US HOTEL multinational Starwood plans to have 100 hotels in Africa by 2020, about triple the 37 it already has.By 2015, Starwood would have opened new hotels in Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Senegal and Mauritius, while looking at opportunities in countries including Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, Kenya and Ghana.Starwood, whose brands include Le Meridien, Westin and Sheraton, operates two hotels in SA — The Sheraton Pretoria and The Westin Cape Town. The group plans to grow to 50 hotels in Africa by 2015, and 100 by 2020.CEO Frits van Paasschen said in Sandton recently that the biggest growth in Starwood’s footprint would come from emerging markets. Developing markets, including Africa, would drive 70 percent or 80 percent of the world’s economic growth over the next decade.Central to Starwood’s growth strategy is the Sheraton brand, which is often used to enter new markets and pave the way for others in the company portfolio.Recently appointed director of acquisitions and development for sub-Saharan Africa Michael Devereux said Starwood had done “a huge amount of groundwork and feasibility work” in S A and the region over the past few months. This would help the group to make an assessment of the industry in the region and decisions on where it wanted to be.Mr van Paasschen said Starwood was also looking at markets such as Russia for expansion opportunities. But the group was not targeting the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA) bloc of countries per se.“Russia in many respects is a similar story to Africa — the export of oil is creating significant pools of capital and significant wealth,” Mr van Paasschen said.“Moscow is the city in the world with the most billionaires, yet there are fewer luxury hotels in Moscow than there are in 10 or 12 blocks of inner-city Manhattan. S o there’s certainly an opportunity to grow.”Starwood was further looking to the mature resource-rich and manufacturing-exports markets. “That classification from our perspective has been a more useful way to think about the world,” Mr van Paasschen said.
