The Nigerian hospitality industry can look forward to exciting developments nationwide with the opening of over 22 hotels in major cities and secondary towns.
New hotel developments are set for major city routes, the Northern regions and the old Trade Route in the South. Hotels can be expected in major cities like Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, as well as towns and cities such as Kano, Yola, Kebbi, Ekiti, Ibadanwarri, Enugu, Asaba, Owerri, and Awka, to name a few.
The BON Hotels group, which currently has 10 operational BON Hotels in Nigeria, will open another 22 hotels and residences in the next few years. Hotels in Kano, Ibadan, Warri, Asaba and Port Harcourt are coming first, opening within the next four months.
These properties will focus on not only local and international business travellers, but keen leisure travellers too.
The tourism landscape of Nigeria has long been dominated by business travellers, and many of these travellers have stayed in traditional, multinational hotels with a run-of-the-mill approach to hospitality, but one group set sights on this area a few years ago and has changed the approach to hospitality expansion in Africa.
Beginning in Abuja, BON Hotels first signed a management agreement to manage, market and administrate this quaint 28-roomed boutique hotel back in 2015 and refurbished the hotel into a flourishing business-focused space, determined to provide loyal clients with reliable conferencing facilities and outstanding hospitality.
“Our ethos has always been to add value, create tourism circuits, and expand the hospitality sector into all regions holistically and, in so doing, extract value. That’s been my mission and goal,” says BON Hotels Executive Director for International West Africa, Bernard Cassar
BON Hotels, who manages and owns hotels, lodges and resorts throughout Southern Africa, as well as West and East Africa, continued with hotels in Enugu, Asokoro and further properties in Abuja, and the growth since then has been exponential.
“The hospitality industry in Nigeria has previously focused on major cities like Lagos and Abuja, with multinational companies copying and pasting their approach of launching large hotels in the capitals of African cities, and ignoring the potential of venturing into smaller but as important cities. This has resulted in limited options for both local and business travellers, who would not always be stationed in major cities. This is where BON Hotels seeks to fill the gap and provide visitors with quality accommodation and outstanding conferencing facilities run at international standards in cities like Warri, Asaba and Apo.
“Since the inception of our hotel group, we have always advocated for investment in Africa by Africans, and being able to work with such talented groups of people across the continent makes us not only hopeful, but assured of the exponential growth of the hospitality industry throughout Africa,” comments Guy Stehlik, CEO of BON Hotels.
