May 4 – Millennium and Copthorne Middle East Holdings will open six new hotels this year out of which three will be in the UAE and the rest will be in Oman, Makkah and Aden, said Ali Hamad Lakhraim, President and Chief Executive of the company. This is despite the fact that occupancy rates in the hotels of his group went down to 70 per cent in Abu Dhabi and 65 per cent in the rest of UAE.
“The feature of the coming period of the year will be stability at current occupancy rates or maybe less,” he said at a press conference in Abu Dhabi.
The first of the three hotels to open in the UAE is the Grand Millennium Al Wahda, which has 850 rooms and hotel apartments and a big business centre and will be opened in July. The second is a block of 198 hotel apartments in Electra Street in central Abu Dhabi. The third, with 412 luxury rooms, will open on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai.
Meanwhile, the group has plans to manage and operate some 50 hotels till 2013. Currently, it is running eight hotels in the UAE which is expected to go up to 15 hotels in the next two years, said Lakhraim. The group has contracts to manage and operate 25 hotels in the Middle East, mainly in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Libya.
