Hotel investments urged as room shortage looms

CEBU, Philippines — Real estate developers and capitalists are urged to pour investments into hotel projects in Cebu to take advantage of the opportunities in tourism.

Research and consultancy firm Colliers International Philippines, in its extensive study, found out that Cebu is on the brink of an accommodation shortage if capitalists were not to act in building more hotel rooms.

According to the study, developing more leisure estates is a practical route for local and national developers trying to capture Cebu’s booming tourism sector.

Specifically, Colliers sees Mactan and Mandaue benefiting from this strategy.

It is calling on developers with massive land bank in Mactan and Mandaue areas to pursue resort-oriented projects.

National developers, on the other hand with vast experience in developing integrated communities but lack substantial land to develop should firm up partnerships with local developers to strategically expand their land bank.

Metro Cebu (covering the cities of Cebu, Lapu-Lapu, and Mandaue) offers an estimated 10,600 hotel rooms.

Cebu City accounts for more than half of the stock with almost 6,000 rooms, about two-thirds of which are three- star hotels.

Some 1,160 rooms are classified as four-star while only two hotels – Marco Polo and Radisson Blu – are classified as five-star.

Resort projects in Mactan account for a third of Metro Cebu’s hotel room stock. Among the five-star resorts in Mactan are Movenpick Resort, Plantation Bay, and Shangri-La Mactan.

Mandaue lags behind Cebu City and Mactan in terms of hotel room supply. The city only has seven three-star hotels offering close to 1,200 rooms.

Colliers sees the completion of an estimated 4,000 rooms over the next four years. This should raise Metro Cebu’s hotel room supply by 36 percent by the end of 2021.

“We expect half of the new hotel rooms to be developed within resort-oriented estates,” the study emphasized.

Metro Cebu’s outsourcing and industrial sectors sustain hotel occupancy across the island-province.

This should be complemented by Cebu’s thriving medical tourism and staycation markets, Colliers suggested. (FREEMAN)