Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) has announced two new member brands, both from the Nordic region, namely Thon Hotels headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and GLO Hotels based in Helsinki, Finland. Together with existing GHA member First Hotels, GHA now has 120 hotels across Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, giving it significant coverage of these important travel markets. Thon Hotels is part of the Olav Thon Group, and was established in 1989. It is Norway’s third largest hotel chain and has 9,300 rooms and over 64 hotels in Norway, five hotels in Belgium one in the Netherlands and one in Sweden. Intra-regional business travel is Thon Hotels’ strength, with hotels designed specifically for the business and convention traveller. Thon Hotels also has properties in some of Norway’s most spectacular locations in the Arctic Circle, which is a hugely popular destination for leisure travellers, especially during the summer months. Thon Hotels’ membership of GHA will commence officially in the coming months.
Morten Thorvaldsen, Thon Hotels’ CEO is excited about joining GHA: “we’ve had a fruitful marketing partnership with First Hotels for many years, and we’ve witnessed their successful membership of GHA; and so it made a lot of sense for us to join the alliance. Norway has one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world, and we love travelling as a nation, so GHA membership gives our customers a fabulous choice of hotels, where they’ll be recognised around the world.”
GLO Hotels is part of The Kämp Group, and has four hotels in Helsinki, three of which are downtown and one at the airport. GLO completes GHA’s presence in the region with its first hotels in Finland. Aarne Hallama, CEO of The Kämp Group, sees not only additional choice for GLO’s outbound customers, but the opportunity to gain market share in Helsinki: “we are a well-known, local Finnish lifestyle brand and we need access to our key feeder markets in Sweden, Russia the UK and Germany: GHA membership will help us enormously to reach customers in these markets, which we cannot do effectively alone”.
Chris Hartley, GHA’s CEO is thrilled about adding these two new brands to GHA’s growing portfolio: “we recently celebrated our 10th Anniversary, and so this is further cause to reflect positively on what the alliance has achieved over the last decade. These two new brands bring the alliance to 425 hotels, and we are gradually gaining strength and recognition in key regional markets, such as the Nordics. This in turn is helping us drive more business to our member brands, so everyone in the alliance benefits from our growth because of the collaborative nature of our business, and in particular our sharing 4 million customers through our loyalty programme, GHA Discovery.”
“It’s an exciting year for the alliance, and we expect more brands to join in the coming months, as independent players continue to look at how they can compete for market share with the mega-chains; and we’re providing that solution” concluded Hartley.
