Resorting to Absolute confusion in Phuket
It can be hard keeping up with who’s who in the hotel world these days. Take for example the recent (August 19) announcement that “Absolute Hotel Services has signed a U Hotels & Resorts management contract with Sudjid Surijamorn, owner and director of At Nai Harn Resort Co. Ltd.”
Untangle the sentence and do some research and you discover that U Hotels is a brand name owned by Absolute. That’s Absolute, as in Bryan Lunt’s Absolute Bangla Suites in Patong, right? Nope. Nothing to do with him. This Absolute is based in Bangkok.
Let’s separate the two. In the blue corner, Lunt’s Absolute Resort Management, or ARM for short. ARM lists on its website eight resorts under management in Phuket, two on Koh Samui and two more in Pattaya.
In the red corner, the other Absolute, from Bangkok, Absolute Hotel Services, or AHS. We’ll go into detail in a moment.
The plot thickens. AHS’s hotel management brand is U which, as we already know, will be affixed to the new Nai Harn resort, due to open in 2011.
Bryan Lunt.
Now get this: ARM has a deal, announced a year ago, with famed design house Yoo (headed by über-designer Philippe Starck) to cooperate on a 256-apartment development on Phuket, scheduled to open next year. When it’s complete – supposedly next year – it will be managed by ARM.
Now AHS and U are moving into ARM’s home territory. Observer hears that ARM, with their “Absolute-Yoo” – and despite their public pronouncement on the topic (below) were none too happy with AHS and their “Absolute-U”.
A company source said They Had Talked With Their Lawyers.
However, the official response from Lunt was: “Although the name of the top-end residential partnership Absolute Resorts & Hotels/Yoo and the company Absolute Hotel Services/U could pose some confusion, we have no real cause for concern”
He added (take a deep breath), “In Thailand, our resorts services extend much further than just our hotel management division. The Absolute World Group has been an established market leader since 1998 and is made up of six brands offering a seamless range of services in the vacation industry, encompassing select resorts and hotels, luxury boutique real estate, a vacation club with thousands of members, a booming fractional ownership and resale division and a leading lifestyle magazine. Absolute operates 27 offices globally and employs 1,300 staff.” There was quite a bit more, but we reckon you get the idea.
AHS were unfazed and equally voluble. The company’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Wigley, told the Observer, “Many companies have the same word in their name so really it is not very unusual.”
He went on, “[ARM] were not active in the market when we opened our company [and] our type of operations is very different.”
AHS was launched in the public eye just over two years ago, on June 26, 2008. It’s backed by multi-billion-baht Thai property developer Tanayong and headed by Wigley, who’s worked for the Minor Group, Marriott, Hilton, Omni, Delta and, most recently, boutique hotel management company Invision.
(Another Phuket connection; Invision was founded and is run by ex-JW Marriott Phuket GM Kevin Beauvais. Invision is another competitor in this increasingly crowded boutique hotel/resort management business; it runs the Glow Trinity Silom hotel in Bangkok and Villa Maroc in Pranburi, and, closer to Phuket. Zeavola Resorts Phi Phi.
It has also signed a deal to run the 123-room B-Lay Tong in Patong [due to open in December], and another to manage the villas at The Residence Phuket, in Bang Tao, under its Lantern brand.)
Jonathan Wigley
Wigley didn’t stay long with Invision – some 18 months – and when he left, two other Invision people went with him: John Westoby, who used to be Invision’s technical boss and is now AHS’s Chief Operating Officer, and Nopparat Pongwatanakulsiri, formerly Invision’s MarCom boss, now VP of Marketing at AHS.
The company’s website shows it has offices (or at least PO boxes) in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Australia. The impressive-looking U portfolio, as listed on the U website, includes a total of 14 properties in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India.
So far, however, only the 41-room U Chiang Mai is actually open. The U Inchantree in Kanchanaburi will open in November and is already taking bookings at very reasonable rates (between B2,000 and 3,000 a night). The other 12 are scheduled to open next year or in 2012.
The Phuket deal is so new that the U at Nai Harn is not yet listed in the website, but expect it to be up there soon.
Wigley doesn’t think there will be much confusion over the names. “Absolute Hotel Services is our company name, which is never used in a consumer environment; we are known to the consumer through our brands and hotel names.”
So no confusion? Well, only a little. “Whenever we have been contacted by mistake by someone looking for Absolute Resorts Management we just explain, then all [is] clear.”
As to the U-Yoo question, he responded, “The brand names U Hotels & Resorts and Yoo are clearly very different so we do not anticipate any issues in Phuket or anywhere else.”
So what it comes down to is that everything is cool and everyone’s happy.
Meanwhile, friends will be asking one another, “So you are staying at Yoo, are you?” ”Oh no. I’m staying at U. How about you?” Confusion? Absolutely not…
