Oakwood Premier considers setting up facilities in Visayas

WITH the tourism industry in the country continuing to soar, an executive of a Manila-based serviced apartment and hotel brand, said her company is planning to expand their facilities in strategic areas in the country.

The company is considering setting up two to three more facilities in strategic areas in the country, said Anna D. Fernandez, Oakwood Premier Joy-Nostalg Center Manila director of sales and marketing, during an interview last week.

“Being a brand that offers serviced-apartment products, we are seeing many opportunities in the Asia Pacific region and that includes the Philippines,” said Fernandez.

She said the company sees a market in the Visayas area for their hotel especially with the robust economic growth in the different provinces in the region spurring different economic activities like in Cebu.

She, however, said that the firm hadn’t come up with a final decision on where to expand yet.

“For now, we are trying to promote our facility for leisure and business travelers especially those who wants to visit Manila over the weekend,” she said.

Her visit here was to promote the hotel in Cebu to get a chunk of the large market, which includes leisure and business travelers.

They’re also targeting the executives working in the outsourcing companies here, which have offices in Manila.

“We realized that most of our BPO clients in Manila also have offices here so we thought of also tapping that market. There is also a huge number of leisure travellers from Cebu that we can cater to in our facility,” said Fernandez.

Traditionally, Oakwood caters to long-staying guests but over time more customers from the leisure, and short stay segment, contributes 65 percent of the hotel’s client base.

“That’s a good trend which we are also very happy to cater to. We plan to do more marketing using the social media to reach more of these markets and see what we can offer them,” said general manager Rick Erdos.

Oakwood Premier Joy-Nostalg Center Manila is under Oakwood Premier, a high-end product category offered by Oakwood Asia Pacific, which is a division of US-based Oakwood Worldwide.

Other Oakwood Premier facilities are also located in key destinations in the region including Bangkok in Thailand, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Beijing and Guangzhou in China./Reporter Aileen Garcia-Yap