FRANKFURT, Germany—Steigenberger Hotel Group has announced its first brand in almost 25 years: a lifestyle flag for millennials called Jaz in the City.
The new brand, Steigenberger’s third, will sit between the company’s upscale and midscale brands. The company also has in its brand stable InterCityHotel and Steigenberger Hotels and Resorts.
“This new lifestyle brand will target major cities in Northern Europe that we would consider not to be the right fit for either our Steigenberger (Hotels & Resorts) or InterCityHotel flags. The aim is for a younger market than has traditionally come to Steigenberger,” said Claus-Dieter Jandel, Steigenberger’s VP and chief development officer.
“This new hotel brand is totally in tune with the times,” said Puneet Chhatwal, CEO of Steigenberger, in the news release announcing the brand.
Jaz in the City came about after careful consideration of what Steigenberger is, what its future plans are, and seeing what the next obvious gap was in its portfolio, Jandel said.
“We’re a private company that takes its time. We’re independent from banks and work from our own cash flow,” Jandel said.
“We waited until we were 100% clear of the opening date of the first Jaz in the City,” Jandel said. Steigenberger signed the site, in The Netherlands, two years ago.
Despite not having ever opened a rash of brands over its long history, Jandel said Steigenberger was always pondering its portfolio and seeing where it could fill its gaps.
Sebastian Gruber, consultant at the Vienna office of PKF Hotelexperts, said Steigenberger is a capable hotel company that would not experience limitations moving into a new property segment.
“My thinking is that as a brand, InterCityHotels--the properties of which are generally placed close to transportation hubs--does not have in its DNA sufficient flexibility to support the new developments Steigenberger was looking at.
“(As) a new brand, Jaz would give them more opportunities,” Gruber said, for potential new developments that also do not fit the criteria for the higher-tiered Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts brand.
The first Jaz in the City property, to open in September, will be a 258-key hotel in The Netherlands. It will be in the Bijlmer-Centrum suburb, south of the city center but adjacent to both the Ziggo Dome, a youth-oriented entertainment facility, and the Amsterdam ArenA, home to The Netherlands’ most-supported soccer club, AFC Ajax.
“The brand will be trendy and target vibrant areas, not always right in the middle of cities, but in areas where Generation Y wants to be,” Jandel said.
Jandel added Steigenberger’s plan, at least for the pipeline it has agreed on, would be to add a new Jaz in the City each year.
“The next two will be in Germany, while numbers three and four will be in Central Europe,” Jandel added, although he declined to say in which Central European countries.
Other expansion plans
Steigenberger also is not being static in other markets or across other components of its portfolio.
“We have also started operations in China with the Steigenberger brand. It has a high reputation in Germany, but in our Maximilian Beijing hotel property, currently we use it to train employees in order to make sure we deliver properly Steigenberger service in that new market. It is a 5-star property, though, and we might rebrand it as a Steigenberger,” Jandel said, again saying that the company was not in a hurry to do so.
“Again, we’ll get it right before we do so,” Jandel added.
Steigenberger in the news release said it has 107 hotels in its system, with 17 hotels under construction or in planning. According to its website, there are 38 InterCityHotel properties in Germany and one each in Austria and The Netherlands, while Steigenberger Hotels & Resorts has 52 properties.
“In construction at the moment for that brand are properties in Dubai and China,” Jandel said.