6,000 rooms to open in Russia and CIS

This is 1,315 rooms less than the amount forecasted early this year. According to JLL, the speed of hotel openings in the region has been slowing gradually. For instance, slightly over 4,000 new rooms opened in Russia and 2,800 rooms in the CIS and Georgia in 2015, which surpasses the target for 2016 openings by 8 pct and 19 pct respectively. “The 2014 result was considerably higher due to the massive hotel construction that took place in preparation for the Olympic Games in Sochi – about 6,000 rooms, which gave a huge boost of over 10,000 rooms to the total branded supply in Russia. The current situation could be the delayed effect of investors being cautious because of the economic stagnation. The average timing of midscale hotel project delivery – and midscale makes up the bulk of the potential new rooms inventory today – is 2–3 years, so today we are seeing the consequences of developers’ conservatism in approaching hotel projects in late 2013 and 2014,” commented Tatiana Veller, the head of JLL hotels and hospitality group in Russia and the CIS.

In the first half of the year, around 2,000 rooms were completed. Almost 1,500 of these were opened in Russian cities, mainly Moscow, St Petersburg and Yerevan. In Moscow (including the Moscow Region) three new properties appeared, and in each of the other two cities two branded hotels were opened. Holiday Inn Moscow Seligerskaya recently opened in the Russian capital (the former Iris Congress Hotel, 201 rooms) and Ibis Stupino (125 rooms), as well as Radisson Residences at Zavidovo (200 units); while St. Petersburg saw the opening of the Hampton by Hilton Expoforum (207 rooms) and Best Western Plus Centre Hotel (107 rooms); and in Yerevan the openings included the Double Tree by Hilton (176 rooms) and the Radisson Blu (142 rooms). In addition, new hotels have been opened in Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnodar, Tyumen and Minsk. For the second half of 2016 in Russia, the CIS and Georgia the opening of around 4,000 new rooms in total has been announced, out of which app. 2,300 are in Russia.