BERLIN — For Wesam Okasha, there's a lot to love about Berlin.
Okasha lived in the city for 18 months in the late 1990s and opened his first hotel — The Estrel — in the German capital.
Today, Berlin is a city that is “evolving again and again and again. … an amazing cosmopolitan city where you see the heavy past and history with the modernity, and you see the diversity for sure,” said Okasha, managing director of TUI Blue Hotels and head of global development, Asia, Greater China and Europe, Middle East and Africa.
As a podcast guest on “The Upgrade: EMEA Hospitality News,” Okasha predicted the German economy will see a turnaround soon, emerging from the slump it has been going through since the end of the pandemic.
“There is a lot of additional investment coming in,” he said. “And not just European.”
TUI Group is a global travel and tourism company headquartered in Hanover, Germany. The company's hotel division, TUI Hotels & Resorts, has 12 hotel brands including TUI Blue.
Okasha said TUI Blue Hotels continues its mission of streamlining a lot of the smaller chains TUI worked with alongside owner-partners. In turn, that helps modernize the package and all-inclusive offerings of the company, as well as being able to be booked as standalone hotels.
The recent launch of TUI's luxury The Mora brand in Zanzibar does the same but in a higher segment positioning. TUI's plan to scale its leisure hotel brands will follow the success of TUI Blue, which originally set a goal of 50 hotels within three years.
“We did 97. Now it is the No. 1 lifestyle brand within the group,” Okasha said, adding he wants to extend TUI's hotel portfolio from the current 433 to 600 in the midterm across all brands.
For more from Wesam Okasha on his brands, his hopes for the firm’s new destinations, the company’s best earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and his commitments on sustainability, listen to the podcast embedded above.