Tune Hotels challenges new frontiers

Tune Hotels is pushing into new territory with a new brand look, an upcoming F&B brand of its own and 70 hotels in the pipeline until 2015. 

Speaking to TTG Asia, Tune Hotels CEO Mark Lankester said the rebranding was a version 2.0 of the budget brand.

Currently, three properties in the chain bear the new look, including a revamped logo and colour palette, a lobby with more congregation space and a booking website that has been simplified.
Lankester also revealed during a session at Travel Distribution World Asia that Tune Hotels was cooking up its own brand of F&B establishments to be housed exclusively within its hotels. All F&B within the hotels are currently outsourced.

“We are still in early stages. We’re having people tasting the food and getting feedback from guests, as it’s all new space for us,” he said. “We’re trying to make it, dare I say it, as generic as possible for the market and testing the food in markets to see what is relevant.”

He added that it had not been finalised as to whether the new brand would take shape as a grab-and-go corner or restaurant for families, which may be dependent on the needs of each market. The brand would likely be launched sometime in 2013.

Tune is also on a development spree, with 70 new upcoming properties versus its 27 operational hotels. Ahmedabad, India will receive its first Tune Hotels on March 28 this year, while Tune hotels will open in Melbourne and Sydney in November 2013 and end-2014 respectively. Tune will debut in Japan between end-2013 to early 2014. 

Further openings within South-east Asia and the Middle East are also on the cards. 

“But it’s really Africa that I’m excited about,” remarked Lankester. “It’s the fantastic growth. Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP growth is outpacing everybody – except maybe China – at five to six per cent.”

With a focus on West Africa, including Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, he said Tune would be opening its doors there in 2014 to tap domestic demand.

Driven principally by domestic business travel from the oil and gas industries, Lankester said a burgeoning local middle class was part of the target audience. “In Lagos for instance, if you were to attend a relative’s wedding, the infrastructure is so poor that you may not be able to return. 

You have to spend the night there, and a five-star hotel in Lagos costs US$500 a night,” he explained. 

“Supply is poor, demand is soaring. We’re serving the underserved.”

He said he was looking at between 30-40 hotels to be set up in Africa within the next three to four years. 

When asked why Tune was not focusing eastward in a time when China was booming, Lankester said: “We want to tread carefully. There are already six to seven major budget chains that are huge in China who will definitely defend their share of the market. It’s easy to make mistakes, but we are getting there in small steps.”

He said a hotel in China would come up in either 2013 or 2014.

“(China) is a country that we need to be in, even if it’s just in four to five major cities.”

-TTG Asia.

www.tunehotels.com