According to the annual project developer report conducted by bulwiengesa on the top 7 cities in Germany, GBI AG has the largest volume of space under construction in the hotel segment. Scheduled for completion in 2016 by property developer GBI AG are around 28,000 square metres in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. In addition, 27,000 square metres of hotels are planned for those cities.
“We are very proud that we are currently the most active project developer in Germany’s major cities with more than a dozen hotels under construction plus more hotel properties already conceived”, says Chris-Norman Sauer, Head of Hotel Development, adding:
Also important for us is the fact that we develop projects successfully not only in the A-cities surveyed by bulwiengesa, but also in promising B-cities such as Essen or Mannheim. Thus, GBI is represented in the most important markets.”
Key to that success is the fact that GBI AG managed to accompany several internationally well established hotel brands entering the market in Germany. This includes, for example, the Capri by Fraser brand from Singapore that previously focused on Asia, or the British hotel chain Premier Inn.
A particular specialty of GBI AG is mixed-use projects. Under this concept, various hotel projects with differing customer target groups which do not compete with each other are purposefully combined on one site. Chris-Norman Sauer: “We make the best use of large plots in urban locations that in view of their size we would not develop with just one single hotel.”
In the Frankfurt Europaviertel, for example, GBI brought together a budget, a midscale- and a long-stay hotel. In addition, serviced apartment buildings for students or business customers, and even a day-care centre for children is integrated there. Just now, GBI AG is about to implement another mixed-use concept located directly at Düsseldorf’s main railway station.
GBI AG also plays a pioneering role at the construction of the Moxy hotel in Stuttgart which started earlier this year. The project is the first property of this brand belonging to Marriott International built in the conventional construction method instead of using prefabricated parts. Moreover, GBI AG is developing in Cologne for Holiday Inn Express the largest hotel in Europe of that well-known brand.
