Nina Hospitality Looks to Boost Hong Kong Tourism with Overseas Expansion

Nina Hospitality, the hotel unit of Hong Kong-based private developer Chinachem Group, is looking to expand into mainland China and overseas markets such as the UK, Australia, and Singapore within two years. The company is setting the goal following a 2021 rebranding effort helmed by its new managing director Simon Manning, who joined the company the same year.

“Our goal in the short term is to be a leading hospitality group within Hong Kong,” Manning said in an interview with the Post. “But following the same investment criteria as our parent company, and looking at more traditional real estate acquisitions, we think that this makes sense because those jurisdictions have similar tax, employment, and people, and they are similar to our home market.”

The company could move into new markets either through a management contract that introduces Nina to a wider audience or by acquiring an existing asset. Locally, it will spend at least HK$240 million (US$31 million) to launch new facilities and refurbish existing ones, including the main and sky lobbies of its flagship hotel, Nina Hotel Tsuen Wan West.

Manning said all these initiatives are in the pursuit of becoming one of Hong Kong’s upscale hotel groups. “When I looked at the portfolio, I realized it could perform a lot better than what it was doing,” he said. “We had actually terrific assets in great neighborhoods that had a lot of room for improvement by the way they traded and the way they serviced customers. So some of the first things I did was put in a new service philosophy, put in key renovation plans, and business models.”