PANAMA CITY—Panama, the isthmus that connects North and South America and provides a passage between, is among the hottest destinations for hotel development right now, with 19 major projects comprising 4,119 rooms in development as of the close of the third quarter of 2008, according to Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Lodging Econometrics.
Given that volume, Panama soon will overtake the ever-popular market of Costa Rica as the hottest development destination in Central America.
Panama City, where more than half of the country's 17,000 existing hotel rooms and most of the development projects are located, offers a perfect combination of business and leisure activities, according to Alvaro Diago, area president for IHG in Latin America. Diago works closely in that market with Herman Bern, a prominent local developer who has built, owns and manages two InterContinental properties, a Crowne Plaza and most recently a Holiday Inn hotel near the Panama Canal with an attached hotel school.
Bern's company, Empresas Bern, plans to open and manage another three hotels this year, according to Herman Bern Jr., who handles the Bern Hotels & Resorts division. Those projects include an exclusive 20-villa cluster within an existing residential development adjacent to the company's InterContinental Playa Bonita Resort & Spa (planned for March); a 118-room Le Méridien hotel occupying the lower floors of a central Panama City condo building (set for a summer opening); and, by the end of the year, a 40-key hotel component for an existing residential project in the Coronado Beach area.
There is also a plan to break ground for construction of the 600-room Westin Playa Bonita Resort, scheduled to open in 2012. Empresas Bern is starting a new relationship with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide with the Le Méridien and Westin projects.
Bern Jr. notes that Panama City is booming with hotels and brands, and that the market was looking for something different—something upscale, with a more European flavor. Le Méridien was a good fit—a European-heritage brand with a renewed energy and a lot of new openings, he says.
And while Panama has not been extremely successful in attracting the Europe markets as yet (Europeans now make up only about 10-15% of visitor arrivals), Bern Jr. says he sees great potential in those markets, especially with KLM's late 2008 announcement that it would increase from three to five the number of weekly direct flights from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to Panama City.
Some 210,000 Europeans visited Panama in 2008, nearly twice as many as the year before, according to Carl-Fredrik Nordström, sub-administrator general of the Autoridad de Turismo Panama (ATP).
Panama continues to reach out to Europeans, with the tourism authority spending serious money on the second stage of a global public relations and advertising campaign that is now targeting Western European tourists specifically.
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