The luxury waterfront hotel is scheduled to open in (May) 2014 and is further evidence of Regent’s strategy to offer bespoke communities to visitors. Originally an Austro-Hungarian naval base, Porto Montenegro has become an illustrious destination for tourists, yacht owners and celebrities.

“The Regent Porto Montenegro will fulfil the Regent precepts of simple, elegant design and intuitive service,” said Steven Pan, Chairman of Regent Hotels & Resorts. “This bespoke hotel will be part of a community unto itself, one that offers the best in service, relaxation and entertainment.”

Located directly in Porto Montenegro marina in the Bay of Kotor, the 80-room hotel will offer thirty-five guestrooms and forty-five suites with interiors designed by Pisano Atelier. London-based ReardonSmith Architects, the recent recipients of four European Hotel Design Awards, are designing the hotel exterior in a Renaissance Venetian style, complete with a terracotta roof, inspired by Venetian aesthetics and drawing on the countless Italianate palazzi around the Bay.

The Regent Porto Montenegro will feature a ground-floor café and brasserie, fine dining restaurant and cigar lounge, meeting facilities, a signature Regent Spa and two spectacular swimming pools. A central atrium with expansive views of the sea and surrounding mountains will lead to a tranquil water garden connected to a private island for exclusive events and dining.

While guests at the Regent Porto Montenegro will be able to enjoy the luxury amenities at the hotel, they will also have full access to Porto Montenegro. The world-class marina features 184 boat berths, a lively village centre with casual cafes, fine-dining restaurants and upscale retail stores offering both local and international designer brands. Village amenities include a day spa, hair salon, yacht club and nautical museum. In the next few years, Adriatic Marinas d.o.o also plans to double its berth capacity from 185 to 370, re-develop a superyacht maintenance and refit facility in conjunction with ASY Bijela just 5km away in the Bay of Kotor, and add a premium casino to its offering.

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Photo and article: Ftnnews.com

“The government’s priority focus on Travel & Tourism, not least  its investment in providing required infrastructure, is clearly paying  off,” said Jean-Claude Baumgarten, Vice-Chairman of the World Travel  & Tourism Council (WTTC), at the launch this week in Podgorica of  WTTC’s latest economic impact study. “Montenegro is expected to be one  of the fastest growing Travel & Tourism economies in the world over  the next ten years.”

Presenting the main findings of this latest  study, Baumgarten stressed the positive outlook for the country’s Travel  & Tourism industry to the public and private sector stakeholders  gathered for the launch, led by Predrag Sekuli?, Minister for  Sustainable Development & Tourism.

“Despite the global 2008-09  economic recession and credit crisis, which resulted in a slowdown in  the growth of tourism demand and investment in 2009 and 2010, demand has  picked up this year and the outlook is considerably brighter,”  Baumgarten noted. “Indeed, we are extremely optimistic about the growth  prospects.”

Travel & Tourism’s contribution to GDP,  employment, visitor exports and investment should rise sharply from 2011  to 2021, in some cases more than doubling in share.

By way of  example, one third of all capital investment in the country (33.4%) will  be made in the Travel & Tourism industry in 2011, according to  WTTC’s research – one of the highest shares in the world. And this is  forecast to rise to 50.8% by 2021, or €876.4 million.

“Although  the global economic crisis resulted in the postponement, and even  suspension of some new Greenfield projects,” Baumgarten noted, “as well  as delays in upgrading existing hotels and resorts, private investment  has now started to pour into major projects – such as Sveti Stefan,  Porto Montenegro and Orascom’s integrated Luštica resort development.

“This  explains why WTTC predicts an average annual rate of growth in Travel  & Tourism investment for Montenegro of 16.4% a year from 2011 to  2021 – higher than for any other country in the world, and twice as fast  as that for India and China.”

Main conclusions … Montenegro  has everything a country needs to develop as a leading tourism  destination, the study concludes – spectacular natural resources,  including beautiful beaches and unspoilt nature, as well as a  fascinating history and culture. Tourists can participate in many  different kinds of activities, from swimming and sunbathing to yachting,  golf, hiking & biking, bird watching and adventure sports.

