Middle class changing face of tourism

These issues were addressed at the “No Vacancy Southeast Asia” conference held yesterday in Bangkok. The event featured speakers from Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States and Australia. It focused on the Web, distribution, innovation, revenue management, sales, digital marketing and technology.

Mark Flower, commercial director for Southeast Asia at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), said the company had experienced increasing demand from middle-class travellers for many years. Therefore the group keeps expanding those products that fit such demand, such as the opening of its first Holiday Inn Express in Bangkok early this year, the first such property in Southeast Asia.

The company plans three more properties under this brand, in Bangkok on Sukhumvit Soi 11, in Pattaya and in Phuket, Flower said. Under the group’s expansion plan, Holiday Inn Express will be established in 12 more locations in the next two years.

He said this strategy would help the group cash in on the rise of new markets such as India, China and South Korea, and particularly in top tourist destinations in Thailand (Bangkok and Pattaya).

“This has become a huge opportunity for the mid-scale hotel business.” 

Bill Black, president for strategic initiatives at SilverNeedle Hospitality, a fully integrated hotel-management company, said that recognising this trend in middle-class customer demand, the company had focused on providing better services at reasonable prices to penetrate the mass tourism market.

Black added that nowadays tourists’ behaviour was more global and more sophisticated. 

Bill Barnett, managing director of C9 Hotelworks, a leading Phuket-based hospitality consulting firm for the Asia-Pacific region, agreed. He said the domestic market was a key alternative during the economic slowdown in Western countries. 

Sonia Kapoor, a director at the Nielsen media-research firm, said the Asian online landscape was moving rapidly, particularly in social media, while penetration of smart devices, including smart phones, tablets and personal computers, had increased.

Kapoor said travel operators should take advantage of the changes in the digital landscape, as members of the middle class were shifting their habits, and would become the mainstream in the travel business in the near future.