With the early signs of economic recovery being seen in certain locations, the London hotel sector is being viewed as a leader of these ‘green shoots’. This recovery is seen against the backdrop of the forthcoming Olympic Games and a forecast recovery of visitor numbers in London during 2010. The conference was arranged to review and examine the London hotel sector and see how the industry can respond to these potential opportunities.

Stephen used the worldwide network of Davis Langdon and Seah International offices to research the market across the world and received detailed responses from their offices in Dublin, Barcelona, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, New York, Cape Town and of course London. He presented a paper that focused on defining the top hotels in the world in these locations, and the relative performance of each location in terms of occupancy levels, average room rates, design standards and build costs. He then looked at this performance criteria to review the relative strengths of London against other locations.

Stephen commented that: ‘London has a mature property market and not surprisingly has some of the highest build costs of all the locations reviewed. As a consequence, our luxury top-end hotels are smaller than their world-wide counterparts but perform operationally to a very high level’.

The future looks positive for the development of high end hotels in London – with over 2,000 new five star rooms currently under construction and due to come ‘on line’ by 2013. High-end hotels are also better development prospects due to their operational returns and these are often the only hotels that will be economically feasible within London’s expensive property market.

London has some of the most famous landmark five star hotels in the world but also has a large number of high-end hotels that offer more than they deliver. Whilst the future prospects look encouraging, Stephen concluded his talk by offering a word of caution suggesting that: ‘There are many high-end hotels in need of refurbishment and upgrading – and there is also work to be done in order to bring up their levels of service to the standards found in other locations around the world’.