Grupo Hotusa’s 2015 sales of more than €955 million (US$1.07 billion) set a record for the Barcelona-based company, which includes a hotel consortium along with tourism and hotel arms.
“Our priority objective is to increase the Eurostars Hotels portfolio, which has 90 hotels,” CEO Amancio López Seijas said. “We have decided to embark on a new line of growth based on hotel franchise.” Through early fall of this year the company had added 25 hotels in Europe, Central and South America – it created a foothold in Bogota with a hotel scheduled to open in a few months. It also opened its first hotel in Africa, the Eurostars Sidi Maarouf in Casablanca, Morocco. And it has designs on the U.S. market, where it has two New York hotels, and in China and Japan.
The company’s Hotusa Ventures, Hotusa Venture Builder and Hotusa Travel Lab are looking for new business models that can work in parallel to the hotel company and consortium, Lopez said. “We believe it is worth investing in startups that provide those projects with financial resources and strategic capabilities, whether they are detected by our team of experts or driven from our own business incubator.”
As for the ripples in the region in the aftermath of the U.K.’s vote to exit the European Union, Lopez is mostly confident. “Even in one of the worst scenarios, like the 2008 economic crisis, our company didn’t record losses but even grew, and this has generated confidence in our resilience. It may be a bit early to forecast the scope of the impact. What is clear is that the most important thing is security, meant in the widest sense. And if this security is endangered, investments falter.”