Indonesia’s halal hotel Sofyan in discussions with Malacca property to expand into Malaysia

JAKARTA – Indonesia’s halal hotel Sofyan is eyeing expansion into neighboring Malaysia, Riyanto Sofyan, the company’s owner, told Salaam Gateway.

The company is in discussions with a three-star 169-room local hotel in the southwestern state of Malacca, said Sofyan, without revealing the name of the establishment.

“[The hotel in Malacca] is in quite a nice location and they are offering cooperation with us. They need to renovate the hotel at a cost of around 10 million ringgit ($2.5 million). We are negotiating the type of cooperation with the hotel (whether franchise or not),” said Sofyan.

The Malaccan hotel is valued between 38 million and 40 million ringgit ($9.5 million to $10 million), according to Sofyan. Progress in the negotiations has been slow as Sofyan Hotel focuses on other projects.

Sofyan Hotel currently operates 11 properties in Indonesia. It also has eight franchised hotels, including a two-star rated property run by the University of Islamic Indonesia in Jogjakarta that paid a franchise value of 60 billion rupiah ($4.5 million).

The 11 directly-owned and eight franchised Sofyan hotels have a total of  1,775 rooms with 72 percent average occupancy rate.

In line with the government's agenda to boost halal tourism, Sofyan Hotel is trying to increase its occupancy rate up to 80 percent, according to the owner, who also serves as head of the Ministry of Tourism’s Accelerated Development of Halal Tourism Team.

Sofyan said that in the last three years, the average growth of international Muslim tourist arrivals was 15 percent, compared to growth of non-Muslim tourist arrivals of 10 percent every year.

“The Indonesian government has several programs to boost Muslim tourist arrivals. Recently we promoted our tourism in Turkey. We also added other halal destination cities like West Sumatra. We will also be participating next at the Abu Dhabi World Halal Travel Summit in November,” said Riyanto.

© SalaamGateway.com 2016