France's Accor, one of the world's biggest hotel groups, said on Friday it plans to open more than 200 new properties in Asia within three years as it looks to cash in on the region's increasing affluence.

Accor, which owns 4,200 hotels worldwide - including 450 Ibis, Novotel, All Seasons, Sofitel, Pullman and Mercure resorts in Asia-Pacific - said it was targeting China, India and Indonesia as its key growth markets.

As the usual key markets in Europe and the United States struggle with limp economies and debt crises, Accor has said Asia would overtake the West as its biggest growth area.

It announced in February that 42 per cent of the 100,000 new rooms it is planning to add around the world will be in Asia.

By the end of this year the group will have opened more than 60 new hotels in Asia-Pacific, said Accor regional spokesman Ewan Lewis, with the figure increasing to 200 by 2014.

Like other big hotel names, Accor provides its name and operating model to local partners.

The group currently has 110 hotels in China, and plans to open 55 by 2014. It has only nine establishments in India but plans to open 63 within three years.

In Indonesia it will open 34 hotels to add to the 43 it already has.

"We will nearly double the number of rooms, from approximately 7,500 now to 14,000," Guillouet Gerard, Vice President for Accor Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, told AFP in Jakarta.

"We plan to have 100 hotels by 2015" in Indonesia, he said.

AFP