MEGAWORLD Hotels and Resorts Corp. (MHRC) is optimistic its revenues will continue to improve going into 2022, especially with Filipinos on “revenge travel mode,” even as it prepares to open more properties by 2023.
In the recent Business Outlook for 2022 webinar of the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines, MHRC Group General Manager Cleofe Albiso said, “We ended up as a group with negative 33 percent compared to our pre-pandemic revenues. That really is a good level of revenue compared to the total industry. So it wasn’t as bad in 2020. And in 2021, we’re still poised to even do better than 2020.” The Hotel Sales and Marketing Association Inc. had estimated that revenues lost by the industry due to the pandemic was close to 80 percent.
She added that “revenge travel” will help the group reach its financial goals next year. “We definitely think that it’s going to happen. The projection and our outlook for 2022 is positive and we have even presented to our holding company a projection that’s even at the level of pre-pandemic times,” adding that “there are also ways which have allowed us to capture businesses we never thought possible.”
Among these are providing hot boxes or food deliveries and establishing al fresco dining in its hotels’ food and beverage outlets. “This means incremental revenues for us, and all the other things that we’re trying to do including the efforts to vaccinate our people, and the increased number of vaccinated guests definitely will help us,” she said.
Speed up vaccination please
The Megaworld hotel unit also presented its “wish list” to the next administration to help push the recovery of the local tourism industry. These include: “Providing more creative ways to resolve vaccination resistance, fast-tracking the vaccination of minors to create confidence and increase leisure travels for families, and implementing calibrated and cautious transitions to easing travel and other industry restrictions.”
Despite the ongoing pandemic, MHRC soft-opened Kingsford Hotel Manila in Parañaque, “one of our top perfoming hotels in the country now,” said Albiso. Opening in 2023 are three other properties: Belmont Hotel Mactan Newtown in Cebu (550 rooms), Grand West Hotel (1,500 rooms), and Chancellor Hotel in Boracay (500 rooms). With the opening of Chancellor Hotel, Megaworld Newcoast property will have 1,500 rooms along with its Savoy Hotel and Belmont Hotel.
These Newcoast properties, she said, will support the Boracay Newcoast Convention Center, slated to open in 2022. “We’re very bullish,” she stressed.
MHRC has also spearheaded the creation of the Boracay MICE Alliance, to encourage the promotion of the island as also a destination for meetings, incentive tours, conventions, and exhibitions.
According to the Department of Tourism, officers of the alliance include presidents of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry-Boracay, Compliance Association of Boracay, Boracay Water Sports Association, and Boracay Island Travel Agencies Tour Operators Association, as well as representatives of Belmont Hotel, Plato D’Boracay, Malay College, iFiesta, Southwest Tours, and the Hennan Resort Group. Albiso chairs the alliance.
The MHRC executive was also instrumental in the formation of the Iloilo MICE Alliance in 2019, when she was manager of Courtyard by Marriot Iloilo.