Category Archives: Hotels

The Hotels and Hospitality Overview India Report by HVS state that 106 branded hotels housing 9,316 rooms have opened in 2019 in India, while 223 hotels with 20,885 rooms have been signed during the same period. Also, according to HVS, hotel investments in India improved significantly in 2019, with the year setting a record for hotels transactions in the country.2019 witnessed transactions worth more than Rs 50 billion compared to just over Rs 5 Billion in the previous year. Transaction volumes have increased primarily on the back of opportunistic pricing of hotel assets.

Sayaji Hotel Kolhapur celebrated the commencement of its high-end luxury banquet Sky Greens.  Sky Greens, an all-new premium event space for social and corporate events on February 1, 2020. Located in the heart of the city, Sky Greens by Sayaji Hotel Kolhapur brings a rare combination of high- quality, designer banqueting experience under one roof. Sky Greens promises to provide grandeur for all customized services that will redefine the standards of celebration for everyone.  The occasion was graced by the crème de la crème of Maharashtra. Sky Greens can house up to 120 guests at a time and is spread over 3000 square feet built-up area includes and climate-controlled glass gazebo. The rooftop terrace space at Sayaji Hotel Kolhapur has been created as a premium banquet space overlooking the horizon of the city at the 8th Floor level. Sky Greens will make you fall into tranquility as you get a mesmerizing view. Richly elegant and adaptable, it will allow the experienced events team to cater for every occasion. The custom-designed food & beverages with live preparations or a 6-course sit-down service; make the culinary experience a memorable one. Every event is made unique by the dedicated team of expert Chefs & service team.

ISA Tourism (India Sales Associates, ISA), has been appointed as the Indian representation partner for BUCCARA – The Private Collection, owners of a bouquet of luxury villas, castles and yachts in bespoke destinations. The signing up of ISA Tourism is done to bring the unique and luxurious accommodation offerings of BUCCARA to the Indian Outbound market. Manas Sinha, Director of ISA Tourism said: “We are proud to be associated with BUCCARA – The Private Collection and to promote their bouquet of luxury properties in South Africa, Spain, Austria and private yachts in Spain. Their unique portfolio enhances the range of luxury products and experiences that we are able to offer to our key travel partners and corporate clients across India. Working with our key partners we look forward to introducing Indian guests to the BUCCARA brand and to experience their villas, castles and yachts.” “With the growing number of discerning luxury travellers from India, it is important for us to have a local presence and provide better customer service to the travel partners. We believe that the dedicated team of ISA Tourism professionals is a great fit for us to get the outreach and to engage with luxury travel bookers,” said Kashif Arif, Managing Director, BUCCARA.

Hospitality industry in India has stringent policies which is detrimental to the sector. Mandeep Lamba, President(South Asia), HVS Anarock, further elaborating on his recent report, states that given limited supply of suitable land parcels for hospitality projects and prohibitive costs of the same, the government must relax FSI norms in key metros to upto 5 times the size of land so as to allow a larger built up space in the designated land parcel. in countries like the US, prime business areas such as Manhattan in New York, could have up to 15 FSI allowing for adequate offset for the cost of land through larger revenue generating built up areas.

Sabre Corporation and Accor have announced that they intend to create the first unified central reservation (CR) and property management (PM) platform for the global hospitality industry. In collaboration with Accor, Sabre intends to develop a new full service property management capability and enrich its existing central reservation and limited service property management systems. These capabilities will combine within a new unified cloud-native, highly-flexible platform that will be built for and available to hoteliers across all property classes and geographic regions. In this context, Accor would be Sabre’s newest enterprise hospitality customer, adopting Sabre’s industry-leading SynXis Central Reservation system and, ultimately, the new global technology platform for all of its hospitality brands and geographies. “We are thrilled to be collaborating with Accor and look forward to redefining the guest experience together. We know our customers have historically had limited options in this area, and we are taking the lead to deliver the solutions that hoteliers have repeatedly told us they both want and need,” said Sean Menke, president and CEO of Sabre Corporation. “Once developed, this offering will power a new generation of retailing, distribution and fulfillment solutions that will enable hotels to drive revenue growth beyond traditional sources and offer unique personalized services to their guests around the world.” With a diverse portfolio of brands from luxury to economy and over 50 years of experience in the industry, Accor offers a unique perspective on what guests want and hotels need. “Sabre shares our vision of a future where hoteliers are able to offer guests an unforgettable, personalized experience that goes beyond simply being a place or service,” said Sébastien Bazin, Chairman and CEO for Accor. “Partners like Sabre are …

