RLC putting up P500-M hotel in Tacloban

The Board of Investments (BOI) approved a P500-million hotel project of Robinson Land Corp.’s Summit Hotel and Resorts Group in the “Yolanda”-stricken Tacloban City, Leyte.

In a statement yesterday, the BOI said the project complied as a tourism project under the 2017 Investment Priorities Plan, a list of government preferred projects qualified to receive fiscal and non-fiscal incentives.

The BOI said the project, which was endorsed by the tourism department as a five-star hotel facility, would be located within the Robinsons Place Complex in Tacloban City.

Named Summit Hotel Tacloban, the 138-room hotel will begin commercial operations in April next year, making it the fifth Summit Hotel in the country and RLC’s 12th BOI-registered hotel project.

RLC is part of the Gokongwei-owned JG Summit Holdings Inc., one of the top conglomerates in the country with interests in real estate and hotels, food and beverages, air transportation, banking, petrochemicals and core investments in telecommunications and power distribution.

“This will serve as a significant boost to the recovery efforts in the region, beefing up local tourism, further pushing economic growth, and providing more livelihood and employment opportunities to the people within the area,” said Trade Undersecretary and BOI Managing Head Ceferino Rodolfo in a statement.

Supertyphoon Yolanda, one of the world’s strongest, hit the Philippines, particularly Tacloban, in late 2013.

From then to June this year, the BOI said it had approved a total of 81 projects worth P128.5 billion in areas affected by Yolanda. Of these, 11 projects are in Leyte, one of the areas hardest hit by the typhoon. All of these projects, once operational, would generate 10,682 new jobs.

Over half of these registered projects are energy and power projects, of which 27 are into renewable energy, the BOI said. The rest are shared by the manufacturing, real estate, agriculture, forestry and fishing, and accommodation and food services sectors.

This year alone witnessed a construction boom with 12 real-estate projects and nine renewable energy projects which are expected to boost the social and economic development in the areas devastated by the super typhoon, the BOI said.