Chairman Cho Yang-ho of Hanjin Group invited reporters at a dinner at the JW Marriot Hotel hosted by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce on the evening of Feb. 7 to the construction site of the Wilshire Grand Hotel scheduled to open in 2017.

Chairman Cho explained to the reporters what the new hotel will look like and the scale of the project, which is located in the center of the financial district in Los Angeles. Korean Air took over the hotel in 1989 and has been running it until now. In March 2011, Korean Air got the license to rebuild the old hotel after demolishing it completely.

Cho told the media people invited to the site that Hanjin Group has been playing the role of a locomotive to make Los Angeles develop further as a global metropolis and he hopes that the cooperative relationship between Hanjin and L.A. will grow deeper with the reconstruction of the Wilshire Grand and continue into the future.

The new Wilshire Grand Hotel has been designed with a dome shape at the upper half of the 73 storey structure inspired by Half Dome at Yosemite National Park. Every window of the building can be opened and closed so that occupants can have a good view of street scenes and skyline in the financial sector of the City of Angels from their rooms.

The new hotel will have 900 rooms, many of them with fancy decorations, as well as offices, restaurants, and bars.

The project is estimated to have a huge impact on the city’s economy with some $1 billion to be invested to rebuild the hotel, providing 11,000 jobs during the construction period and paying $80 million in taxes. After the construction, some 1,700 new jobs will be created at the hotel and more than $16 million in taxes will be paid to the city annually.

In the meantime, Korean Air plans to focus on its flight routes to the United States and Japan during the summer to expand its share of vacationers on those routes, according to the airlines’ flight operation schedule announced recently.

The airline will try to pick up more passengers on the flight routes, especially the VIP passengers outbound from Japan and others traveling to the United States during the March 31 through Oct. 26 period this year. The air carrier will increase the number of weekly flights on those routes to 903 during the period, an increase of 23 flights from the normal schedule, although the flight numbers and the number of planes assigned to each route will vary around the world. 

The airline plans to give more choices of planes on the routes including those from Incheon to Seattle, Dallas, and Toronto, with weekly flights on those routes to increase to seven from the normal five °™ one flight daily. The number of weekly flights on the Incheon to Las Vegas route will be expanded to four from three during the summer, bringing the total flights to 115, up seven from the normal schedule.

Korean Air will inaugurate its flights to Toronto from Incheon with Air Canada launching three weekly flights on the route from June 3 deploying Boeing 777-300 jet passenger planes with the two airlines expected to heatedly compete for the passengers and cargoes on the new route. The plane has 42 first-class seats and 307 economy seats.

Korean Air plans to increase its flights to Japan as the country recovers fully from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in its northeast region like many foreign airlines taking advantage of the Japanese travel market returning to normal.

The air carrier plans to increase the number of flights from Incheon to Narita to 35 from 28 in line with the deregulation of flights to Narita, Japan, to take effect from March. The airline also plans to change the Incheon-Narita-L.A. route to Incheon-Narita-Honolulu to carry more newlyweds to Honolulu from Korea. The number of flights from Busan to Narita will also be increased to 14 weekly from seven.