Hotel Shilla's biz hotel to post record guest room sales

When Hotel Shilla Co. CEO and Samsung Group heiress Lee Boo-jin said in a shareholders’ meeting in March that the Korean hotel company will briskly scale up its business and take the lead in the market, her announcement didn’t garner much attention from investors amid a local spike in COVID-19 cases.

Seven months later, on Oct. 23, Hotel Shilla announced its premium business hotel brand Shilla Stay is expected to post sales of 1.25 million rooms this year, becoming the first single hotel brand in Korea to sell more than 1 million rooms on an annual basis. 

Such a record means it has maintained an average 80% room occupancy rate as well as more than 3,000 check-ins per day.

Hotel Shilla’s hotels and leisure business unit is making up for sluggish sales in the travel retail (TR) business, or Shilla's duty-free shops, which have been hit hard by the weakening won. The hotel and leisure unit shifted to 30.8 billion won ($21.4 million) in operating profit during the first half of 2022 from 15.8 billion won in operating losses during the same period of 2021.

Shilla Stay saw a soaring number of business travelers and foreign tourists as COVID-19 became endemic and the Korean currency weakened against the US dollar.

It has also created sales from other customers seeking a luxury domestic digital nomad experience since 2020-- working remotely and enjoying leisure -- or staying for more than a month in another city. The luxury business hotel saw losses in 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak and swung to the black in 2021.

Shilla Stay is operating 14 hotels across Korea with 4,510 guest rooms, the highest number of rooms for a single hotel brand in the country.

Write to Mi-Kyoung Lee at capital@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.