Millennium & Copthorne COO François Kassab announced that the hotel company will bring its midscale Studio M brand to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in 2018.
The Studio M property will be located in Madinah, while the UAE property will be located in Al Barsha, Dubai.
Kassab told Hotelier Middle East that Millennium & Copthorne has more Studio M hotels “planned in Riyadh and Muscat and Abu Dhabi too, all of which are signed now.”
The mid-market sector is important to the overall strategy of Millennium & Copthorne, Kassab said, “because we see the demand coming from this sector, especially from a development point of view.
"The number of [mid-market] hotels you can bring to a market is different, there is more demand because you can put more properties in a city, when compared to the locations of luxury and four- and five-star hotels and resorts. This is because the number of people who can afford the mid-market is much greater, and from cost of development point of view it is cheaper to build.”
Millennium & Copthorne has 12 hotels set to open in the Middle East over the next year in the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, as well as in Georgia.