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Valor Hospitality opens Middle East subsidiary

Atlanta-based Valor Hospitality Partners, a hotel management company that owns and operates more than 75 hotels in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe, has launched Valor Middle East in Dubai.

Valor Middle East is expected to provide hotel owners and brands with third-party management services, including food and beverage, capital fundraising, sales and marketing and hotel development services.

Dubai-based Julien Bergue, a 20-year veteran of the hospitality industry, was selected to lead Valor Middle East as managing director. Bergue has more than 14 years' of international expertise directing mixed-used development, new hotel development and luxury refurbishment projects across the Middle East and Europe. Bergue will be supported by Michael Pownall and Graham Wood, co-founders and managing partners for Valor Africa. 

Valor’s expanding global footprint includes a recent extension into the Sub-Saharan region of Africa, where it signed an exclusive agreement with IHG to roll out several franchised hotels over the next 10 years.

“As the Middle East hospitality landscape continues to grow and evolve, this new division offers regional hotel owners the services they need to see a faster return on investment, help hotel brands maximize their ROI, create a better customer experience, increase revenue, boost hotel occupancy and so much more,” said Bergue.

Euan McGlashan, global co-founder/CEO of Valor Hospitality Partners, said Valor had identified a gap in the market that the company was poised to fill. “With such a strong base and team of professionals in Southern Africa eager to share their knowledge outside the region as well as history with some project work we had undertaken in Saudi Arabia, we saw a wonderful opportunity to further expand our global footprint within the franchise world,” McGlashan said. “Franchis[ing] is not prevalent in the [Middle East] region and given our strong relationships with the major international brands ... we felt the timing was right to share our expertise in many of the incredible cities within the ME region beginning with Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Africa and Middle East will now fall under Managing Partners Graham Wood, Michael Pownall, Tony Romer-Lee and myself in a business-development support role.”