Investors to give Dar hotel Sh23bn facelift

Dar es Salaam. The Kunduchi Beach Hotel in Dar es Salaam will get a major facelift as investors seek to turn it into a five-star accommodation facility.
Wellworth, which manages the hotel, says preliminary estimates show that at least $10 million (about Sh23 billion) would be spent on upgrading the hotel, the exercise that will begin next month.
“Our aim is to turn the Kunduchi Beach Hotel into a world-class Five-Star facility…At least $10 million will be spent in giving it the facelift,” a director with Wellworth, Mr Zulfikar Ismail, told journalists in Dar es Salaam yesterday.
The actual facelift exercise will take between six and 10 months, said the Wellworth operations officer, Mr Saimon Nguka, said.
Mr Nguka said upon completion of rehabilitation, the hotel will be handed over to a new operator who will work with other stakeholders to increase the number of tourists visiting Tanzania.
The formerly government-owned hotel was privatised to Wellworth in 1997 and the new investor employed a total of 202 people, mostly Tanzanians.
Mr Nguka said the decision to turn it into a five-star facility stems from the fact that in recent years, a number of world-class accommodation facilities have been erected in Tanzania, making competition tense for operators.
“Due to competition, we have been compelled to turn Kunduchi Beach Hotel into a five-star facility because we believe that it will help attract a bigger number of international visitors,” he said.
With the new operator, he said, the hotel’s workers will get a chance of getting new experience from their counterparts across all the countries where the new operator also has investments.
Ownership of the hotel will remain unchanged.
“It will remain in the hands of Tanzanians, but after a period of five years, we will issue an Initial Public Offering (IPO) where its share will be sold to the Tanzanians so that it can be turned into a publicly-owned company,” he said.