IHG Hotels & Resorts has signed a franchise agreement with Hong Kong-based Harilela Group to convert the 324-room Holiday Inn Singapore Orchard City Centre into The Hari Singapore, Vignette Collection — the brand’s debut in Singapore. The property is expected to welcome guests in 2027.
The hotel opened in 1985 and is IHG’s longest-operating property in Singapore. Rather than trade the asset or run it down, the owner is repositioning it: the building is undergoing a significant transformation with British designer Tara Bernerd — whose portfolio includes The Hari London and The Hari Hong Kong — overseeing the design.
Conversion is the quiet engine of hotel franchise growth in Asia Pacific. It removes the two variables that kill new-build projects: construction risk and the multi-year gap between capital commitment and first revenue. An operating hotel with an established catchment can be re-flagged, refurbished in phases and returned to market at a higher rate position, which is precisely the logic behind IHG’s 14-hotel Kyoto conversion deal with GCP Hospitality.
Location does most of the work here. The hotel sits in Singapore’s Orchard Road precinct, moments from the historic Emerald Hill area, with connectivity to Marina Bay, the Civic District and Changi Airport. IHG points to year-round demand from regional leisure travellers, high-spending shoppers and extended-stay international guests — three segments that rarely peak and trough together, which is what an owner wants underneath a premium repositioning.
The agreement reflects a partnership between IHG and Harilela Group that has evolved over more than five decades, with the two companies now collaborating across six hotels. That longevity is the part most worth studying. Cross-border hospitality franchising is frequently sold as a transaction; the deals that compound are the ones where a single ownership group keeps adding keys under the same franchisor because the economics and the working relationship both hold.
IHG says Vignette Collection is tracking ahead of its ambition to reach more than 100 hotels within its first decade, with over 80 open and pipeline properties globally. Soft brands are the mechanism: they let an owner keep a distinctive property identity while plugging into a global reservation system, loyalty base and distribution engine. For independent hotel owners across Asia Pacific and the Gulf who have resisted conventional franchising because it flattens their asset’s character, that is the argument that changes minds.
Three signals stand out for capital allocators watching this market.
First, the conversion pipeline is where the near-term growth sits. Owners of ageing but well-located assets in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Riyadh are being courted with soft-brand economics rather than asked to build. Wyndham’s franchise-led push in India runs on the same thesis from a different price point.
Second, the franchise structure keeps the balance sheet with the local owner. IHG is not buying the building; it is supplying the brand, the systems and the demand. Investors weighing which contractual form fits their capital should read our comparison of master franchise, area development and single-unit structures.
Third, Singapore continues to function as the credibility market. A brand that lands well on Orchard Road earns the right to be taken seriously across the region — the same reason Gulf-born operators keep naming Singapore and Hong Kong as their Asia entry points. For groups building a cross-border portfolio, that reputational spillover is worth as much as the individual asset’s yield, and it is one of the first things we test when structuring a market-entry sequence for a brand or an investor.
IHG’s official hotel development site
