Help unsqueeze Myanmar’s packed hotels

I made a business trip to Myanmar with two female colleagues a few months ago. Knowing most of us were visiting the country for the first time, our partners, a Chinese company in Myanmar, kindly arranged a sightseeing tour including a two-day stay in Mandalay, the second-largest city in the country.

You cannot imagine how scarce the hotel accommodation there was. Since it was an unscheduled trip, virtually every ordinary room in the city's four- or five-star hotels was already booked by the time we started looking.

Finally, our partners managed to secure a deluxe suite in a local five-star hotel through business connections, which four of us, including one middle-aged man from the local firm to guide us, were crammed into.

With three girls sharing two beds in the bedroom and a married man in an extra bed in the small sitting room, we spent a cautious night, tiptoeing to the only bathroom while keeping an eye out for hotel staff who might chastise us.

I recalled this embarrassing experience when reading various reports on the Myanmar tourism boom recently. Tourism in Myanmar has been on a roller-coaster ride since the reformist government embarked on its democratic transition.

Earlier this month, the Myanmar government launched a tourism master plan with hopes of making it a pillar of the economy. The plan, which hopes to lure 7.5 million tourist arrivals by 2020, outlines 38 development projects ranging from infrastructure improvements, tourism education and training programs to streamlining licensing formalities for hotels and other tourism-related business.

Many have warned that the short supply of hotels could be a big constraint if not properly addressed. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the UN was being forced out of the Traders Hotel in Yangon next month after housing various offices in five floors of the hotel since 2007.

This is the result of marketization. Soaring demand has driven up prices in the big cities, as tourists arrive from all over the world. Some Chinese companies' branches in Myanmar also contracted with top hotels in Myanmar to rent floors of rooms for office use and I was impressed by lines of famous branded cars of the companies parked in front of the hotels.

In the era when Myanmar faced global isolation and economic sanctions, that helped minimize the vacancy rate of hotels and wouldn't be a target of criticism. However, it's a different picture when hotel rooms are in a tight supply.

There are around 25,000 rooms reportedly available in 731 hotels around Myanmar, which is not enough to meet the rising demand. Htay Aung, tourism and hotels minister, told local media last week that the number of visitors coming to Myanmar grew by about 30 percent in 2012 to 1.06 million. The minister forecast that foreign tourism arrivals would reach 1.8 million by the end of this year.

The price of hotel rooms in Myanmar now is much higher than other hotels in the same chains elsewhere. Take Traders, where the prices of the hotel rooms started at $235, almost twice the rate for the Traders in Hong Kong and higher than that of the hotel in Singapore, priced at $197.

Many hotel tycoons have a vision for the promising Myanmar market, with some having expanded projects in Myanmar. But according to some analysts, the shortage in room supply will continue in the next five years, which means an extra cost for traveling in Myanmar than other Southeast Asian countries.

Under such conditions, is it wise for those Chinese companies based in top hotels in Myanmar to follow the UN and voluntarily move out of those expensive rooms?

Chinese projects in Myanmar in recent years have aroused many controversies. Some hyped up surging anti-Chinese feelings in Myanmar. Though I didn't sense such sentiments while traveling in the country, some people I talked to did see Chinese working in Myanmar as "living in expensive hotels and driving famous vehicles."

As ambitious as the government is to create a tourism boom, Myanmar still has a long way to go. It's on the right track to make use of its rich cultural heritage to develop tourism, and it will create more conditions for attracting foreign investment, such as enhancing infrastructure and facilitating office renting.

Let's hope Chinese firms will adapt appropriately and avoid leaving avenues for attack.

source: Global Times

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/796328.shtml#.UeTOglJX3EY