Onefinerate.com gives its travel agent partners and M!CE bookers easy and direct access to hotels that match their event criteria. RFP is sent instantly to the selected hotels for them, with a prompt, to respond to the booker at the earliest. The OFR operations team ensures that the RFPs are responded by the hotel partners at the earliest. This leads to a shorter ‘selling cycle’ thereby helping both parties to close deals in a shorter window of time. Incremental sales & revenue for hotels with minimal use of their resources adds to their bottom line and at the same time giving the bookers an opportunity secure business faster. Onefinerate.com or OFR is one-of-its-kind travel marketplace designed for both B2C and B2B business. It addresses the key pain points of both the M!CE bookers & hotels like lead generation, access & faster response times. With deep domain knowledge, the OFR team has developed complex algorithms that identify & match the bookers requirements with the availability & rates offered by hotels. With the expanded distribution network, Hotels discover Bookers that they had never worked with and Bookers begin business with Hotels where they had no relationships.

Asia Pacific hotel performance for 2019 by STR states that Delhi hotels have recorded its fifth consecutive year of RevPAR growth (8.5% to Rs 4801.75), and the absolute occupancy level was the market’s highest for any year since 2007. STR analysts point to a 7.1% jump in demand as the driver of that performance. November was the strongest month of the year for RevPAR growth due to the Diwali festival calendar shift from November in 2018 to October in 2019. Occupancy: +4.9% to 73.0% ADR: +3.4% to INR6,581.95 RevPAR: +8.5% to INR4,801.75

Martin R. Smura, CEO, Kempinski Hotels and Chairman of the Management Board, says,”India is a very dynamic market and offers enormous potential for future growth in the hospitality sector. Our plans are to intensify our efforts to bring Kempinski back on the Indian sub-continent. India is a growing market to us where we see huge potential for future growth for outbound travellers. Several of our hotels already enjoy a strong wedding business from India. We tapped into the market last year and opened a Global Sales Offices in partnership with Nijhawan Group. Since 2018, we see very promising results with revenue from the Indian market increasing by 30%.  

Explaining the group’s plans for 2020, Pradipta Mohapatra, Asst. Vice President (Sales & Marketing), MAYFAIR Hotels & Resorts, says, “We will be opening a tea resort in Siliguri this year. Other projects in the pipeline include a 252-key five-star deluxe property in Kolkata- the work for which is also underway, and we plan to make it operational latest by early 2021. We are also in process of establishing a Golf Resort in Satapada region of Puri, Odisha, wherein our group will be investing Rs 125 Crores. It will be a Five Star Deluxe property featuring facilities like helipads.

According to a recent report by HVS, India ranks amongst the countries with the highest cost of capital for the hospitality industry. Lending norms for the industry are extremely stringent with interest rates ranging between 11% and 14% for borrowings as against an average of 4% to 5% in most developed economies. Given the higher cost of servicing debt, the quantum of debt available to the sector averages at 50% of the total project cost further restricting the capital available for hotel development. And finally, the cherry on this cake is the short tenure for repayment of debt which averages at circa 10 to 12 years including the construction period moratorium. Assuming a three-year construction moratorium and a three-year period for hotel revenues to stabilise, the effective repayment term ranges from 4 to 6 years causing severe stress on hotel owners and operators. Given the cyclical nature of the business, if the hotel enters the market in a down cycle phase, it is almost certain to head towards becoming an NPA as has been evident from the last cyclical downturn.