Only 3 of 11 trackside hotels booked fully

Source : Business Times - 24 Sep 2008

Just days before the Formula One race kicks off, a majority of the 11 trackside hotels are still not fully booked.

Still, there is a silver lining. For some of them, business has picked up strongly of late as the race date gets closer.

The Conrad Centennial and Ritz-Carlton Millenia were the first to fill their rooms for the F1 race weekend several months ago. The Fullerton Hotel will also be running a full house.

Other hotels such as The Raffles Hotel and the Pan Pacific - both declined to comment on occupancy rates - still have rooms available this weekend, as does the Marina Mandarin.

However, a spokesman for the Raffles Hotel described occupancy as ‘healthy’ and said that it would only be able to take ‘very limited last minute requests’.

Initially, hotels had doubled and in some cases even tripled their room rates for the F1 period. This was done in part to offset the tax being levied on them by the government. Non-trackside hotels are required to pay 20 per cent of room rate takings, and trackside hotels 30 per cent.

When demand for the hotel rooms at these inflated rates proved softer than anticipated earlier this year, some hotels had to revise rates downwards but it may not have been enough.

‘We are rather disappointed with occupancy rates,’ said Peninsula Excelsior Hotel’s general manager Daniel Chia, who declined to reveal actual figures.

Others, such as the trackside Carlton Hotel - which also has availability - chose to remove a stipulated minimum number of nights when it came to bookings for the race weekend.

The Swissotel and The Fairmont are currently running occupancies of over 90 per cent, with bookings slightly stronger for the former. ‘We expect both hotels to be full by the end of the week,’ said Belladonnah Lim, Fairmont’s director of marketing communications.

In the last week or so, last-minute bookings have been streaming in for both hotels, she said, adding that bookings jumped 5-6 per cent over a period of five days or so.

In addition, Raffles City Convention Centre has eight function rooms which have either partial or full views of the track - 6 of which have been snapped up as hospitality suites so far.

The Mandarin Oriental is about 80 per cent full and has remained so in recent weeks. The hotel has not lowered its rates ($1,750-$2,250) since it first launched them.

However, most of its guests are checking out by Monday morning - after the Grand Prix - which suggests that Singapore GP season might not be a good enough reason for visitors to stay beyond the weekend.