As The Langham Hotels and Resorts brand celebrates its 160th birthday across 2025, the CEO of its parent company is planning its future growth.
Bob van den Oord, CEO of Hong Kong-based parent company Langham Hospitality Group since September 2023, said in an interview that the company's oldest brand will take its next growth stage via management agreements.
Langham Hospitality Group owns 65% of the properties in the Langham brand, but van den Oord said that “we need to be a little more asset-light."
"There are only so many places you can build and command the right [average daily] rate for the required return on investment,” he said.
The Langham Hotels and Resorts brand's biggest birthday gift to itself will be the 133-room Langham, Venice, its first hotel in Europe since the opening of the Langham, London in 1865. The Venice hotel will open near to the southern tip of the island of Murano in a 16th-century building owned by Palladium Italia. Van den Oord said the Venetian property is a major milestone for the Langham brand and company.
“We found its site a couple of years ago, an old glass factory with al fresco paintings. We’re raising the floor level by almost two meters and rebuilding the façade. Everything is listed,” he said, hinting at the high tides that on occasion have flooded Venice’s streets with ankle-deep water or higher.
Van den Oord expects the hotel, which is fully owned by Langham’s parent company Great Eagle Holdings, to be one of the most gorgeous hotels on the Venetian Lagoon. It will be on the southern tip of Murano’s central canal, the Rio dei Vetrai, facing the main island of Venice and occupying a former glass factory built in the 16th century.
The Langham, Venice will provide something unusual for Venetian hotels: a swimming pool.
"A pool, which is very rare in Venice. The only other hotel to have this is the Cipriani [a Belmond hotel], and we’ll be competing with it. We plan on opening it in April or May 2027,” he said.
The architecture and design firm developing The Langham, Venice is Matteo Thun & Partners, with the eponymously named founder having a home in Venice.
“We always wanted to be in Italy, which always is fully booked and very popular with Americans,” van den Oord said. “We have a great name in the U.S., a great synergy, so we were always on the lookout for something for the right price in the right location. It is good that it is all ours, so we can build it on spec and help us leverage future growth.”
The Langham Hotels and Resorts brand has 15 hotels in its pipeline. The move to scale, albeit a modest one so far, has taken time, van den Oord said.
“We’ve signed a deal for two or three hotels in [the Chinese city] Xian, and we want to open hotels along the old Silk Road. Building hotels in these places evokes the golden age of travel, and they work well, commercially. In all the [Silk Road] countries, it is cheaper to build and more efficient to run hotels. Obviously, that is less so in Europe, but everyone wants to go to Venice once in their life,” he added.
Also in development is The Langham, Diriyah, which is scheduled to open in 2029 in Saudi Arabia. Diriyah is a UNESCO World Heritage site on the edge of the Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh. Van den Oord said the hotel would be a visionary project as Saudi Arabia looks to compete with Dubai.
The hotel is "in the new part of Diriyah adjacent to the new [Royal Diriyah] opera house, on a boulevard that will be the Champs-Élysées of Riyadh,” he added. “Saudi Arabia is where Dubai was 15 years ago. It has the vision and resources, but not the time, although they will do what they say they will do.”
Plans for other brands and growth in Asia
Langham Hospitality Group’s other hotel brands — Cordis Hotels and Resorts, Eaton and Ying’nFlo — have more flexibility and allow for full ownership or leasing, van den Oord said. The company plans to increase the full portfolio of all brands to 100 properties in 10 years.
Cordis competes in the upscale market with hotels of between 300 to 500 rooms in city centers, airports and resort destinations, van den Oord said. These hotels prioritize being part of the local community and offering experiences that might include night-market tours, discovering Māori art in New Zealand and cooking dumplings with chefs in Shanghai.
“Cordis is the fastest to grow and have a wellness play. We’ve seen the shift in China from buying luxury bags and shoes to having more experiences,” he said.
Chinese travelers are no different from many other hotel guests, van den Oord said.
“They follow the sun. If Europeans go to the French or Italian rivieras, the Chinese are going to Thailand or Bali, and not just for holidays but also to invest in second homes, and we’re seeing the great potential for the Chinese guest, who is extremely curious about traveling the world,” he said.
Shanghai has become more sophisticated, and van den Oord described it as “the Paris of Asia” with galleries, museums, restaurants and incredible coffee shops.
Hong Kong, meanwhile, has struggled, but it is on the way back, he added. Langham Hospitality Group has five hotels in Hong Kong.
“It certainly has gone through some testing times. The government is working hard with many initiatives. There is a new stadium at the airport, and Coldplay just sold it out,” he said.
He added Hong Kong has two fundamental problems. The first is that average daily rates at Hong Kong hotels haven't made up for the rising costs. The second is that Hong Kong's hotel industry remains too reliant on Chinese guests.
“Every market at the moment has its challenges, but Hong Kong is a great city. I feel the media is overhanded when it reports on it,” van den Oord said.
To get Hong Kong back to where it was, and to get hotel guests and investment back from Singapore, the government needs to invest a little more in sports tournaments, he said.
“It does not have a tennis tournament or Formula 1, but it does have other things, The Rugby 7s is big,” he added.
There are 10 Cordis projects in the pipeline, including a mountain resort in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia that features an onsen-style spa. Another Chinese project is a property near Ningbo.
“We have a lot of confidence in the brand, which continues to grow and not just in China,” van den Oord said. “We have some deals being worked out in Southeast Asia.”
He said Eaton can grow in the medium term to 10 hotels from its current two properties.
However, Langham Hospitality Group's growth is not being spurred on by geopolitics, van den Oord said.
“The situation is not helpful. It needs wars to stop, the trade war to go away and costs to decrease,” he said. “The industry has the confidence to come back. In times of uncertainty, we travel and spend less, but our last set of results showed some growth, and [for full-year 2025] we will show more.”