Western District Becoming The Place To Be
<B>Western District Becoming The Place To Be</B>
By Judy Jacobs
Hong Kong Island's Western District, one of the Special Administrative Region's most traditional neighborhoods, may be the next hot destination to do business in Hong Kong. High rents and low office space availability have driven corporations out of the Central District in search of better deals, and the Western District seems to be the latest of these.
New office buildings and two new hotels are the harbingers of future development. While office towers and hotels already have taken over much of Wanchai on the opposite side of Central, Western has, up to this point, pretty much been left alone.
"In recent years, the Western District has been gradually developing more Grade A commercial buildings as office rentals escalated in the Central Business District, Wanchai and Causeway Bay," said Jenny Kong, director of sales for the new Century Harbour Hotel. "Limited space also has forced developers to build outside these popular areas. The forthcoming plans for Cyberport (Hong Kong's proposed high-tech business park) is also a great incentive for further development in the western part of Hong Kong Island."
The new 282-room Century Harbour hotel, a member of Hong Kong-based Century International Hotels, opened last year on Queen's Road West in the heart of Western District. The hotel, like all Century properties, was designed with business travelers in mind, a market Kong estimated will make up about 40 percent of its total business.
To cater to business travelers, the hotel has installed dataports, multilingual satellite TV and voicemail in all guest rooms. It also has two floors of executive rooms known as the Royal Club, a meeting room accommodating up to 50 attendees and a boardroom seating 10. Another hotel created with business travelers in mind also opened last year--the 346-room Island Pacific.
"Fifty percent of our guests are business travelers. To cater to their needs, the hotel provides three executive floors, a lounge, a business center with meeting room, a courtesy shuttle service to main commercial areas and an additional dataport line in the guest rooms," said Ilona Yim, the hotel's marketing communications manager. Hotel facilities also include a small meeting room seating 60 people theater-style, which is divisible into two sections.
Several aspects of the Island Pacific Hotel set it apart, according to Yim. "The Island Pacific is a boutique hotel located on the waterfront of Victoria Harbor." The guest rooms with their floor-to-ceiling windows allow guests panoramic views over Kowloon Peninsula to as far as Tsing Ma Bridge. Adjacent to the hotel is the Western Harbor Tunnel, she added, which links Hong Kong Island to Kowloon and connects to the expressway for the International Airport, which can be reached in just 30 minutes.