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Ho Kwon Ping’s love of journeying was sparked as a journalist, both on the job at the Far Eastern Economic Review and while backpacking with his then-girlfriend (now his wife), Claire Chiang. “The romance of travel is something I’ve always loved and it had nothing to do with luxury. Even today, Banyan Tree isn’t about luxury, but the manifestation of new places, experiences, cultures and people,” he says. It all began when Ho purchased a small piece of land in Phuket to build a summer house (which morphed into what is now the prodigious Laguna Phuket). The decision to build a hotel instead soon snowballed into a business based on entering an area of hospitality with little competition and creating its own stakes. Today, Banyan Tree still occupies its position within the same niche.
Selecting locations involves a rigour, intuition and instinctive response, but selecting areas in Mexico and the Caribbean was largely a strategy to access the US short-haul market, in the same way that Marrakech and Greece were chosen to cater for Western Europeans. After analysis of the access infrastructure however, it’s all about the ‘wow factor’. Ho admits that after all the beaches he has seen, drawing the line between stellar and run-of-the-mill has become natural.
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His industry savvy came with practice; after buying an abandoned tin mine in Phuket purely for its moonscape and surreal quality, he discovered that it had been written off as one of the most polluted areas in the region. Ever the realist, Ho admits to making his fair share of mistakes, finding that the benefit of experience is one’s capacity to extrapolate and learn from error.
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