BHI to upgrade Boracay resort
Boulevard Holdings, Inc. (BHI) is tearing down the rooms in Fridays Boracay and renovating the resort to upgrade its amenities and reposition it to an upscale market segment.
“We won’t open up Fridays Boracay if BHI is just going to earn a run-of-the-mill return based on cutthroat room rates,” the firm said in a disclosure on Wednesday, citing the P5,000 to P8,000 per night market segment.
The announcement was made in response to reports from stockholders who had been to Boracay and seen the closed-down Fridays resort in spite of the full-occupancy status of the island.
BHI said that it is allocating capital from recent sales proceeds to reposition its market segment within the P12,000 to P20,000 a night clientele.
“This means we are currently tearing down all the 50 rooms to the foundation poles and spending on new fixtures, furniture and fittings, new elevators to handle clients coming in from the mountain behind us, brand new plumbing system, new employee housing and dining facilities, new landscaping and lighting schemes, and two new restaurants at the beach front,” the company said.
BHI said it is spending to develop the resort to compete in the Boracay “super-premium market.”
“From these activities, BHI expects free cash flow upwards of 9 million a month after fixed and working capital reinvestment. We look forward to definitely opening at the end of September this year,” the firm said.
“Please be assured we are laying the basis for earnings growth in the medium term derived from solid tourism and property opportunities,” it added.
BHI noted that foreign visitors to Boracay are expected to return in the last quarter of the year.
It cited figures from the Malay Tourism Office showing a total of 150,597 mostly domestic tourists visited the island in March 2022 alone, exceeding the “normal” March 2019 figure of 145,204 that counted the combined foreign and local visitors.
The company said that netting out the marginal foreign visitors for 2022, the number of visitors in March this year “spells out an unseasonal adjusted-growth rate of 102.9%. It is in this environment, FHI (Friday’s Holdings, Inc.) hopes to grow its resort revenues.”
Earlier this month, BHI reported that its 12-month sales ending in May 2022 surged to P18.57 million from just P665,027.92. It said the figures cover only its resort in Puerto Galera.
Aside from FHI, the company’s subsidiaries are Fridays Puerto Galera, Inc. and Crown One Land, Inc. The group primarily operates in segments of providing hotel and resort amenities and investment holding.
On Wednesday, BHI shares dropped by 4.65% or P0.004 to close at P0.082 at the stock exchange. — Luisa Maria Jacinta C. Jocson
