Injap Sia’s Hotel101 targets US, Spain for expansion

MANILA  – Tycoon Edgar “Injap” Sia II is opening his first Hotel101 in California, United States within three years under an ambitious global expansion push that would see the homegrown condotel chain reach more than 100 countries by 2040.

Hotel101, the hotel brand of Philippine-listed DoubleDragon Corp., is eyeing the US as its third international location, Sia said in a text message on Tuesday.

Its Niseko, Japan branch is currently underway and Sia told Bloomberg News their second location would be Madrid, Spain.

“These first three overseas sites have good connections to the Filipino community, who are familiar with DoubleDragon and Hotel101,” Sia said.

Sia founded the successful Mang Inasal barbecue chicken restaurant chain before selling the venture to fast food billionaire Tony Tan Caktiong’s Jollibee Foods Corp. over a decade ago. The two later joined forces to establish DoubleDragon to take on the country’s real estate giants.

On Tuesday, Sia described their early locations as “bridge projects” to jumpstart their global expansion, which will involve bringing the hotel brand to 25 countries under subsidiary Hotel101 Global Pte. Ltd. by 2026.

The company will also expand to the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Mexico, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy, Germany, France and China, he said.

Hotel101 develops condotels, whose rooms are sold to individual investors and are managed by the company.

The business, which offers more affordable room rates, differentiates itself from competitors by offering uniform-sized rooms across all of its locations.

This was a core strategy for the group as it seeks to achieve efficiency and scale while expanding globally, Sia explained.

“Hotel101 is like the Toyota Innova of the global hotel industry that delivers real unbeatable value and above average satisfaction to consumers, and at the same time delivers the scale volume with durable, simple design, versatile, easy and highly efficient to build, maintain and operate,” he said, referring to the Japanese car maker’s best-selling family car.

Sia said their long-term goal was to turn Hotel101 into a “top 5” international hotel brand with over 500,000 hotel rooms in 101 countries by 2040.

Beyond this, he hopes to establish a standard for hotel rooms that was lacking in the global mid-market hotel industry.

He said this would benefit hotel guests since more efficient operations could be passed on to consumers in terms of better room value.

Last December, DoubleDragon said it would raise around $125 million from venture capital investors to help bankroll their international expansion.

Sia also told the Inquirer last year that plan to list Hotel101 Global overseas via an initial public offering.

“We believe that our team is now ready to take on the expansion of Hotel101 in the first 25 countries globally in the next three years to 2026 given the substantial first-hand experience of our team gained from building a start up business multiple times in the Philippines and going thru the process of polishing the idea, prototyping the model, then execution,” Sia said.

“Our team is determined to use our valuable first-hand learnings these past years to plant Hotel101 Global seeds to the rest of the world,” he said.

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