International Hotel Investments (IHI), the trading name of Corinthia Group, has set the goal of managing 100 hotels on behalf of third-party owners by 2030.
This target was announced by Founder and Chairman Alfred Pisani in his statement in IHI’s Annual Report for 2023, published on Tuesday.
IHI owns and manages a number of hotels across four different continents, and over the years it has also delved into residential and commercial real estate markets through a range of investments in subsidiary and associate companies. In Malta, it owns and manages the iconic Corinthia Palace Hotel (Attard), Corinthia Hotel St George’s Bay (St Julian’s), Radisson Blu Resort & Spa (Mellieħa), Marina Hotel St George’s Bay (St Julian’s), and Radisson Blu Resort (St Julian’s). It also manages the Verdi Hotel (Gżira) and also the planned mixed-use development Corinthia Oasis. The company also has a number of hotels in the pipeline, many of which are planned to open over the coming years.
Over recent years, IHI has strived to attract more intentional attention to the Corinthia brand, with a number of key openings across different countries. These include both hotels which are fully owned by IHI, as well as ones that are owned by third parties, and only managed by the company under the Corinthia brand.
Commenting on this, Mr Pisani said that IHI’s target is to “operate many more hotels belonging to third-party owners, as offering management services should be a faster road to fly the Corinthia flag in many more destinations without IHI, the holding company, having to invest in these new properties.”
He acknowledged that this plan is similar to what other international hotel management brands have done in order to achieve growth.
“It is our plan to manage 100 hotels on behalf of third-party owners by 2030,” he stated.
In addition to this, Mr Pisani also stated that when the Corinthia Palace Hotel in Attard was opened in 1968, the company “could have chosen the easier road” of appointing an establishment international hotel management company to manage the hotel and other wholly-owned properties that followed. “Instead, we chose the more difficult road to manage our first and subsequent hotels, thereby creating and building the Corinthia brand,” he affirmed.
A key part of this move towards managing third-party-owned hotels is the investment in management company Corinthia Hotels Limited (CHL). The company operates 25 hotels around the world, of which eight are luxury Corinthia hotels under development and expected to be launched in the next couple of years.
In the Annual Report, IHI CEO Simon Naudi, who was appointed Managing Director earlier this year, remarked that the investment in CHL came in the form of recruitment of added senior level human resources, together with global marketing and technology investments.
“Our target is to grow this brand by providing services to third-party hotel owners and developers worldwide,” he added.
To date, aside from the aforementioned Malta properties, IHI also owns and manages hotels in Brussels (opening 2024), Budapest, Lisbon, London, St Petersburg, Tripoli. It manages hotels in Bucharest (opening 2024), Budapest, Doha (opening 2025), New York (opening 2024), Prague Rome (opening 2025), Tunis, Riyadh (opening 2027), and Maldives (opening 2027)
Financial performance
During the financial year ended 31st December 2023, IHI witnessed a return to normality in the global travel markets after the turbulent COVID-19 pandemic period.
Total revenue for 2023 reached €287.8 million, a 20.8 per cent increase from 2022’s €238.2 million. The primary source of this increase was the income from wholly owned hotels, which went up from €119 million in 2022 to €157 million in 2023.
Tied to this, the costs of providing services has also surged upwards by 20.4 per cent to €151.2 million (2022: €125.6 million). IHI also incurred further expenses related to marketing costs and administrative expenses in 2023, at €10.8 million and €48.1 million, respectively. On a weekly average, IHI had 2,592 employees in 2023, up from the 2,249 it had in 2022.
IHI also incurred substantial finance costs during the year, with €38.8 million in interest expense and similar charges, together with €1.3 million in exchange differences on borrowings. The company is heavily invested in real estate financed in part by bank borrowings and bonds, and therefore is subject to annual re-assessments on the value in use of the properties, together with interest rate and exchange rate fluctuations, aside from charging depreciation.
These factors prompted IHI to register a pre-tax loss of €4.1 million during 2023, a drop in performance when compared to the €1.1 million pre-tax loss recorded in 2022.
Total assets in 2023 increased to €1.8 billion from €1.7 billion in 2022, mainly driven by the uplifts in value of IHI’s properties together with the continued works on its Brussels project.
In his concluding remarks, Mr Naudi acknowledged that while IHI has passed from a number of turbulent years recently, firstly due to the pandemic and then because of adverse geopolitical events and high inflation, it has "stayed the course."
"In parallel, IHI continued to invest in our portfolio and human capital in preparation of our next growth phase with the opening of eight hotels in rapid succession. This augurs well for a strong future," he added, before thanking the Board of Directors, management, and the rest of the company for the support.