Thanks  in part to its isolation during the Balkan War, Montenegro is also a  destination that has avoided many of the pitfalls suffered by some  traditional Mediterranean hotspots, such as over-building, congestion  and the degradation of natural resources.

But most importantly,  the Montenegrin Government has demonstrated a commitment to tourism  development –¬ to developing the basic infrastructure to stimulate,  support and facilitate investment, and to creating the underlying  conditions necessary for market confidence, dynamism and sustainability.  Among the different measures taken in recent years have been the  simplification of procedures, reduced taxation, increased transparency  and improved legislation – all with the aim of generating ‘smart growth’  in line with the longer-term goal of being a green economy.

… key recommendations “WTTC  commends the Government of Montenegro for its progress over the past  ten years,” Baumgarten told delegates at the meeting. “The baseline  forecasts are all very positive and we believe that Montenegro could  even surpass these. But the underlying policy framework must continue to  be conducive to growth.”

Three key issues are singled out in the  report as areas of possible concern: human resource development and  vocational training, improved access – especially in terms of direct air  links – and marketing and promotion.

Measures are being taken to  address these, but progress is sometimes too slow. And WTTC’s focus on  the need for increased investment in marketing and promotions hit a very  sore spot with Montenegro’s tourism stakeholders as the Ministry of  Sustainable Development and Tourism is to suffer a significant drop in  its annual budget for tourism sector for 2012.

“This is not the  moment for budget cuts,” Baumgarten warned. “It is even more critical to  step up marketing and promotional activity in difficult economic times –  when one is coming out of a crisis. “That way, you will see even  greater rewards when demand really recovers.”

Source: MICE-contact

Montenegro, as it was assessed, in previous years has experienced strong growth in the field of hospitality and quickly became a very popular destination for organizing the congress tourism.

“Situated on the Adriatic coast and is often called one of Europe’s best kept secrets, the country offers vast experience in this kind of activities and excellent accommodations for their organization,” explains the HTM.

Hotel industry is growing thanks to large investments in its infrastructure and development, and given that almost all parts of Europe, located less than two hours of flight time, Montenegro is fast becoming one of the most sought after destinations in the area.

Immediately after Montenegro is Croatia, which Swiss center, described as the pearl of the Adriatic and the land that this area has plenty to offer.

Source: Pobjeda / Balkans.com

Armand Guillemot, Director of MICE sales at Great Hotels of the World comments: “Enquiries for meeting and incentive bookings have been increasing steadily since October 2010 and have risen dramatically in the first half of 2011, signalling a healthy growth in the MICE market. Our enquiries are from a mix of agency and direct corporate buyers, mainly from France, UK, Ireland and Germany. The most requested destinations for meetings and incentives are Spain and the UK but we do also get demand for other emerging destinations such as Seoul, Montenegro and India.”

Great Hotels of the World has also reported a number of other MICE trends. Lead times for enquiries are shorter with an average lead time of six weeks for enquiries in June 2011. Many companies are wary of booking too far in advance in the event of cancellation or postponement which in some cases is associated with hefty fees whereas some are simply taking advantage of favourable last minute rates and packages. The value of enquiries has increased as companies start to invest again in meetings and incentives. However at the same time, the destinations requested are usually closer to home.

Guillemot continues: “Businesses nowadays are much more return-on-investment focused. Budgets are cautiously growing but price is still a big deciding factor. Above all buyers are looking for flexibility and added value whilst remaining cost-effective.”

Source: Breaking Travel News

An occasionally Venetian trading port, the slight, stone-built city is encompassed by white stone walls that zigzag up the cliffs overlooking it. Venetian and Byzantine influences vie with each other in the labyrinthine streets dotted with little squares and Orthodox and Catholic churches.

The main square just inside the city gates is teeming with bars and restaurants with sprinkler-cooled umbrellas. There is a fantastic view to be had by walking the walls as they snake up the cliffs – but in 40-degree heat, I stuck to the cooled brollies.

I stayed in the Hotel Catarro in the main square, which is charming and partly built into the city wall with a curious 18th-century nautical theme and a suit of armour in the hall. The staff were very friendly and mostly spoke English. Outside the walls of this maquette Dubrovnik, the new town stretches away on both sides and there is a glossy marina where the Venetian trading galleys used to moor.

