VENUE NEWS

from Business Events Africa — May 2022

Business Events Africa — May 2022

Century City Hotels opens with a lavish event

Century City Hotels recently held a launch party for their newest hotel, Bridgewater Hotel, a purpose- built hotel ideally suited to the modern business traveller.

The new hotel was built in response to the increase in demand for rooms in the Century City precinct to cater to the Century City Conference Centre delegates. This was as a result of the overwhelming success and popularity of its existing hotel, the Urban Square Hotel and additional accommodation in the precinct.

Both Urban Square Hotel and Bridgewater Hotel reached similar occupancies with Urban Square growing revenue by nearly 200 per cent, year-on-year.

The Century City Conference Centre is also showing impressive recovery with 830 per cent year-on-year revenue growth and similar growths forecasted for the next few months and Q2 of 2022’s revenue is forecasted to reach 90 per cent of pre-Covid levels. The new hotel is expected to average 60 per cent occupancy by the end of its first year.

The stylish 80-room Bridgewater Hotel overlooks a tranquil six-hectare parkland of islands and waterways, yet it is just a stroll from the buzz and bustle of Century City’s vibrant Urban Square and a stone’s throw from the ever-popular Canal Walk Shopping Centre. To celebrate the benefits of this unique location, the new hotel has been designed to create a zone of tranquillity in the heart of activity.

Sitting at the intersection of natural beauty and urban energy, Bridgewater Hotel offers guests a wide variety of activities to choose from, all within easy walking distance. These include running, cycling, canoeing, and stand-up paddling on the extensive waterways of Ratanga Park and the Grand Canal.

Hi-tech, low-touch hospitality

With innovation and convenience at the core of its offering, Bridgewater is equipped with the latest trends in hospitality technology. From the option of a frictionless digital check-in and the thoughtful provision of power points throughout the public areas, to the ease and speed of the free hotel-wide Wi-Fi. All the rooms have intelligent TVs, conveniently loaded with popular streaming apps Netflix and YouTube.

Glyn Taylor, joint chief executive officer of Century City Conference Centre and Hotel, said the decision to build the Bridgewater Hotel in 2019 was informed by an intensifying accommodation shortage that came about because of the success of the Century City Conference Centre.

The Urban Square Hotel – formerly known as the Century City Hotel, which was built seven years ago with the capacity of 125 rooms – along with other hotels in the precinct could not service the accommodation demands of the area.

“People would book our conference facilities for 500 to 700 people, but we didn’t have enough accommodation in the area.”

Businesses in the hospitality industry were all hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and consequent lockdown regulations, as restrictions saw restaurants, hotels and the greater tourism sector closing their doors, resulting in huge revenue losses.

In the past two years, employers and employees have had to acclimatise to not only working remotely but to hosting functions and conferences on virtual platforms such as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet.

However, with the world opening, it appears the pandemic has not been all doom and gloom for the city: it seems the Covid-19 bubble phenomenon has assisted the company’s recovery.

Mr Taylor said: “Our next challenge is skill brain drain, people have left the industry, and some have left the country to find new opportunities. We need to find a way to upskill people very quickly.” He added, “We are currently looking at launching a hotel school or a training programme that may overcome this challenge.”

International travel bans restricting air travel to South Africa also negatively impacted the business.

Mr Taylor said that North America is one of the Western Cape’s biggest emerging markets.

US airline Delta Air Lines earlier this year announced its plans to operate direct flights between Atlanta and Cape Town, but these efforts seem to have been met with a sluggish response from the country’s transport ministry.

In March, the Western Cape launched an inter-governmental dispute with the Department of Transport.

Speaking at the hotel launch, Western Cape Premier, Alan Winde reiterated the Western Cape government’s commitment to take the department to task for its lack of action on the matter.

“We will keep pushing that market and keep working with you [Delta Air Lines] on our airlift strategy between the city and the province, a great partnership, where we have actually focused on the last two years on growing direct flights to this region,” Premier Winde said.

“We know that that is the lifeblood of tourism, of conferencing, of foreign direct investment, of attracting people to this region because they want connectivity to this world. We will continue pushing as hard as we can.”