700 members, plus the guests of the apart hotel who use the health center on a daily basis. We have the commercial area on the ground floor of the building, with shops and banks, which is valuable to us, as rents in this area have increased over the past few years. We will bring designers from Milan and Paris into our shopping outlet. We are starting to renovate the corner of Calea Victoriei with George Enescu street and we will have there a car rental outlet, a bank and fashion stores. The process is ongoing; we are in talks at the moment with leading fashion companies, as only such companies would be suited to this high rent area. One of them is already on the market. We will also relocate the casino to another place, and we hope to make it the largest one in town, 2,500 sqm on three floors, with different restaurants, bars and slot machines. We will outsource the management of the casino. The center will have 90,000 built sqm, on a 20,000-sqm plot. |
| What about the Radisson SAS Hotel – what developments are planned there? |
The Radisson SAS Hotel will open in summer 2007, and construction works are currently ongoing. The hotel will have the biggest convention center in town, which will host 1,200 people. The center will have 11 seminar rooms. We will also take the indoor pool out and build the first outdoor Jacuzzi in Romania. It will be heated to 37 degrees Celsius all the time, even during winter. We are building a car park with 200 parking places on top of which we will have a garden. Our development plans also include enlarging Le Bistro and making it a French Bistro with a garden. |
| What is the most profitable of the Centre Ville divisions? |
The apart hotel is the most profitable, because people come for the long term. Furthermore, we don’t have too many public areas, which are very expensive and lose money. All the spaces are rented out. This is why we can reach 50 percent gross operating profit, while an average leading hotel gets 35 or 30 percent. Le Bistro and the spa center are leverage for our clients. We will have over EUR 6 million in revenue for the apart hotel this year, and over EUR 3 million in net operating profit. We accounted for some EUR 1.5 million in revenues in Q1 this year, and the April – June period will hopefully bring us more. June will be a very good period, with almost EUR 600,000 revenues from the hotel operations alone. |
| Who comes to the Centre Ville apart hotel? |
| Our target is the corporate market. Occasionally we have tourists coming for one night on their way to other parts of the country. We are working with medium- to long-term accommodation. We also have solutions for families, for intermediary situations. People leaving the country stay with us for some weeks before leaving, and those coming into the country with the family stay here before finding a house in the town. |
| What is the average amount a Centre Ville apart hotel guest spends in one year? |
| A client would spend on accommodation alone an average of EUR 25,000 per year, and on the other facilities, like laundry, restaurants and spa, an additional EUR 5,000 to EUR 10,000 per year. Guests benefit from a personalized services. When they come, they receive a personal letter. Furthermore, when somebody comes here to our hotel for the second time, the person is offered something we know they like. We also have supermarket services. There is a menu from which customers choose what they want and they receive it from our staff. The third thing we have added to our services is the so-called “mother’s recipe.” When coming into the hotel, the customer teaches our chef how to cook a certain recipe. This personal touch makes the difference between hotels. |
| What was the total investment in Centre Ville from the beginning, including revamping Hotel Bucuresti, which is ongoing? |
| We have already invested in Elite Apartments some EUR 3.5 million, in the spa another EUR 3 million and in the apart hotel, EUR 2 million. Hotel Bucuresti will need another EUR 40 million in investment. So all in all it will reach almost EUR 50 million. We will also work on the Cina restaurant, which we own as well. The restaurant is currently being rented out to ING bank, but we have big plans for it. But we don’t have specific details to give at this moment. |
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