You can eat well anywhere here, from a late-night plate of seafood spaghetti at the bar to the Catovica Mlini restaurant half an hour away at Morinj. This is the most famous eatery around, and is set on a flat meadow by the sea with a spring bubbling by it and a cooling river running below the breezy outside dining room. You can’t go wrong with grilled fish accompanied by a glass or two of Posip, one of Croatia‘s best-known white wines.

And if you’re nice the waitress will explain at considerable length which bits of the fish’s head (a Montegrin delicacy) are best to eat. Apparently the eyes have it … Drive in either direction along the coastal road, rapidly becoming a ribbon development of “aparmanis” (holiday lets), to find a beach (generally quite crowded as there aren’t many of them) or just jump in off an old stone waterfront – as I did after lunch at the small baroque village of Perast, staring out at two churches built on islands so minuscule that they seem to float on the waves.

Tourist and development money has been pouring down the Dalmatian coast from Croatia for a few years now. Old stone houses snapped up by sharp-eyed Brits for tens of thousands of pounds are now worth millions. Montenegro isn’t as cheap as you might expect and it uses the euro.

My hotel cost €150 per night, however you can rent an apartment for €456 a week peak season. Amanresorts opened a glamorous €700 a night outpost last month on Sveti Stefan – an island of 15th-century cobble-stoned streets set beside crescent-shaped beaches, once a playground for Hollywood’s elite, including Elizabeth Taylorand Richard Burton in the Sixties.

Around the corner from Kotor, above the old Yugoslav Navy’s submarine pens, hovers a strikingly beautiful, palm fringed, jet and turquoise lido cantilevered over the sea. Beyond it floats a new fleet, testament to something very different from state socialism. This fleet is gleaming white and echoes not to admiral’s salutes and the slapping of boots to attention on armour-plated decks, but the padding of cocktail-bearing Lascars, and the thrum of money gushing through the electric ether.

A golden wand has been waved over Porto Montenegro, one-time naval base of one-time Yugoslavia. A deep-water port is very handy for the new super yachts floating around the Med looking for somewhere sympathetic to moor, and Montenegro has been persuaded to put its tiny navy elsewhere.

Peter Munk, a Canadian businessman of Hungarian extraction, backed by among othersOleg Deripaska and Nathaniel and Jacob Rothschild - Nathaniel chose to celebrate his 40th birthday here earlier this month with a lavish £1 million, three-day affair – has conjured the place into an embryonic Slav Monte Carlo: a playground with berths for yachts and apartments for sale or rent.

Nearby Tivat airport is private jet-friendly and there are shops to create a village feel, though only luxury goods companies seem to have outlets. Presumably they send in to town for fruit and fags. Access to the swimming pool will set you back €50, and God knows what a glass of dry white costs.

Oh well. Commerce and shipping have historically been the key to success on the Dalmatian littoral, and in this new configuration will prove a welcome boost to the Montenegrin economy. What’s more, this fleet is unlikely to steam up the coast to bombard secessionist cities in Croatia.

Source: Read entire article here.

On a mild June morning, the medieval city of Kotor in Montenegro seems a place lost in time. A maze of worn cobbled corridors swirl inward from the walled town’s three stone archways, opening onto a string of courtyards. The main square is filled not with shoppers and Starbucks latte guzzlers but old men drinking muddy Balkan coffee, playing chess and throwing back fiery doses of rakia, a regional fruit liquor. Female merchants lean in the doorways of their shops, sucking on hand-rolled cigarettes and gossiping in Serbo-Croat across the narrow cobbled laneways. If it weren’t for the smattering of tourists, mostly German and Russian judging by the gutteral noises in the air, it could be a regular morning in 17th-century Europe.

Until you notice the cruise ships, that is. This week there are two enormous, floating hotels docked in this secluded nook in the Bay of Kotor on the country’s northern coast. With the deepest fjord in the Mediterranean, the bay is one of the few still-rustic locales that can accommodate both full-size cruise ships and the international elite’s expanding fleet of super-yachts, many of which require $200,000 for fuel tank fill-ups (marina fuel in Montenegro is sold duty-free). In addition to tax breaks, the country offers heartbreaking scenery: steep, scrub-dotted mountains plunge dramatically into the pristine Adriatic Sea. The incongruity of these monolithic floating energy-guzzlers transposed on such unspoiled natural beauty provides a visual metaphor of the extraordinary transition gripping one of the world’s youngest and smallest democracies.

