Copos to control the Crowne Plaza

This decision will allow Copos to be directly involved in the hotel’s management, and he will no longer be forced to adhere to an investment schedule.

The unit was developing an investment program which started with a €2 million project for the renovation of its kitchen.

Through the management agreement, Ana Hotels, the company controlling Copos’s seven hotels in Romania, was forced to make several investments to maintain standards to meet those of similar hotels part of this chain. However, in the case of franchises investments are determined by the owner.

Copos’s decision is unusual, as hotel owners generally do the opposite. The new contract is to go into effect as of November 1. A contract of this kind is usually signed for one or two years. Copos was unavailable to comment on the information by the time the edition closed. Copos owns two five-star hotels in Bucharest: Athenee Palace Hilton and Crowne Plaza.

Simona Constantinescu, former General Manager of Ana Hotels, and now member in the Board of Directors of this same company, said that the new contract has not yet been signed, as negotiations have not ended.

She added that the Athenee Palace Hilton will not undergo any changes.
One main result of Copos’s decision is the resignation of the unit’s General Manager, Franz Rattenstetter, from the position he has held for the past 6 years, to occupy a similar one with the German Steinberg Hotels chain.

Frenchman Pierre Boissel is the unit’s new General Manager, a former employee of the Intercontinental chain. Boissel is General Manager of the Ana Hotels company, according to latest available information.

A management agreement with an international chain generally involves moderate influence of the unit’s owner on the strategy applied by the administering company. In practical terms, when a hotel owner signs such a contract, he is agreeing to a secondary decision-making position.