As Novac/Dora Koretic writes on the 8th of December, 2019, it will happen a little later than was initially announced last year, but the City of Zagreb and Croatia will get their first Novotel hotel at the beginning of 2021, just before spring, which should “sprout” in the eastern part of the capital city, more precisely in Resnik.
The investment, which was first introduced to the public back in October 2018, now finally has its first visuals, a conceptual design that Jutarnji list exclusively received from the investor of the project, the company Rox d.o.o, whose founder and owner is entrepreneur Ivo Kristić.
Judging by the visuals, the first Novotel in Croatia will be located right next to the Rox headquarters in Resnik, on the plot of land owned by that company, at the eastern entrance to the city, right next to Slavonska Avenija.
According to the description of the architects themselves, the facility will consist of a multifunctional ground floor building and a smaller tower that will house hotel rooms, and the centre of the ground floor should be a central green part, a kind of piazza, or space that will serve for the daily needs of guests who will hang out, have business meetings or rest there.
In addition, the idea of the architects and investors was to build a hotel in the east of the city, which would also be visually attractive from a distance, especially considering the fact that it was planned along an extremely busy road.
What is also interesting is the solution of the façade of the construction itself: it consists of horizontal lines that round off the corners or act as if they “hug the building”, and due to the numerous decorative elements they create special optical effects that should visually enrich that part of the city.
The intention is also to make the guests at Novotel feel at home, which is why the interior design will be based on natural materials and colours, especially when it comes to the decoration of the rooms.
“Our idea was to build a four-star hotel for business guests, which we found to be chronically missing from the Zagreb market. We haven’t timed the investment with the Croatian presidency of the EU Council, since the construction of a hotel is an extremely demanding job, but we believe that the hotel capacities in Zagreb are lacking independently of the EU presidency and that we’ll be able to offer quality content to the market,” the hotel project manager, Matej Krištić, told Jutarnji list.
Zagreb’s first Novotel will be mainly intended for business guests, given the number of stars it boasts, but Krištić says that no other types of guests are excluded here, in accordance with the wishes and needs of the hotel manager with whom Rox, as an investor, entered into a separate contract.
The investors are confident that they’ll be able see a return on the value of the investment within a nine-year period, and also revealed that the construction of Novotel is only in its first phase, and given that, depending on the indicators and the operation of the future hotel, they will be interested to continue expanding their business in this segment.
All of this was shown to them in extensive research, for which they had hired a separate agency, which provided information on that location in Resnik. A possibility for the second phase of investment in a service centre and a health clinic (polyclinic), as well as additional facilities into which Rox would invest, but leave the running of the businesses to other interested partners.
“We had quite a lot of land at that location, so we thought long and hard about what purpose to use it for. The research showed us that it’d be profitable to invest in the hotel business, and in this segment we’re interested in further expansion, not only in the Zagreb area, but also in other commercially interesting locations. As we have contracted for this hotel with Accor, which is a really respectable company in the hotel business, we’re interested in continuing to cooperate with them, since the company has a lot of well-respected and successful brands,” said Krištić, citing Ibis, Sofitel and many others.
Accor Hotels is truly among the world’s leading tourism groups with more than 4,500 hotels and forty brands under its belt, the most famous of which are Ibis (one of the world’s most famous three-star hotel chains), Novotel, Mercure, Sofitel, Fairmont, Rixos and many others.
Croatia’s southernmost city of Dubrovnik, where the Rixos Libertas Resort was opened in 2009, was the ninth Rixos Hotel in the world.
In addition to Novotel, however, Croatian tourism was also glad to receive the announcement last year of an investment in the first Ibis hotel in Croatia, namely the Ibis styles hotel in Rijeka, which is a strategic partner of Accor, or the Orbis hotel group, working in partnership with Rijeka Property. According to the announcements, the first Croatian Ibis’ door’s should open for its guests in 2021, and the plan is to build a 15,000 square metre hotel.
It will have 150 rooms, including 18 family rooms, a bar, a restaurant, four conference rooms and meeting rooms, a wellness area and parking for guests and visitors of the hotel. The investment, which would employ 45 people from Rijeka, amounts to 18.5 million euros, and the new hotel capacity in Rijeka will emerge just twenty minutes away from the popular Korzo.
Unlike the Rijeka investment, which is well known for its value, Novotel’s investors don’t want to reveal the price tags associated with the project at this point in time.
According to the information Novac received, the architectural design of the hotel was entrusted to the Chapman Taylor International Architectural Office, which is recognised worldwide for its work on the Port Bak Business Tower in Azerbaijan, the modular Holiday Inn Hotel in Manchester, a Shanghai retail shopping centere for which they were awarded, as well as on projects they’re about to work on, which include a futuristic eco resort in Vietnam with six hotels and 500 villas, or a smart hotel in China at over 63,000 square meters.
This office in particular has worked on over two thousand projects so far and received 250 awards for them, and it’s interesting to note that one of their first projects, given that the office has existed for decades, was the New Scotland Yard building, designed back in 1959.
This will be the first ”trip into tourism” for the Rox company since the company primarily operates in the wholesale and distribution segment of consumer goods, and operates on the markets of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Slovenia.
At the regional level, Rox employs a total of 200 employees, and according to Business Croatia, in 2018 it generated revenues of just over 107 million kuna and employed around 100 employees in Croatia.
In addition to the distribution of its own and foreign brands, Rox also owns several petrol stations (two in Croatia and three in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina) that operate through a partnership with INA.
Despite frequent complaints by investors about the complexity of the bureaucracy and lengthy procedures in Croatia, this company’s ”trip into tourism” has so far gone smoothly, and if everything goes to plan, in 2021 the eastern part of Zagreb should finally receive a more respectable hotel complex.
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