HILTON TO OPEN ITS FIRST MAJORCAN HOTEL

By Humphrey Carter THE Hilton Hotel group announced yesterday that it will open its first luxury hotel in Majorca next June. The Hilton Sa Torre Hotel is going to be set in the grounds of a stately home and medieval tower in LLucmajor which dates back to 1369. The 29 million euro development is going to be carried out by Majorcan construction company Drac, whose chairman Vicente Grande is the current chairman of Real Mallorca football club, which actually owns the site, while the hotel will be run as a franchise by Gestion T3. The 90-bedroom (15 of which will be suites) hotel is going to be built with the tower as the primary focus of the project and Pere Nicolau, who designed the new Palma airport, will be taking care of the architecture. The 56'000 square metre luxury hotel project is being designed to cater not only for summer visitors but also conventions and business tourism during the low season periods. The main building will feature the reception area, a small haute-cuisine restaurant, banqueting facilities, lounge and bar while adjoining buildings will include further conference, meeting and banqueting facilities. Hilton Sa Torre will be part of the Hilton Mediterranean wing of the international hotel chain and vice-chairman Theo Kreutzer said that he is “extremely proud” that Hilton is moving into Majorca and expanding its Spanish operations, something Kreutzer said the company intends to continue. Gestion T3*s Ton Lodder, who has worked with Hilton International for the past 13 years and for luxury hotels around the world, is in charge of setting up and launching the hotel, and says he is extremely excited about opening Hilton's new hotel in Majorca “one of Europe's and the world's most popular tourist destinations.”