Marriott International, a U.S. based worldwide hotel chain is planning to open a new luxury resort at Kabira, Ishigaki City. The hotel will reportedly have about 360 guest rooms, which would make it the largest on Okinawa’s remote islands.

The construction work on the new resort is scheduled to start in July 2017, with the hotel set to open in December 2019. Marriott Resort & Spa Ishigakijima will be Marriott International’s first directly managed hotel in Japan.

According to a source familiar with the plans, the hotel will be built on a site of about 86,000 square meters, and the facility would include a hotel accommodation building and separate cottages, with total floor space of about 40,000 square meters. Ishigakijima Sangyo Kaihatsu is reportedly the developer that builds the resort at an estimated cost of ¥28 billion.

Marriott has reportedly been interested in having a hotel at Kabira Bay for 10 years, and they have been preparing for it by concluding an employment agreement with the Kabira Ward of Ishigaki.

Since the new airport was completed in 2013, the number of visitors to Ishigaki has been increasing sharply, reaching one million in 2014. Tourists from foreign countries are also increasing, a fact that has not escaped business planners at Marriott who want to get into the action at an early stage in order to capture their share of the demand from the beginning.

Marriott International is a hotel managing company with its headquarters in Maryland, U.S.A. In April, Marriott acquired Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, and it currently manages many luxury hotel chains like Westin and Sheraton. It’s the world’s largest hotel chain with more than 5,500 hotels.

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