Development Quarterly - Issue 3 IHG Europe's Development, Design & Openings magazine

ISSUE 3
editor’s letter…
welcome to issue three
Here we are at the tail end of summer. I hope you all found time to take a vacation and enjoy a break
from the day-to-day. Summer is one of my favourite times of the year. It is all about family and
friends enjoying long sunny days and beautiful balmy evenings. Something a little less enjoyable in
the summer is construction site visits. Sweltering places where you sluggishly drag yourself around
trying to concentrate on anything but the heavy-duty jacket and fur-lined boots. It is hot work but
I can’t complain about one sweaty hour on site when construction teams do this all day every day to
build our fantastic hotels.
Now as we enter the final months of 2015, we are all feeling fresh from holiday and energised by
everything we have achieved at IHG ® since the last issue of DQ. We are well on our way to attaining
the goals we set ourselves for the year. Last month we unveiled a new and exciting set of refreshed
Build brand standards for InterContinental ® , Crowne Plaza ® and Holiday Inn ® . Later this year
the updated Hotel Indigo ® Build and Operate brand standards will be launched and work on the
Staybridge Suites ® standards will follow suit. Brand standards serve to strengthen our message and
ensure that they remain your brands of choice. They offer great inspiration about what IHG brands
mean and where they are heading in the future.
Developing great brands and financially successful hotels can only be achieved when teams work
together to achieve a common goal. I want to thank the hotel owners and their teams for their ongoing
partnership with IHG and praise the Development, Design & Openings team who work tirelessly
with the support of the Legal, Corporate Finance, Brand, Operations, Sales and Marketing teams
to open the right hotels in the right places. So far this year we have opened some fantastic hotels,
including two impressive Hotel Indigo hotels in York and Helsinki, a flagship Crowne Plaza in Berlin -
Potsdamer Platz, Holiday Inn hotels with show-stopping Open Lobbies in Frankfurt and Watford, and
Holiday Inn Express ® Grimsby, which is the first new-build to feature Generation Four rooms. We have
signed some excellent hotels including our first property in Mongolia with Holiday Inn Ulaanbaatar,
a 322-room Holiday Inn in Moscow, six hotels in Germany and three new InterContinental hotels;
Estoril, Lyon and Bordeaux. The latter two properties position IHG as the leader in France’s luxury
segment, something we explore further in this issue of the magazine.
Some other topics we cover include the importance of being China Ready and our newly launched
Lowest Price Promise. These are two features that go to show at IHG we are continuously striving for
improvement and working towards our goal to become number one.
That just leaves me to say welcome to the third issue of DQ. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to
seeing you at events all over our region in the coming months.
Philippe Bijaoui
Vice President Development, Europe
03