The group currently has 1,600 hotels with 132,253 rooms around the world, including 63 properties in the Middle East RIYADH: Louvre Hotels Group is planning to create more than 3,500 new jobs as part of its strategy to expand its portfolio to nearly 50 hotels in the Kingdom by 2025. It currently has 16 hotels in Saudi Arabia and its expansion will begin this year with the opening of five new hotels. They are the 94-room Golden Tulip Riyadh, the 84-room Golden Tulip Unaizah, the 70-room Tulip Inn Dammam Corniche, the 150-room Tulip Inn Al Balaad Madinah and the 454-room Golden Tulip Umm Al Qurah in Makkah. The French hotelier is also planning to roll out the Campanile brand across the Kingdom. “Saudi Arabia represents a strategic market for our global development, due in great part to its focus on tourism and the extraordinary choice of destinations it offers. Launching Campanile, our midscale brand, in this region is a point of pride for us because we want to inaugurate an innovative yet affordable offer, able to satisfy local customers and international tourists alike,” Pierre-Frédéric Roulot, CEO Louvre Hotels Group, said in a statement. The company’s president, Amine E. Moukarzel, was one of more than 60 speakers taking part in the Tourism Recovery Summit 2021 in Riyadh this week. Established in 1976 by French wine merchants the Taittinger Group, the Louvre Group was sold to Starwood Capital Group in 2005 and to China’s Jin Jiang International (Holdings) in 2015. The group currently has 1,600 hotels with 132,253 rooms around the world, including 63 properties in the Middle East. Middle East’s hotel occupancy rates approached 2019 levels during Ramadan and Eid Al-Fitr this year, according to data from the hotel management analytics firm STR. The report highlighted near-normal occupancy levels in the region during the holy month, helping key markets outperform global peers. Hotels in Alkhobar city, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, reported the highest average occupancy level in the Kingdom at 63.5 percent. A separate global STR report from March said that Saudi Arabia had the world’s biggest hotel pipeline. The research found that the Kingdom’s expected a 67.1 percent increase in room supply over the next three years was the highest among the 50 most populated countries. STR data shows 73,057 rooms in the Kingdom’s hotel pipeline. Of the total, 16,965 are scheduled to come online during 2021. While a significant portion of Saudi Arabia’s pipeline activity is concentrated in Makkah, with 28,052 rooms under development, several other sub-markets across the country are expected to increase hotel supply by 50 percent or more.