Three news items caught my eye last week.
IHIF moves month
The first is that conference organizer Questex has moved back the 2027 edition of its annual International Hotel Investment Forum, held at the Intercontinental Berlin, from its traditional March to May.
It has been held in May once before, when Questex wanted to even out its editions of the show following the 2020 show being canceled due to the pandemic.
May in Berlin is wonderful, but I do not suppose Questex thought of this blog’s constant requests for May conferences to better align hotel news and spring-migration bird sightings.
Maybe they did?
One can register interest in attendance here.
Marriott celebrates 10,000th opened hotel
There are some notable hurdles hotel firms reach — having 10,000 opened hotels must be one of them.
Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel firm by hotel count and market capitalization, has reached that barrier this week. Its 10,000th hotel is the 127-room JW Marriott Ranthambore Resort & Spa in the Indian state of Rajasthan and owned by Jaipur-based Ishika Resorts & Hospitality LLP.
I am sure Ranthambore has much else going for it, but essentially it is on travelers’ radars because visiting the 515-square-mile Ranthambore National Park provides probably one of the country’s best opportunities to see the Bengal tiger.
In April, wardens at the park boasted that a trip with guests to one specific zone provided sightings of tigers, leopards and cheetahs.
Cheetahs are not considered inhabitants of the park, so that sighting must have been particularly memorable.
Several other hotel firms have 10,000-plus hotels in their portfolios, but their numbers also include pipeline hotels in development.
That’s less to roar about, although I will add quality, not quantity, needs to be the fundamental criteria of expansion.
A notable sale in South Africa
This time last year, I visited South Africa for the first time to attend the Future Hospitality Summit Africa and to travel around Cape Town.
Now there's word of a proposed sale of a huge chunk of land in the Eastern Cape of South Africa that has on it a hotel.
The deal involves the Tyityaba Nature Reserve, 10 or so hours of driving east of Cape Town, with the land in question covering 13,000 hectares, or 32,124 acres. Put another way, it is the same size as the British Army’s training ground in Dartmoor, Devon, or 2.2 times the size of Manhattan.
The hotel on the Tyityaba Nature Reserve has eight suites, or one suite per every 1,625 hectares, which does not sound crowded.
It also contains part of the famous Amatole Mistbelt Forest, a protected area that contains bird species such as Cape parrot; Knysna turaco, and Narina trogon. If you want to see some pretty spectacular colors in the avian world, I would suggest you search online for these three species.
The sale has a guide price of 145 million South African rand, or approximately $8.8 million. According to the brokerage blurb, this rare sale has a “status as a gazetted proclaimed reserve, a designation under South African law, [that] ties the land to long-term conservation management and places it within a category of property that has drawn growing interest from investors looking for protected land.”
It is the wildlife that would interest me, and on the preserve roam buffalo, nyala, kudu, bushbuck, giraffes, leopards, zebras, Blue wildebeest, eland and impalas, along hundreds of bird species.
Controlled hunting is allowed, and that always divides opinion, although many conservationists are not against it if it is regulated, sensible and ultimately helps the health of animal populations.
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