Durban - uMhlanga is to get several new hotels, and three of them will be four-star.
Construction has already started on two new hotels for the Premier Hotels & Resorts Group, which is ploughing a total of R380million into its four-star Premier Hotel and three-star Splendid Inn by Premier.
They are both going up on the corner of Herrwood Drive and uMhlanga Boulevard, close to the Gateway Theatre of Shopping.
The Premier Hotel will have 130 sea-facing bedrooms, a restaurant, swimming pool and gym, while the Splendid Inn by Premier will have 64 sea-facing bedrooms and its own eatery. Guests at both hotels will have access to conferencing facilities for up to 400 delegates.
“Our decision to invest in uMhlanga is due to our desire to have properties in every major South African city, as well as in all secondary cities, said Samuel Nassimov, the hotel chain’s founder and managing director, who also announced the group was further expanding its national footprint to Bloemfontein with a new three-star hotel.
Construction of both uMhlanga hotels is due to be completed in November 2019.
The Premier announcement comes in the wake of another by Hilton, which is due to open its own four-star hotel in the uMhlanga Arch development, which is now under construction in the Ridgeside area of the town.
It will be called Hilton Garden Inn uMhlanga, will have 203 rooms and is due to be finished in 2020, Markus Fritz, the general manager of the Durban Hilton, said yesterday.
The Daily News also learnt yesterday that another four-star hotel will be going up on Ridgeside.
“This is a very desirable location and we are in the final stages of negotiations with a global hotel brand, which has extensively researched the node’s appeal to develop a 165-room hotel with an additional 40 executive long-stay suites,” said Gavin Rogaly, the founder and commercial director of the commercial property investment firm Taylor-Made Property Asset Managers.
Rogaly said the company had bought a 55000m² portion of Ridgeside to develop the hotel as well as 300-350 luxury residential units, contemporary offices and “destination retail space”.
Meanwhile, further down the hill, a new five-star Radisson Blu hotel is also taking shape in the Oceans uMhlanga development.
Rogaly, Nassimov and three top Hilton executives will all be flying in to attend next week’s annual Travel Indaba at Durban’s International Convention Centre, which will be hosting hundreds of the continent’s tourism and travel businesses, including 120 first-time exhibitors.
Peter Rose, chairperson of uMhlanga Tourism, said that as long as tourism continued to grow, there would always be room for new hotels.