Thai Company Signs Franchise Deal To Set Up 44 Tune Hotels In Five Countries

Evolution Capital, listed on the Stock Thai Exchange, is planning to invest over US$200 million in the next few years to build, refurbish and operate 44 Tune Hotels.com in five countries.

The company has signed a franchise agreement with Tune Hotels.com.

Its President, Simon Gerovich said 24 hotels would be operated in the first phase within the next four years, with the first scheduled to be operational in Thailand's premier resort island of Phuket by 2010.

Besides newly set up hotels, half of them would be existing hotels to be refurbished as Tune hotels.

"We are leasing most of the land or space for 30 years to keep our initial cost low," he said at the announcement of the franchise agreement between Tune Hotels.com and Evolution Capital.

Property prospects for Phuket and Krabi

Nick Anthony and Tom Travers of Indigo Real Estate discuss how Thailand’s property sector has been affected by the global economic crisis, and what to watch for in southern Thailand during 2010.

Phuket shakes off the world economic problems
The global financial crisis will rumble into 2010 and will create more surprises. The United States is still in deep trouble, Europe is fracturing and Africa is unstable.

In Phuket most projects went into the global financial crisis under duress caused by the previous two years of political instability, so most developers have escaped the worst of the speculative excesses. Developers have been offering attractive incentives in the final quarter of 2009 that have helped to thaw the standoff from buyers.

In Industrial Thailand, Health and Business Concerns Collide

MAP TA PHUT, Thailand — Villagers here avoid walking in the rain because they say it burns their skin and causes their hair to fall out. They have trouble breathing at night when, they say, factories release toxic fumes. And they are terrified by what studies show are unusually high cancer rates.
Skip to next paragraph
The New York Times

Map Ta Phut is an industrial zone akin to a midsize city.

Map Ta Phut is the heart of Thailand’s industrial underbelly, an area rarely seen by the millions of tourists who visit the country every year. Jutting out into the Gulf of Thailand, the industrial zone is on the scale of a midsize city — only instead of office buildings and apartments, there are block after block of tangled tubes of steel, vats of chemicals and towering, fire-breathing gas flares.

AirAsia's $3 hotel rooms target Phuket

Kuta Beach in Bali is one of the locations of Tune Hotels, a Malaysian budget chain affiliated with AirAsia. IT aims to set up 44 properties across Asia in a deal with Evolution Capital, a SET-listed real estate investment and management firm.