Dusit International, a Bangkok-based Thai Hotel and property development company, has announced plans to open a serviced hotel apartment in Westlands Nairobi.
Dubbed ‘Dusit Princes Hotel Residences’, along Mimosa Lane off Church Road will consist of a hybrid of 56 one-bedroom and 30 studio apartments and 14 deluxe hotel rooms.
Other properties’ facilities will include; an Italian-inspired restaurant dubbed ‘The Olive Restaurant’, a rooftop bar dubbed ‘The Aviary Lounge’, a heated swimming pool, a rooftop gym, and a 150-guest capacity theatre-styled meeting room.
The opening of ‘Dusit Princes Hotel Residences’ comes after the closure of ‘DusitD2 Nairobi‘ in 2021, a luxury hotel branch of Dusit International located at 14 Riverside Complex in Westlands.
The hotel’s closure, which opened in 2014, was occasioned by a terror attack on the 14 Riverside Complex in January 2019 and a prevailing COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, significantly hampering its business operations the hospitality sector.
According to Cytonn Investments, the decision by Dusit is part of an aggressive expansion move by the international hotel chain with plans to open 14 new hotels in the next three to four years, with a total estimation of 1,700 new rooms across seven countries worldwide.
Westlands continues to attract more international hospitality brands in Kenya, evidenced by the latest entry of Kwetu Residences by Hilton Hotel in February 2023 and JW Marriot in Global Trade Centre (GTC), which will be opened in 2023.
According to Cytonn’s Nairobi Metropolitan Area (NMA) Serviced Apartments Report 2022, Westlands still holds the largest market share of serviced apartments in the NMA region.
Kenya Hospitality Sector
Kenya’s hospitality sector continues to showcase positive growth in its performance, development, and expansion activities.
The increased international tourist arrivals have mainly boosted this into the country, conferences, leisure, and sports activities following the continuous reopening of the country in the post-COVID period, with the sector’s performance gearing towards pre-COVID levels.
According to Kenya Tourism Research Institute’s Annual Tourism Sector Performance Report – 2022, Kenya registered a 70.5% increase in international arrivals to 1,483,752 persons in 2022 compared to 870,465 persons in 2021.
The performance in 2022 represented a 72.4% recovery level compared to pre-COVID-19 levels of 2,048,834 persons in 2019, 7.4% points higher than the average global recovery rate compared to the same period. The graph below shows the number of international arrivals from 2017 to 2022.
Additionally, the number of international and domestic bed occupancies grew by 38.4% to 5,726,609 beds from January to September 2022 from 4,138,821 beds in the same period in 2021.
This represented an 89.2% recovery rate against 2019 which recorded 6,416,730 occupied beds. On the other hand, rooms occupancy increased by 19.5% to 3,687,365 in 2022 from January to September from 3,084,957 in the same period in 2021, achieving a recovery rate of 89.9% against 2019 pre-COVID levels, which recorded 4,101,150 rooms occupied.
Source: Cytonn Investments