North-east entrepreneur Robert Cook was back in Aberdeen yesterday to see work get under way on another new hotel.
The chief executive of De Vere Urban Village Resorts had a helping hand in the ground-breaking ceremony from former Scotland rugby star Gavin Hastings, who is now a brand ambassador for the leisure firm.
The official start of work on De Vere’s latest “urban village resort” at Kingswells – the first in Scotland – came in the same week as north-east hotelier Stewart Spence announced that his Marcliffe Hotel and Spa will close in November 2014.
Mr Cook, who grew up in the north-east and went to Peterhead Academy, said the loss of the Marcliffe – Aberdeen’s only five-star hotel – would leave a gap at the top end of the market.
But the Robert Gordon University graduate also said the new De Vere resort could benefit if any of the Marcliffe’s staff, which he said were the best-trained in Aberdeen, wanted to go and work there.
In addition, he said the new hotel would take a “sensible” approach to pricing at times of peak demand, such as during the biennial Offshore Europe (OE) oil and gas show.
Aberdeen hotels are notorious for hiking up prices for OE, or when offshore crew changes make rooms scarce, but Mr Cook said De Vere would not take advantage beyond normal supply and demand-based room yield management.
The £20million-plus investment at the Prime Four business park at Kingswells will put De Vere’s latest offering, the first of three new Scottish resorts the group is building, at the heart of a fast-growing energy hub.
Its neighbours there will include Apache, Nexen, Transocean and Premier Oil. Developer Drum Property Group is in “active discussions” with other potential occupiers and expects to announce other tenancy deals soon.
Drum director Graeme Bone said: “We have already attracted a number of blue-chip tenants to Prime Four and the arrival of a prestigious hotel group such as De Vere underlines the park’s credentials as a world-class business environment.
“The critical mass we now have for Prime Four supports the view that it will play a major role in generating economic activity for the north-east of Scotland for many years to come.”
De Vere Urban Village Resort will have 148 bedrooms, business and conferencing facilities, a Starbucks coffee shop, restaurant, bar and luxury health spa and leisure club.
It is expected to open during the fourth quarter of 2014 and create about 120 jobs. Mr Cook said the site, which covers around 100,000 square feet, was the ideal location, adding: “This is a hugely significant investment for our group.
“It has been planned and designed to complement the world-class office facilities Drum is developing at the park.”
He said De Vere was already looking at Dundee as a potential new location for the urban village resort brand, while Inverness, Perth and Stirling could follow.