Tycoon Edgar Sia II is opening his first Hotel 101 in California, United States, within three years under an ambitious global expansion push for the homegrown "condotel" chain to reach more than 100 countries by 2040.
Hotel 101, the hotel brand of Philippine-listed DoubleDragon Corp., is eyeing the United States as its third international location, Sia said in a text message on Tuesday.
Construction of its Niseko, Japan branch is currently underway and Sia told Bloomberg News the second offshore location would be in Madrid, Spain.
"These first three overseas sites have good connections to the Filipino community, who are familiar with DoubleDragon and Hotel 101," 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 global expansion, which will involve bringing the hotel brand to 25 countries under subsidiary Hotel 101 Global Pte. Ltd. by 2026.
The company will also expand to the United Kingdom, the 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.
Hotel 101 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 locations. This was the core strategy to achieve efficiency and scale while expanding globally, Sia explained.
"Hotel 101 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 Hotel 101 into one of the world's top five hotel brands with over 500,000 hotel rooms in 101 countries by 2040.
Beyond this, he hopes to establish a standard for hotel rooms that he deems to be 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 international expansion.
Sia also told the Inquirer last year about plans to list Hotel 101 Global overseas via an initial public offering.
"We believe that our team is now ready to take on the expansion of Hotel 101 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 startup business multiple times in the Philippines and going through 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 Hotel 101 Global seeds to the rest of the world," he said. INQ