DoubleDragon breaks ground on new Hotel101 in Spain

DoubleDragon [DD 8.13, down 0.6%] [link], the property developer owned by Injap Sia and Tony Caktiong, announced that it has already broken ground on its 680-room Hotel101-Madrid and signed a contract for the hotel’s construction with Ferrovial Construction. Full-scale construction is scheduled to begin in April of this year, and be fully completed by Q4/25 which is “just in time” for a massive tourism event, the Madrid F1 Grand Prix. The press release said that when it is completed, the Hotel101-Madrid will be “one of the top 5 largest hotels in Madrid”.

MB BOTTOM-LINE: This is an impressively large project in a prestigious location, but due to the sheer audacity of DD’s goals for its Hotel101 expansion, I can’t consume this news without instantly wondering when we’ll see similar grandiose announcements about groundbreakings in the 22 other countries that DD said Hotel101 would expand into by 2026. If this hotel will take around 18 months to complete, then we’d expect to see 22 more of these announcements over the next four or five quarters if all 25 hotels are to be operational by December 31, 2026. Again, I’m not saying that they can do it, or that they can’t do it, I’m only saying that the goal is so big and huge that I feel like we need to see more movement to confirm that the timeline is possible. DD announced the start of its Hotel101 project in Japan in Q4/23, and now this Hotel101 project in Spain in Q1/24. One per quarter won’t get us to 25 in time. I’m waiting for the pace of Hotel101’s development to increase.

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