InterContinental Hotels Group Opens its Tenth Holiday Inn in India

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has opened Holiday Inn Chandigarh Panchkula, its first hotel in Chandigarh and tenth Holiday Inn hotel in India. Located on Kalka Shimla Highway, the hotel offers 127 rooms, two restaurants, a lounge cum bar, eight meeting rooms and event spaces with a capacity to host up to 500 people, a fitness centre, a spa, and a swimming pool. The hotel has easy access to both tourist attractions such as Sukhna Lake, Rock Garden, Cactus Garden, and Sector 17 market area, as well as business districts and IT Parks of Mohali, Baddi and Zirakpur.

Visa-free Entry to Indonesia is Now a Reality

President Joko Widodo has followed through with his plan to relax visa regulations for foreign visitors to Indonesia. According to the Indonesia Cabinet Secretariat website, the visa-free travel regulation came into effect as of 9 June 2015. China, Japan and South Korea are amongst the 30 new countries whose citizens may now travel visa-free to Indonesia through ten immigration check points including Soekarno Hatta (Jakarta), Ngurah Rai (Bali) and Kuala Namu (Medan), Juanda (Surabaya), Hang Nadim (Batam) and several seaports in Bintan and Batam. Despite being Indonesia’s third largest feeder market, Australia, which brought close to one million arrivals to the country in 2013, is not included in the list. In 2014, Indonesia received approximately 8.52 million foreign visitors between January and November, a 7.29% growth over the same period in 2013; of these, approximately 3.4 million arrivals visited Bali, specifically. The new regulation, which permits visitors to stay up to 30 days without the option of extensions, will no doubt continue to fuel visitor arrivals to Indonesian destinations.

The Mekong Tourism Investment Summit Successfully Concludes

As a sideline event of the Mekong Tourism Forum, the Mekong Tourism Investment Summit was held in Da Nang, Vietnam on 17 June 2015 at Hotel Novotel Danang Premier Han River, with a collaboration between HVS and two other leading consulting groups in the region. Bringing together delegates from various sectors including hotel owners, developers, operators, investors and tourism stakeholders, the investment summit kicked-off with an overview of tourism performance across the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and China’s Yunnan and Guangxi provinces. The key success factors for developing cultural routes between the six countries were discussed. The investment summit continued with interactive panel discussions to facilitate the growing sector of niche hotels such as riverboats, tented camps and private island hideaways, as well as discussing opportunities and challenges across the GMS region. The investment summit successfully lined up industry experts and thought leaders providing knowledge and insight to market the GMS as a single tourist destination in the future.

Absolute Share Price Performance, as at 18 Jun 2015