Montenegro has one of the lowest corporate and personal income tax rates in Europe, at just nine per cent. With increased development, jobs are being created (Montenegro has a lower unemployment rate—currently 11.6 per cent—than both Spain and Greece), while labour remains relatively cheap and appealing to investors. In 2002, it opted to unilaterally adopt the euro as its official currency, and, in 2007, the country became a member of the World Bank and the IMF. Late last year Montenegro was granted official EU candidate status. But as Luksic told me in a phone interview, there is still much work to be done. His government has been cracking down on the kind of corruption, organized crime and money-laundering that has run rampant in other parts of post-Communist Eastern Europe. But on the flip side, he says, he is keen to attract as much legitimate outside investment as possible. “We are determined to improve the economic environment by getting foreign investors in and by cutting red tape,” he explained. “As for joining the EU, we hope to open up session talks at some point next year. But at this point we are really not so obsessed with dates.”

Maybe not, but things seems to be changing quite rapidly for the small Balkan nation. Montenegro is in some ways deliciously backwards (highway gas stations have full-service cocktail bars and organic food is plentiful, due to a lack of factory farming rather than bourgeois demand), and in other ways amazingly progressive (the Bay of Kotor region is a UNESCO world heritage site with strict environmental controls on development—only those catering to the high-end luxury market need apply).

Recent developments include refurbishing Sveti Stefan, a former fisherman’s village that in its 1960s heyday played host to the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Kirk Douglas, a $2-billion Swiss resort development on the Lustica peninsula that has a 670-hectare golf course, as well as a major luxury sand beach resort funded by a Qatari developer.

But the project that Prime Minister Luksic is most excited about was in fact spearheaded by a Canadian. Back in 2004, Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk decided he wanted to build a luxury port for the super-yacht set in the Bay of Kotor. He persuaded some high-placed friends to invest, among them Nathaniel and Jacob Rothschild, Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and Bernard Arnault, the French CEO of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. Since then, a once-rusting naval shipyard in the village of Tivat has been transformed into Porto Montenegro, a full-service luxury marina, with everything from on-site customs, refuelling services, shopping and fitness facilities, to a bar and restaurant, as well as palm trees shipped in from Uruguay.

On this particular evening at dusk, the main pier at Porto Montenegro looks as glamorous—although distinctly less crowded—as any of the more famous French and Italian destination ports of Western Europe. The imported palms are lit up by dramatic spotlights, and uniformed deckhands hose down their gleaming charges as the Mediterranean sun sinks low in the sky. The Porto Montenegro staff has set up a barbecue at the end of the pier and are passing out burgers for the annual crew party. It’s hard to believe that Yugoslav submarines used to lurk below the harbour’s surface. For Prime Minister Luksic, the port is a first step toward a new world order.

“It’s definitely the development that has changed the way Montenegro is seen in the eyes of the world,” he said. “It goes over in a positive way with private investors, because on the one hand Porto Monenegro is shape-shifting—it replaced a naval shipyard with a new marina, but it’s also mind-shifting, opening up an array of other small business opportunities. And this shape-shifting and mind-shifting, it is exactly what we’re trying to do in Montenegro.”

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The vista is quintessentially Mediterranean – a shimmering blue bay and craggy   limestone mountains framed by the swaying fronds of palm trees.

This week, it was Monte Carlo. Next week, Montenegro. Nat Rothschild, who has one of the best financial brains in a family renowned for business acumen, will be 40 next Tuesday, and intends to make this a weekend to remember.

The financier is rumoured to be splashing out £1m on a birthday bash. That is small change for a man whose personal wealth is reckoned to be about a thousand times that amount. And the little state of Montenegro is understandably delighted to be chosen as the venue.

Montenegro is a staggeringly beautiful, mountain statelet onn the c oast of the Adriatic, only just more than half the size of Wales with a population of 660,000, slightly more than that of Glasgow. It has been an independent state only since 2006, when its people voted in a referendum to sever their union with Serbia. It is probably best known to the British public as the supposed setting of the film Casino Royale, though most of it was actually shot in the Czech Republic.

