BANGKOK – The Thai hotel industry is expected to grow by around 10,000 new rooms in 2024, according to Jasper Palmqvist, senior director for Asia Pacific at STR Global, a global provider of data, analytics, and marketing for the hospitality industry.
Most of the new rooms will be in the upper midscale category, followed by the luxury category. Nevertheless, the overall situation will remain challenging this year given rising inflation, higher costs and companies’ cost control.
“In recent months, we have seen midscale hotel room rates return to pre-COVID-19 levels, which took longer than for upper-scale hotels,” Palmqvist said to Prachachat Business.
STR Global said the overall Thai tourism industry is expected to be positive this year, and it is starting to see a more diversified tourist market that is not too dependent on any one market.
It expects the average daily rate (ADR) of hotels in Bangkok to be 18 percent higher than in 2019 and overall occupancy to be only 4 percent lower than in 2019. However, hotels in some areas are recovering to varying degrees. Hotels in Chiang Mai, which used to host a large number of Chinese tourists, only saw a price increase of 5 percent compared to other areas, which can be as high as 20 percent.
Bill Barnett, managing director of C9 Hotelworks Company, said that 2024 will be another year of recovery for the Thai tourism industry. The overall picture is positive. More large-scale real estate projects are being built, market sentiment is returning, financial institutions are lending more and investors see tourism as a good investment again.
There are around 12,000 hotel rooms under construction in Phuket province alone. More than half of these, around 6,000 rooms, are projects that were revived after being halted during the COVID-19 pandemic. These projects are expected to be completed in around 2-3 years.
“Since the second half of 2023, we are starting to see signs that hotel owners are looking to branded hotels to upgrade their properties to make them more premium and open up opportunities for increased revenue and competition,” said Barnett. “Meanwhile, banks have also started to lend more to operators.”
Wallapa Traisorat, chief executive officer and managing director of Asset World Corporation (AWC), said AWC plans to invest more than 10 billion baht this year to open four hotels with a total of about 1,000 rooms.
The hotels include: Two hotels in Pattaya (Chonburi): Marriott Resort Pattaya and one IHG hotel, one hotel in Hua Hin (Prachuap Khiri Khan): Kimpton Hua Hin, one hotel in Bangkok: Fairmont Bangkok Sukhumvit (a rebranding of Grand Mercure Bangkok Windsor).
AWC also has a number of major projects in the pipeline, including the Aquatique Pattaya mixed-use project, for which agreements have been signed with the JW Marriott and Marriott Marquis brands, as well as a plan to invest more than 30 billion baht in Chiang Mai over the next five years, which is expected to represent a total investment value of more than 13 billion baht.
Suwanna Buddhaprasart, managing director of LH Mall & Hotel Co, Ltd (LHMH), the operator of the Grand Center Hotel Group, said there are currently seven Grand Center Point hotels in operation. The latest is Grand Center Point Surawong Bangkok, a 5-star luxury hotel with 399 rooms in the heart of the Surawong district. The hotel only opened at the end of 2023 with a total investment of over 2 billion baht.
The Dusit Thani Bangkok Group will open its largest project of 2024, a 6-star hotel with 257 rooms. It is part of the Dusit Central Park mixed-use project with a total value of over 46 billion baht. The hotel is scheduled to open in June.
The newest hotel of the Dusit Thani Group is the Dusit Princess Patthalung, a 4-star hotel with 132 rooms. It is the 15th hotel of the Dusit brand in Thailand and the first “Dusit Princess” hotel to open in the south.
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