Atlas Hospitality and FTI have created a joint venture in the form of a limited company, with the aim of ultimately investing more than one billion dirhams in the hotel sector. Details.
Good news for the Moroccan tourism sector. Under the leadership of the Moroccan National Tourism Office (ONMT), the Moroccan hotel chain Atlas Hospitality has just concluded an important partnership with the 4th largest tour operator in the world, FTI.
The idea of this partnership is to create a joint venture (JV) owned equally between the Moroccan hotelier and the international tour operator which will, according to our information, take the form of a limited company. This new structure will aim to consolidate the ambitions of the two partners for the Moroccan hotel market and will focus on “current clubs and those to come”, Atlas Hospitality management explains to Telquel.ma.
The JV will initially concern three hotels which will be transferred to it by Atlas Hospitality. These are two units located in Marrakech, namely Atlas Targa Club and Idrissides Urban Club and the Dunes d’Or Beach Club in Agadir which is the first unit to adopt the name Labranda, the brand which brings together the hotel activity of the FTI group. These three hotels have a total bed capacity of 980 rooms. In addition, the new structure « will recover a fourth hotel by March 2017, and will build at least four new hotels in the next two years », Atlas Hospitality management tells us. The goal is to reach 7 Labranda units by 2020“to become the first All-inclusive club brand in Morocco,”explain the two partners.
In terms of investment, the two partners do not intend to skimp on resources. “A firstinvestment level of 600 million dirhams is planned. It will be followed by a secondlevel of 500 million dirhams”, we are told. In total, more than a billion dirhams of investment are planned to increase hotel capacity. Regarding air capacity, the FTI group will increase its frequency of flights to Morocco to 11 flights/week.
This joint venture, of which the ONMT played a major role in its conclusion,“responds to Morocco’s needs to diversify its clientele and its sources, to smooth out the historical dependence on the French market,”say the partners. Indeed, the ONMT hopes, thanks to this partnership, to “triple the volume of this large TO in the Morocco destination”, and thus ensure a good vintage for the year 2017. FTI attracted 40,000 travelers to Morocco in 2015 and confirmed another 80,000 at the end of 2016. The objective is to increase this figure to 150,000 customers in 2018, “which will generate more than 1 million hotel nights”.
Source:http://telquel.ma/2016/12/14/atlas-hospitality-fti-sassocient_1527251