Uniquely for a sovereign state, Montenegro has no currency. All transactions are conducted in euros though it is not in the EU or the eurozone. This peculiarity has made it a magnet for Russian oligarchs, and for people who want to disguise the source of their wealth, such as Irish drug barons.

It is also open for those with legitimate business interests, including Nat Rothschild, who will be combining with pleasure by flying his guests in to see for themselves the attractions of the Bay of Kotor, one of Europe’s finest natural harbours, tucked between the mountains of Montenegro.

Mr Rothschild and his main business partner, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, have sunk a lot of money in to the fresh concrete that has been laid on the water’s edge in Kotor Bay. The British media will obviously focus its attention on who is or is not a guest at the Rothschild bash, because the only social event of the summer to match this one was last week’s wedding of the billionaire Prince Albert of Monaco to the former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock.

Eager to whet everyone’s curiosity, Porto Montenegro’s sales and marketing director, Colin Kingsmill, has told journalists that invitations have gone to “the ritziest, wealthiest, and most photogenic people on earth”.

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When we call Robert, he tells us: “The reason we have decided to open in Porto Montenegro is that it is clear that everything they have promised over the last 4 years is being delivered. The marina has been constructed to a very high quality and has the correct top end boutique brands and young, enthusiastic management that are in-line with our style of brokerage and way of doing business. It is a very sophisticated environment, that is without doubt going to be one of the most popular destinations in the Mediterranean.”

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This fragment of the former Yugoslavia once lured celebrities to its shores. Can a new luxury enclave help to put it back on the map? By Lisa Markwell (Saturday, 18 June 2011)

What would Sophia Loren make of Aman Sveti Stefan, I wonder? The Italian superstar was a fan of the 1950s hotel that was once on this Montenegrin rock. It had a fleet of Chevrolet cars to transport guests across the causeway and around the coastline, and served elaborately embellished lobster.

That’s all gone, replaced by the austere lines that define the Aman resort   aesthetic (present across the globe from Cambodia to the Caribbean). Bare   stone walls in bedrooms, rough ceramic shampoo bottles and rustic village   salad on the menu signal a major change. But if the glitz has been replaced   by restrained tones, make no mistake – it’s still for the wealthy, it’s just   that now it’s stealthy.

….

Somewhat reluctantly, I stroll over the causeway and into a car with Marco,   one of the hotel’s guides. He’s bursting with pride about Montenegro. We   tour Kotor, a Unesco-listed medieval walled town of narrow, cobbled pathways   and the occasional square with a church or museum to gaze upon. Its walls   extend up the steep mountain behind. Hardy souls can walk up to the   crumbling remains of St Ivan’s Castle at 260m and look down at the luxury   yachts and expanse of fjord on which Kotor sits.

I get into a little boat and travel across the silent, crystal clear water to   the twin tiny islands that sit between the impossibly pretty town of Perast   (where the influence of the region’s Venetian rule between around 1400 to   1800 is very clear) and the narrow neck that separates the bay from the rest   of the fjord and the Adriatic sea beyond.

“Our Lady of the Rock” is a man-made island, in the shape of a ship.   It was created over 200 years starting in 1452, built up from a natural rock   of just a couple of square metres by fishermen who wanted the protection of   the Virgin Mary. They sank vessels here, more than 100 of them, and cast   rocks and stones into the bay until they reached the surface, then created a   church. I study the silver votives left by grateful sailors, the dried   flowers and lace of long-ago brides, left by tradition in thanks – and   wonder at the quiet, careful pride Montenegrins have for their natural and   spiritual treasures.

Budva, back down the coast towards Sveti Stefan, is also an ancient walled   town, but although the old settlement shares the church spires and   worn-smooth cobbles of Kotor – and nuns selling the same fabulous soap that   appears in the Aman bathrooms – outside the walls, it’s a thoroughly modern   resort. Russian-built black-glass hotels sprawl, superyachts bob   cheek-by-jowl in the harbour and plenty of bars, restaurants and shops   entertain those that descend on this tourism hub in high season.

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