Kempinski Hotels has enjoyed its best year since 2000, Chris Hartley, its senior vp sales and marketing director, said at the World Travel Market in London.
“It has been our biggest year ever with 12 new hotels opening up and with another ten due to open next year.
“In two and a half years we have doubled the size of our portfolio. We will have 51 by the end of this and 60 by the end of 2006,”he said.
The main areas of growth are Eastern Europe, the company's historical stronghold, the Middle East and Africa and China.
New openings of five-star properties there next year will put the Far East country on a par with Germany.
But Mr Hartley said 2005 was also the year Kempinski saw the corporate market come back.
“It's been a great corporate year with business travel markedly up. We are getting the business back again in most destinations.
“The big issue is price. We would like to push prices up but the corporate market is still price sensitive. Five years ago the corporate's budgets were unrestrained but now it is much more price sensitive.
“In some cases they want the price the same as it was five years ago. In some locations, Istanbul and Dubai the prices have gone up – crazily so.
But in other destinations, prices are flat. Munich is doing very well but there are difficulties in Berlin because of the huge oversupply.”
He said that website bookings had also doubled and although they remained a “small proportion” he said the rate of growth was a sign that they would overtake the GDS bookings.
“This will be landmark change. We estimate over the next two to three years that they will be higher than the GDS bookings,” he said.