Holiday and leisure travel company, Thomas Cook has acquired 42% stake in Aldiana from LMEY Investments to further its interests in branded hotels.
The Aldiana acquisition is part of a strategic partnership with LMEY Investments, a Swiss-based hotel property development company, to develop and grow Thomas Cook’s own-brand hotel portfolio.
Aldiana, a premium club and activity-focused tour operator and hotel management company based in Germany. Aldiana currently operates eight club resorts located in Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Tunisia and Austria, with plans to open another four resorts over the next two years. It attracts a loyal base of primarily family customers who enjoy activity holidays in premium-quality resorts. Following the acquisition, Aldiana will sit alongside Thomas Cook’s six existing proprietary hotel brands, bolstering Thomas Cook’s own-brand hotel portfolio with a popular club offering and broadening its reach to new customers.
In addition, Thomas Cook and LMEY have entered into an agreement to work together to create a joint hotel investment platform, in order to accelerate the growth of Thomas Cook’s own-brand hotels portfolio. The partners intend to establish the platform by contributing a minimum of five owned and directly-managed hotel properties between them. These seed assets, with a combined value of around £150 million, will be used to develop the platform into a fund focused on acquiring a pipeline of further hotel and resort assets across Thomas Cook’s destination markets. Further details will be provided in due course.
The strategic partnership with LMEY is a significant step forward in Thomas Cook’s strategy to expand its portfolio of own-brand hotels and resorts. It will provide customers with an even greater choice of high-quality holidays that are unique to Thomas Cook and achieve both higher levels of customer satisfaction and better margins than the portfolio average.
Thomas Cook Chief Executive, Peter Fankhauser, said: “The development of a strong portfolio of own-brand hotels is absolutely key to our success, allowing us to provide customers with a consistent and high quality holiday, whatever their needs. Our new strategic partnership with LMEY, with its proven track record of identifying and redeveloping highly successful properties in sun and beach locations, gives us the perfect launch pad to accelerate this critical part of our strategy. The acquisition of a stake in Aldiana expands our reach with a premium club-based activity holiday brand that both complements and enhances our existing own-brand portfolio, enriching our holiday offering for customers and giving us an established pipeline of new properties for the future. This is yet another example of the way that we are transforming our business through partnerships.”
LMEY Founder, Hans Kortlevers, said: “I believe that the combination of the entrepreneurial approach that LMEY has to buying, developing and upgrading hotels and Thomas Cook’s unrivalled expertise and professionalism in European tourism, has the potential to build a really exciting pipeline of new properties in sun and beach destinations. We are looking forward to working with Thomas Cook in this alliance and helping to fast-forward the development of its own-brand hotels and resorts business.”
