Shinsegae Heirs Wager on Hotel Business

The heirs of retail conglomerate Shinsegae are competing with one another in the high-end resort business.

The group's vice chairman Chung Yong-jin is expanding its resort and resort business aggressively, while his sister Chung Yoo-kyung, the president of Shinsegae Section Retailer, is launching her own resort brand Onoma.

Josun Hotels & Resorts will open an extravagance hotel found in the swish Gangam spot in Seoul beneath the Josun Palace brand.

Furthermore to decades-outdated five-star Westin Josun, the business has launched various makes or "collections," since it likes to call them. It opened up the boutique resort L’Escape in 2018, and design resort Gravity and premium Josun Grand last year.

The Josun Palace Seoul Gangnam is the first of a type of top-end hotels called the blissful luxury Collection and expects to contend with other native hotels in the category.

The Josun Palace takes up 17 stories of a high-riser on the site of the old landmark Renaissance Resort. Renderings show a lot of marble and a skill deco design strategy with black-and-white geometries. It has 254 rooms, 44 of them suites, which the priciest will definitely cost W16 million a night.

The buffet restaurant is definitely the most expensive in the administrative centre, with a Sunday free-flow lunch priced at an eye-watering W150,000 a head, compared to W130,000 at the JW Marriot Seoul.

The opening has raised some eyebrows as a number of luxury accommodations in southern Seoul have closed down as a result of coronavirus pandemic, like the Le Meridien and Sheraton Palace.

One gain of that is that the brand new hotel was already getting ultimately more than 600 applications for the 250 obtainable memberships of its health golf club despite a W250 million deposit and W10 million gross annual membership.

A person hospitality insider said, "The quantity of luxury hotels found in Gangnam has dwindled, as a result a lot of wealthy clients are looking for a new hotel fitness golf club membership." But heads also have to be placed on pillows, and which will be a much greater challenge.

Shinsegae Deparment Store, in the mean time, opens its first resort beneath the Onoma brand in Daejeon in August. It'll be connected to the store's different branch in the central city.

Chung Yoo-kyung had headed the family group conglomerate's hotel organization from 1996, when she joined it as general manager of the Josun resort, until 2009 when she moved to group headquarters as vice president. Later on she and her brother divided control over the group, and she took over the department store, duty-free, vogue and cosmetics business in 2015.

Shinsegae also owns a good stake in the JW Marriott resort in Banpo, Seoul but isn't involved in operating it.