ONE of the big tourism players in Cebu, the JPark Island Resort Cebu, formerly known as Imperial Palace, will be bringing its water park facilities to Luzon in 2015.
JPark Island Resort president Justin S. Uy said the P1.2 billion project will sit in an eight-hectare property in Sta. Rosa, Laguna and will retain the name JPark Island Resort.
“We’re still in the drawing stage now. We are planning to have it early next year but the completion will probably take 18 months,” Uy told Sun.Star Cebu on the sidelines of JPark’s grand launching on Tuesday.
The newest addition to JPark’s portfolio will have 150 rooms, smaller than the existing facility in Lapu Lapu City, which has 556 rooms. The room rates in Sta. Rosa, according to Uy, will be lower than JPark in Lapu Lapu because the former will only be a three- or four-star hotel.
Rebranding
On June 1 this year, Philippine BXT Corp, the company running and managing the Imperial Palace, officially rebranded the facility to JPark Island Resort Cebu.
The move, according to officials, was to position JPark Island Resort as a property not only limited to a resort and hotel, but also as a waterpark and amusement park.
In the past three years, Philippine BXT Corp franchised the Imperial Palace brand and personally ran and managed the facility.
“We were initially managed by Imperial Palace of Korea for the first two years but after that we managed it but we still used Imperial as a franchise. Starting June 1 of this year, we were finally strong enough to come up with our own identity, we are now called JPark, which we can call our own, a Filipino brand,” Uy said.
JPark is a combination of Uy’s first name and his Korean partner’s name Park Yong Jun. Park serves as chairman of Philippine BXT Corp.
Uy said that the company is also planning to set up hotels and resorts in Boracay and Bohol but no definite plans yet as to when.
The official also welcomed the possibility of international expansion.
For the last three months since the rebranding took place, Uy said the occupancy rate in JPark remains to be “high,” like that of Imperial Palace.
However, he stressed that the resort wants to attract not only Koreans but also other nationalities like Japanese, Americans, and Europeans.
For now, 70 percent of the tourists in JPark are Koreans.
High occupancy
“In Mactan, there remains to be a healthy, high level of occupancy. We are doing very good especially in the last four years. So far, in the last three months, we didn’t see any drop,” Uy said.
For more tourists to come in the Philippines, particularly in Cebu, Uy cited the important role the government plays. He said there is a high need to improve Cebu’s infrastructure. “We (Cebu) have a very good future (in tourism) but we need help from the government to improve the infrastructure…If we don’t have better our facilities, we will just discourage tourists,” he added.
Uy said the Philippines’ tourist arrivals lag in Southeast Asia.
From January to June this year, the Department of Tourism recorded 2.43 million international tourists to the Philippines, growing at 2.22 percent compared to the same period in 2013 with registered arrivals of 2.38 million.
Yu said tourist arrivals in Thailand is five times than that of the Philippines. JOG
Source
https://www.sunstar.com.ph/more-articles/jpark-to-expand-to-luzon
