New openings and offers this winter at Sol Melia

Sol Meliá opens the Gran Meliá Shanghai, a new hotel industry icon in the most industrialised city in China

• 25 years after becoming the first international hotel chain in Bali, the leading hotel chain in Spain and Latin America-Caribbean remains committed to Asia and opens its first hotel in China.
• The Gran Meliá Shanghai Hotel provides 686 rooms over 30 floors and is one of the leading lights in avant-garde design and Feng Shui philosophy in the city.
• The Universal Exhibition that the city will host in 2010 will be the perfect showcase for a hotel which combines Latin flair with the finest luxury and hospitality experience of the Gran Meliá hotel brand.

The largest resort hotel company in the world, Sol Meliá Hotels & Resorts, has announced further growth in Asia with the new five-star Gran Meliá Shanghai Hotel. The hotel is a sign of the commitment of Sol Meliá to growth in China and its first development in this growing economic giant, providing customers with an ideal hotel for exploring and enjoying the vibrant and dynamic city of Shanghai.

The Gran Meliá Shanghai Hotel, the new jewel in the company’s Asian crown, is located in the district of Lujiazui, the financial and commercial heart of the city, with easy access to the most popular attractions and entertainment such as the famous Oriental Pearl tower and the Shanghai Aquarium. The hotel enjoys magnificent views over the Huangpu River and district of Puxi, and is the maximum exponent of ultra-modern design in the city based around traditional Feng Shui philosophy, in which all of the architectural features of the building live in perfect harmony with its location, providing the most discerning guests with the most enjoyable stay in a great location for meeting their business needs.

Displaying all of the exquisite luxury so characteristic of the superior category Gran Meliá hotel brand, the hotel provides a wide range of services for business travellers and a total of 17 meeting rooms for between 20 and 150 people, a large ballroom with space for up to 800 guests, as well as Wi-Fi access throughout the hotel, newspaper service, CD and DVD library, buffet breakfast, lounges and business centres fully equipped with additional services such as secretaries, transport, fax and e-mail.

The opening of the hotel comes just a few months before the celebration of the Shanghai Universal Exhibition to be held between May and October 2010 where numerous delegations and tourists from all over the world are expected to visit. The impact of the event on hotel occupancy will be an excellent opportunity for the promotion of the Gran Meliá Shanghai Hotel, undoubtedly the most important Sol Meliá development at the close of 2009, consolidating its growth in Asia and creating great expectations amongst the public.

For more information, visit www.granmeliashanghai.com

Sol Meliá, first biosphere hotel company 

• Certification has involved an arduous company-wide process to verify achievements and assume environmental, social and cultural commitments.
• The hotel chain’s agreements with suppliers and tour operators already include sustainability clauses.
• Sol Meliá remains a pioneer in its commitment to Responsible Tourism.

Sol Meliá has become the first hotel company in the world to be certified by the prestigious Responsible Tourism Institute (RTI), supported by UNESCO, as a ‘Biosphere Hotel Company’. Sol Meliá has successfully concluded a certification process which has verified all of the company’s processes and business units on the basis of the criteria which define Responsible Tourism.

The value of the certification by the RTI basically lies in its ‘broad scope’ given that it is the only hotel certification which includes company-wide social, environmental and cultural requirements, and applies all of those requirements to the relationship with all of its stakeholders. In particular, to achieve certification Sol Meliá has had to successfully complete an exhaustive analysis of company activities from a sustainable tourism perspective:

To achieve certification the hotel chain had to have a minimum of 10% of its hotels certified by an official certification agency and then assume a commitment to add more hotels. Sol Meliá currently operates 15 ‘Biosphere Hotels’, 8 hotels that have been awarded ‘Green Globe’ certification, 7 with ISO 14.001 certification and 4 more with EMAS certification.

The company must also demonstrate a certain degree of compliance and progress in the criteria applied to environmental, social and cultural factors. In the environmental arena the criteria applied, amongst others, include the standardisation of eco-efficient lighting, water and energy saving systems, the involvement of customers in responsible behaviour (consumption, waste management, etc) and the way that Sol Meliá interacts with and protects the biodiversity in its immediate environment. Amongst other advances and achievements, Sol Meliá has eco-efficient lighting systems in all of its new hotels, water recycling systems and other systems to make use of the geo-thermal energy generated by some hotels, an electronic billing project which eliminates the need for paper, ‘green floors’ in some hotels and, amongst other initiatives, an agreement with the World Wildlife Fund to protect the natural environment around the land acquired in Salvador de Bahía in Brazil.

Sol Meliá will also continue to make progress on its ‘SAVE’ programme to reduce energy use, a strategic project for the company to help fight climate change and one which has made Sol Meliá the first Spanish company to incorporate the ‘Voluntary Commitment System’ against climate change defined by the Spanish Ministry of the Environment.

PROMOTIONS


MELIA HOTEL DE LA RECONQUISTA - OVIEDO
EURO144*

  • Buffet Breakfast
  • 2 tickets to the Bellas Artes museum
  • Upgrade to a Premium Room

* Terms and conditions apply

MELIA BILBAO: CITY BREAK CULTURAL PACKAGE
EURO144*

  • Buffet Breakfast
  • 2 tickets to the Guggenheim Museum
  • Upgrade to a Premium Room

* Terms and conditions apply


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GDS Chain codes:
Amadeus/Worldspan/Galileo – SM
Sabre – ME