When the Ascott Group took over what was formerly known as the Oakwood Premiere Ayala Center in 2000, guests never had any inkling as to what is about to happen.

Arthur Gindap, country manager for the Ascott Group (owner of the Ascott properties in the country), said, “guests slept with Oakwood and woke up with Ascott.” With surgical knife precision, Ascott undertook the transformation overnight with very minimal disturbance to hotel operations. “There was a small army of personnel working overnight to replace all the Oakwood materials with Ascott. Even the packet of sugar used by the guests for their morning coffee already had the Ascott logo,” he said.

Ten years after, this kind of service has become the standard in the serviced apartment segment of the hospitality sector in the country.

The bulk of the Ascott’s clients are business travelers, mostly expatriates on long-stay assignments. New clients, he said, are introduced not only to the services and facilities of the serviced apartment but also their surroundings. “We even give them a security briefing and take them on a city tour around Makati and even to the American cemetery,” he said.

Ascott now has four properties in the country. The flagship Ascott Makati is right inside the Glorietta shopping mall and has become the choice residence for long-stay business and leisure travelers in the country. There are two Somerset properties—Millennium and Olympia—in Legaspi Village and cater to extended-stay guests, mainly families. The fourth one is Somerset Salcedo in the Salcedo area of the central business district.

Gindap said Ascott will bring its third brand—Citadines—into the country very soon. “My goal is to sign the Citadines project within the year,” he said.

Declining to provide specific details, Gindap said the project area will be within “Makati” and construction may take around “two years.”

The Ascott executive said the plan is to launch the first Citadines property in the country in a “central place to give it a lot of exposure.”

Gindap is excited to bring in the Citadines brand, saying its facilities and equipment are apt for travelers in the Philippines.

The Ascott brand, he explained, caters to the high-end market while Somerset is for families. The Citadines properties, on the other hand, are for the individual travelers as these have smaller rooms (ranging from studio to 1-bedroom units) with very chic furnishing.

Gindap said after Makati, the company might soon look into building in other growth areas, particularly Bonifacio Global City in Taguig, Alabang, Cebu and the Quezon City financial hub. He said he sees the Bonifacio area to be fully developed within four to five year, making it imperative for Ascott to build a property there.

Unlike most hotel chains that only manage the properties, Gindap explains that Ascott Ltd. prefers to be owners. “There’s a different perspective if the operator owns the property as well because our motive is always on how we can earn from our apartments and residences and increase the shareholdings of our stakeholders,” Gindap explains. The company owns three of the Ascott properties in the country while the fourth one is managed.

He said Ascott does not rely on occupancy rate numbers (although the properties average between 85 percent and 95 percent occupancy rate) to measure performance. “We’re more interested in ARPU or the average revenue per user (sometimes average revenue per unit), which is defined as the total revenue divided by the number of [in Ascott’s case] guests.”

The three Ascott properties in the country are owned by the Ascott Residence Trust (Ascott REIT), which recently became the sixth-largest REIT in Singapore in terms of assets after its recent acquisition of 28 more services properties from The Ascott.

Despite the debt crisis and the recent hostage-taking incident in Manila, Gindap said the company is optimistic about the prospects of serviced apartments in the country. The company, he explains, stands to benefit from the rising intra-Asean trade.

“We already account for 90 percent of the market for serviced apartments in the country,” said Gindap. “We know exactly what we are and where we’re heading and we’re focused on our market.”