Hospitality News

The Panorama hotel unit in Chania recently became the latest member of the Cyprus-based Leptos Hotels & Resorts group. The 167-room first-class unit immediately underwent an extensive refurbishing program.

Plans for an extensive renovation of the Porto Carras complex in Halkidiki, northern Greece, will proceed despite an outstanding legal decision concerning management of the unit’s casino. One of the new owners of the complex, Greek construction company Techniki Olympiaki, recently announced their business plan, which it hopes to be completed by March 2002.

The Cypriot-based Louis Group is securing a firm foothold in Greece through buyouts of existing hotels and the construction of new units. Its most recent purchase was the Louis Imperial Beach on Zakynthos, which lies next to the group’s Palazzo di Zante and Royal Palace, just 17 kilometers from the airport and 15 kilometers from the island’s capital.

Greece’s National Bank, owner of the Astir Hotel Company, has placed the three-hotel group on the Athens Stock Exchange. The initial public offering last month places 14.7 billion drachmas within the group’s coffers. This cash will be used mostly to initiate a five-year 14-billion-drachma investment program.

Up-market Greek hotels for business travelers are on the average the fourth most expensive in the world. And it looks like prices are going even higher. According to a study by BTI UK Hogg Robinson, which was published by the Hellenic Travel and Tourism Agents’ Association, last year Greek hotels moved from being the seventh most expensive in the world to the fourth most expensive for business travelers.

One of the biggest and best-known first-class resort complex in Greece, the 472-room Colossos Beach of Rodos, is now in the hands of Louis Hotels. Furthermore, with its purchase of 68.3% of Colossos, Louis gets 25,000 square meters of beach property.

The biggest conference venue within the City of Athens, the ballroom at the Athenaeum InterContinental hotel, is undergoing extensive renovations worth 950 million drachmas.

Athens hoteliers have agreed to set aside 80 percent of the capital’s beds to accommodate the Olympic family during the 2004 Games. At a meeting last month with Development Minister Nikos Christodoulakis and Athens 2004 Organizing Committee Chairwoman Yianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, the president of the Athens Hoteliers’ Association, Spiros Divanis, said hoteliers would sign a contract to that effect before the end of July.

The Hyatt group of Thessaloniki, which has acquired a majority of shares in the Grande Bretagne hotel, and the Latsis-owned Eurobank are said to be close to finalizing an agreement to merge the classic Athens-center hotel and the defunct King George Hotel that sits empty next to it.

Upon completion of its extensive and even radical renovations, at a cost of some five billion drachmas, the Athens Chandris Hotel assumes a new identity. The deluxe cosmopolitan unit heretofore becomes the Metropolitan Hotel. “We at Chandris Hotels and Resorts thought it only fitting that, in reflection of our efforts, a new name be found to match our new image,” says the hotel’s sales manager, Spyros Maganiotis.