Plans to operate 50 more hotels in Africa within the next five years have been tabled by the Minor Hotel Group.
The multi-billion rand plan will treble the group’s current footprint with high-end hotels planned for Cape Town and Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos and Abuja (Nigeria) and Ndola (Zambia) among others.
“At the moment we have 25 hotels in Africa and we want to grow by 50, adding 10 a year for the next five years,” said Sir Richard Hawkins, the Minor Hotel Group’s Regional Operations Director for Africa.
The group plans to negotiate management deals with hotels of about 150 bedrooms, with the possibility of taking equity in them later.
Minor is keen to establish a presence in South Africa through business hotels in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and leisure hotels along the Western Cape as well as in Cape Town.
This will build on the deal Minor struck with Sun International in 2014, when it opened an office in Johannesburg after buying a stake in eight Sun International properties. The group took over the hotels’ attached to Sun International casinos in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Zambia, and rebranded them as Anantara and AVANI properties, two of the six brands owned by the company.