BEL
#Yes, more than happy to do that.
We have been focusing on the areas that we have been talking about, first of all, trying to get the people in place and as I mentioned we are good on the way to hire one person which will start in September here in London to cover the European market, which will be our number two in that position.
We are also at the point of hiring somebody to be based in Dubai, which will from there cover the Middle Eastern market and focusing also on markets like the Indian Ocean.
We are still in the process of hiring somebody for Asia-Pacific.
Our initial plan was to put somebody in Bangkok but the market has ---+ or we have not been able to find the right quality of talent there.
So we have shifted to the plan to put somebody in Singapore and we are working on that.
And for Latin America and for the Americas we have not started the search process yet, but we will do that very soon.
That was planned to start at the beginning of 2017.
For as far as the discussions are concerned, I myself have been involved in many of those discussions together with James.
And we have had a large number of I would call very positive and very receptive discussions with individual owners where we've been looking at opportunities.
A number of them were clearly outside of our range.
And I think part of doing good development is being able to step away from certain deals early on.
But a number of them were also serious and within the boundaries that we have described to you from a financial and from a brand point of view in our strategic plan, and we are working very hard on seeing how we can get some of those over the line.
Without giving dates or giving deadlines on them I think that the feedback has been positive and I feel comfortable that as we step up our efforts that there will be a number of opportunities both in the acquisition component as well as in the management range.
And then, of course, the trains that we have been adding as a separate component of the overall growth strategy.
Did that sort of answer your question, <UNK>.
I think that when we did our presentation in New York we gave an overview of what would help us shift the growth opportunity in our existing hotels and how can we drive organic growth.
Underneath there we gave you a few examples but there is a whole list of 10s of initiatives that have started and we already actually started even before we came to New York.
I think that the ones that I mentioned are around the website, which we consider to be an opportunity that we could work on very quickly and get quick results.
Another one that I could mention just as an example, and not that that is going to change in the majority our numbers for the second or third quarter, but we spoke about the German language speaker and the fact that we could not book over the website until the second quarter of this year.
Since we introduced it in April, we saw a lift of the German language speaker bookings of 7% year-over-year, which even though those numbers per se might not be so big, altogether these are bits and pieces that add up.
And once that we start seeing all those little bits getting together then it starts making sense and you will start seeing good results.
We have been working very hard as well with the teams in the way of getting our capital lined up, making sure that we go back into our hotels, figuring out where the opportunities are, where we can do similar things as what I was describing for the Peru property - adding new rooms, adding new opportunities, re-converting underutilized space.
And there is no rocket science there but it is certainly something that will help us get to the results.
What we will do is the overall list of individual activities, together with Philippe, we will make sure that we will keep you posted as those individual bits and pieces come through, where we stand and how you can keep us accountable against them.
I think that's a fair way to think about it and I also think that lines pretty much up with the time frames that we have set in order to get some of those activities on the road and where the kick-in will come would be, it might start early but the financial impacts will be Q2 and Q3 of next year, in many cases.
Well, I think it's hard to speculate on when deals get signed.
But what we know today is that there is a number of transactions that we're working on, that I would consider to be serious enough that I would hope to be able to announce those over the coming quarters.
Listen, <UNK>, I don't want to speculate on any intentions or anything around Barry, as we've all seen that he filed a 13G and as such will be taking a passive position.
For as far as the way of us communicating with individual shareholders, we have a policy and I think it's wise to stick to that, not to comment on any individual communication with shareholders like we would do with all of you.
Obviously, for Barry certainly like for any other investor, we love to have communications with our investors.
And we have had those in the past with any of our investors.
And we look forward to maintaining those relations, and the same would apply for Barry.
Thank you very much, Sarah, and thank you everyone for joining us today.
We look forward to speaking with you next quarter.
