Felipe Arranz, director of Villa Padierna Hotels & Resorts, is very optimistic about the great future that awaits the well-known Costa del Sol resort with three golf courses and the prestigious hotel where the then first lady of the United States Michelle Obama and one of her daughters stayed.
And even more so now that the emblematic Villa Padierna Palace is to be managed by one of the world’s most important brands in the operation of exclusive luxury hotels, Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas, part of the Minor Hotels chain, which has close to 600 establishments in more than 50 countries and owns brands such as NH Hotel Group. The Asian chain will operate the aforementioned hotel and the Villa Padierna Thermas Hotel, in Carratraca (Málaga), on a rental and management basis.
From now on, the hotel will be called Anantara Villa Padierna Palace Marbella-Benahavís Resort and will be the second property operated under this acronym in Europe. Anantara has already been managing the Vilamoura Algarve Resort in Portugal for months. Throughout the world, this brand has fifty luxury hotels, mainly in Asia, and now its intention is to penetrate strongly in Europe, and they have started through these two golf resorts in the Iberian Peninsula. Their next project is located on the Amalfi coast of Italy.
With three 18-hole golf courses, Michael Campbell Golf Academy, beach club, racquet club with 22,000 square meters for sports activities (tennis, paddle tennis and croquet), spa and medical wellness of 2,000 square meters, five-star hotel, eight restaurants, and a luxurious and varied real estate development, there is no doubt that Villa Padierna is one of the most important golf resorts not only in Spain but throughout Europe.
Felipe Arranz, a 9.2 handicap on paper but with two handicaps in practice, as he confesses, a graduate in Business Management from the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas in Madrid and the Hochscule Reutlingen in Munich, Germany, is convinced that the agreement signed with Minor Hoteles will have a positive impact on the resort as a whole. “It’s a great agreement for both parties and the resort will benefit greatly,” he says.
-What implications will the agreement with Minor Hotels have for the resort?
-Minor Group will manage the entire resort, except for the sports area, which includes the three golf courses, the academy and the racquet club. They will be in charge of the hotel, including the spa, and the seven restaurants: the four restaurants inside the hotel plus the beach club, La Cantina del Golf and the restaurant serving the racquet club.
In addition to the seven restaurants that will be managed directly by Anantara Hotels, the resort will have a new addition before the summer, Sushi 99, a renowned Japanese cuisine restaurant with establishments in Madrid, Barcelona and Abu Dhabi, and plans to open others in Dubai, Los Angeles, London and an Eastern European country.
-What is going to happen to the golf courses?
-In principle, the Villa Padierna Group will keep the golf course. We have had a well-defined strategy for two years now, trying to enhance the name and make the courses identifiable by their characteristics. We have three 18-hole courses. The main one of the resort would be Flamingos, which is located around the hotel and is the commercial course, the course that sells our golf, so to speak. It is an easy course, with very good views and quite pleasant.
Then we have Alferini, which is our championship course, the course that goes deeper into the mountains, where you practically play by yourself, you have no houses, no noise around you, so it is a very interesting course. It is a long course, complicated, with water and it is more dedicated to a client with a reduced handicap, so to speak, but it is having a very good acceptance among all the clients from the center and north of Europe.
And finally there is Tramores, which is half pitch and putt and half normal golf course and is focused more on teaching. We want to combine it with the academy we have with Michael Campbell, the 2005 US Open champion, who beat Tiger Woods, and together with him we want to develop a new concept of teaching golf where the student is not only on the driving range but can go out and enjoy a couple of holes of golf, see different situations and be able to correct mistakes and thus implement their golf.
Since the golf club is growing and so is the number of members, our goal is to provide them with a clubhouse as they deserve, and this will be located in Alferini, which will allow us to have a centralized clubhouse from both Alferini and Flamingos and much closer to the driving range, which right now is a bit far away. This will also make more sense for the distribution of the courses.
-What differentiates Villa Padierna from other golf resorts on the Costa del Sol?
What we offer is a very well-defined product that focuses on a clientele and a high-end, luxury product. We offer top quality facilities, from the hotel to the restaurants and the golf courses, of course, and we focus a lot on customer service, with a great welcome and constant attention from the moment you enter our resort until you leave. What we are offering is not just coming to play a golf course, but a very pleasant experience in every way. You could say that excellence is our hallmark.
-In the residential area, what real estate products does Villa Padierna have?
-When the resort was purchased, around five million square meters were acquired. We developed the first and second phases, which is where the hotel and the golf courses are located, and all the real estate product, which is around a thousand homes, both single-family homes and Mediterranean village and apartments, and now the future is the development of the second phase, which comprises 192 single-family plots. It is a concept that we want to develop of an urbanization within an urbanization, thus enhancing the security and privacy of the residents. We are receiving a lot of demand from both foreign and domestic investors. The starting price will be between 600 and 800 euros per square meter and we are talking about plots of 2,200 square meters or more.
Felipe Arranz approaches the future of tourism and the residential market of the Costa del Sol with optimism despite the symptoms of economic stagnation that could even point to a period of recession, according to different sources. “We are well positioned and we have to know how to take advantage of Marbella as a brand, we have to develop this diamond in the rough that we have, and I think we are not yet aware of it”.
In the opinion of the director of Villa Padierna Hotels & Resorts, “it is necessary to work together, with the rest of the businessmen, which is what we have lacked in recent years, we must try to join forces, strengthen the brand and develop everything to the level it deserves. And not to go betting on simplistic and short-term businesses, but on a long-term strategy where we all go in the same direction and we all empower ourselves because surely, as my father (Ricardo Arranz, president of the Villa Padierna Group) says, the best years of Marbella are yet to come and that is when we have to be attentive and not miss the opportunities”.
With a lot of work and responsibilities as a director of the Villa Padierna Group, Felipe Arranz doesn’t play golf as much as he would like, but he shows his intention to reverse the situation a little. “The truth,” he says, “is that last year I became a bit obsessed because, taking into account that we own several courses, we had to perform, so to speak, on the golf courses. My goal then was to get below double digits and last summer I managed to get to a 9.2 handicap. Now I’m clearly not meeting it, but I’ll have to get back to it a bit in the summer, as friendships and commitments are coming up, and I’ll have to get back on top of my game”.
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