The Continental Hotels chain, which owns 13 hotels on the local market, registered a level of 1,000 employees at the beginning of June, compared with 950 registered at the beginning of the year, with numbers also estimated to double over the next four years, according to the company's human resources manager.

"This month, we have reached 1,000 employees. Given the company's ambitious development plan for the next four years, the number of employees will rise proportionately to the volume of our activity. We estimate that by the end of 2011, the number of employees will have doubled against the present figure," Iulia Dinu, human resources manager of Continental Hotels, told ZF, adding that the average annual personnel fluctuation registered by Continental hotels is 26%.

Businessman Radu Enache and other family members control the Continental Hotels chain through the RED Group, which holds 71% of the overall shares. Enache recently stated that he would invest 50 million euros within the next three years in building seven two-star hotels, which will operate under the Ibis brand that belongs to the French group Accor.

The Continental Hotels network currently has nine Continental hotels and three hotels operating under Ibis-Accor management, and will open another hotel in Sibiu, in July this year. For the Sibiu hotel, which will be called Forum, the company intends to hire an average of 70 employees. The Sibiu hotel, plus the new hotels planned for the next few years, could see the number of rooms in Continental's portfolio double to almost 1,600. The cities targeted for the opening of new hotels are Timisoara, Targu-Mures, Bucharest, Brasov, Cluj and Iasi.

Continental Hotels posted a 24.3 million-euro turnover last year. As a result of a partnership between PPF Investments (PPFI) and RED Group, Continental Hotels will carry out an approximately 13