Travel China Planner

Royal Tulip Garden Hotel Zhujiajiao, the first five-star standard hotel in the Qingpu district of Shanghai, will have a soft opening on New Year’s Day 2010, and is slated to formally open around the Spring Festival in 2010.

Designed and decorated by Alliance Interior Architects USA and Golden Tulip Hospitality Group, the hotel has many features characteristic of local culture such as the facade, the courtyards and gardens between the six buildings, and the wood carvings inside the hotel.

The hotel covers an area of 33,327 square meters with 190 guestrooms and suites, seven meeting rooms that can offer meeting services for 20 to 250 people, a swimming pool, tennis court, gym, sauna, a playroom, and other entertainment and recreational facilities. The hotel’s 1,000 square-meter pillarless ballroom can accommodate 60 tables.

Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels has returned to its Shanghai roots after an absence of 60 years with the recent opening of The Peninsula Shanghai, in the city where it once operated four of the city’s premier hotels: The Kalee, Majestic, Palace, and Astor House.

The 235-room Peninsula Shanghai is built on the Bund in the style of a noble residence of the 1920s and 30s, harking back to when the city was known as “the Paris of the East”, and is the first new building on the Bund in over 60 years. The hotel occupies a prime site on the Huangpu River beside the former British Consulate Gardens and the Suzhou Creek and the guestrooms include four themed suites with outdoor rooftop terraces giving views of the Bund and Pudong’s futuristic skyline.

For meetings and events, there is the Rose Ballroom, which accommodates 450 guests for a banquet or 1,000 for a cocktail reception. Special features include an elevator large enough to deliver a limousine to the ballroom, a custom-made 1930s Schindler cage lift, and a full-scale replica of a 1930s seaplane in the Rosemonde Aviation Lounge. The MICE facilities are complemented by the 900 square meter Palace Suite wraparound rooftop terrace with panoramic views of the city, which is planned to become a venue for prestigious corporate events and social occasions.

For rest and recreation, Peninsula Spa by ESPA, offers nine treatment rooms, with a cool navy and white nautical theme, which complement the sauna, steam and relaxation rooms, and is just steps away from the 25-metre indoor swimming pool and fitness center.

The Radisson Hotel Pudong Century Park has been awarded the Green Globe Benchmarking Bronze Status and becomes a certified member of the EC3 Global family.

To achieve Benchmarked Bronze Status, the hotel committed to benchmarking its energy, paper and water consumption, total waste production and community commitment; along with implementing an integrated environmental and social policy. These measures are aimed at promoting efficient practices and large cost savings, ensuring the hotel is on the path to securing a sustainable future for the environment.

The Green Globe program, as managed by EC3 Global, an internationally recognized environmental advisory group, is a worldwide benchmarking, certification and performance improvement system assisting the travel and tourism industry to attain sustainability. Green Globe with Earthcheck science inside provides a certification system that responds directly to the major environmental problems facing the planet, including climate change, waste reduction and non-renewable resource management.

Chinese budget hotel brand Hanting Inns & Hotels has announced in Shanghai that its sub-brand Hanting Inn has now entered Shanghai and that the company plans to change its name from Hanting Inn to Haiyou Inn in the near future.

Haiyou Inn is located beside Nanpu Bridge and the average area of its guest rooms is about 10 square meters while room rates range from RMB79 to RMB159. Haiyou Inn also has landscape suites and three-bedroom, one-bathroom suites.

Targeting young people as its major clients, Haiyou Inn puts an emphasis on entertainment. Besides facilities such as billiards, X-Box and home theater, the whole hotel is covered by wireless Internet access network as well as two free Internet zones on the first floor.

Hanting Inns & Hotels now has three brands, Hanting Hotels, Hanting Express, and Haiyou Inn. According to Zhang Tuo, the CEO of Hanting by the end of 2010, Hanting Inn is expected to have ten hotels in Shanghai.

HNA Hotels & Resorts is planning to acquire Jumeirah HanTang Xintiandi and Conrad Shanghai, two luxury hotels in Shanghai Xintiandi, the construction of both of which has been stopped due to the financial crisis.

These acquisitions are said to involve a total of CNY5 billion. According to Gao Tianming, president of HNA Hotels & Resorts, the transaction is still under consultation.

The investor and developer of the two hotels is Shanghai Li Xing Hotel Company, a joint venture of Shui On Group and Shanghai Hotel Investment Company. The two hotels were scheduled to open in 2008 but the openings were delayed due to impact of the financial crisis.

A week before this, HNA Hotels & Resorts signed an agreement with Skyfame Realty (Holdings) Limited to conditionally acquire all the equity of Chengjian Tianyu for a price of CNY1.1 billion. The main assets of Chengjian Tianyu include The Westin Guangzhou and Skyfame Building (not including the floors from the 17th floor to the 22nd floor which have been sold).