Asian hotels bring their brand of hospitality to the West

To look at the rate of international expansion of several hotel groups out of their native Asia in recent years, one might imagine that they had run out of room on this side of the world.

The last five years have seen Shangri-La hotels open in Vancouver, Paris, Toronto, Istanbul and London, and it has 20 more in development, as far afield as Qatar and Ghana. This year also saw The Peninsula open in Paris - the brand's first outpost in Europe. The Banyan Tree Group has opened in Mexico, to be followed by Spain and Greece, and has stated plans to double its portfolio internationally over the next five years. And Swire Hotels is set to open in Miami this year - its first hotel in the West.

Robert Cheng, vice-president of marketing for The Peninsula hotels, says the shift is due to fewer opportunities close to home. "There's a greater demand for luxury hotels - our policy is to open iconic hotels in gateway cities, because that's where the international business and leisure clientele are, and there are only so many of those in Asia. So now we're looking to the US and Europe, with even South America and India on our list."

But expansion isn't that simple - properties in such locations rarely come up. Cheng says The Peninsula was looking to open in Paris and London for longer than it has had an American hotel, which opened there over 25 years ago - "the stars really do have to be aligned".

However, now could also be a good time to introduce Asian hospitality styles to non-Asian markets. After all, as Greg Dogan, CEO of

Shangri-La hotels notes, the numbers of outbound Chinese travellers have grown rapidly, "and, as guests, they look to their familiar brands when they travel the world. They stay with us because we give them a sense of home".

Exactly what Asian hospitality style might amount to is, of course, hard to pin down without resorting to stereotypes or conflating a multitude of cultures: Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Singaporean. Dogan believes that Asian culture "comes basically from the family, and our hospitality industry consequently has a quite family-oriented approach to service … the idea is to look after guests as though they were family".

Since 41 of Shangri-La's 88 hotels are in China, Dogan might be considered well-placed to conclude as much. But, as he further stresses, Asian touches in the group's hotels tend to be on the subtle side: in the design of uniforms, in the names of restaurants and in the art on the walls - most of the art in at the hotel in The Shard in London, for instance, is by established Chinese artists.

"It all has to be done in an elegant manner," Dogan says. "But I think it is a value guests want us to bring to the table, and the majority of our guests are from Europe and the US. And I think they care where those values come from."