One of the World’s Biggest Hospitality Summits Is Coming to Egypt

Egypt’s hospitality scene is getting harder and harder to keep tabs on. Every other day, there’s a a glitzy new hotel planting its flag on a different stretch of Med or Red Sea, beautifully battered buildings older than entire nations are being revived, global names are muscling into the market, and investors, flush or frugal, are looking at the country with increasingly serious eyes.

So, if there’s ever been a time to get the industry’s biggest bidders, builders, and brokers into a room together, it’s now. And if there’s one place where all three already tend to congregate, it’s the Dubai-famous Future Hospitality Summit: one of the hotel scene’s most important powwows, where developers who look at a blank map and see an audaciously elaborate resort, operators who have the keys to some very swanky stays and the big-name brands behind tomorrow’s feed-filling destinations come together to figure out what gets built next. And this November 10th and 11th, that whole room is relocating to Cairo, as the summit makes its first-ever stop in Egypt, where the hotel pipeline is increasingly threatening to burst.

Organised by hospitality-summit veterans The Bench and touching down at Sofitel Downtown Cairo Nile, the inaugural Egyptian edition is aptly themed “Where Heritage Inspires Investment”, a neat way of summing up the rather complicated question at hand: how do you turn a country’s extraordinary past into its next generation of places to stay, work, eat and invest? And across two days of panels, pitches and plenty of networking, that conversation will stretch from Gulf money and hotel performance to Cairo’s old bones, Red Sea resorts, the North Coast and the increasingly big business of branded residences.

As for the line-up, it reads rather like a cross-section of the machinery behind a hotel boom: you have Tatweer Misr on the development side, JLL and HVS bringing the property and hotel-market intel, Radisson Hotel Group, Rotana and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts representing the global hotel brands, Aleph Hospitality from the management side and UN Tourism weighing in on the bigger picture. And that’s before we get to everyone else making their way to the gloriously chaotic capital, which we’ll be doing soon enough.

For now, keep your focus on the feed, because SceneTraveller will be on the ground as the official Media Partner, cameras in tow and interview booth at the ready. We’ll be bringing you the people behind the projects, the bits that don’t always make it onto the conference stage, and the hotel-world gossip we’re probably not supposed to call gossip.