Education should be a priority
these 26 million outbound travellers into our guests, as they will be looking at alternate destinations within the country. I think the industry would look at domestic business, which is going to be a saviour. It is going to be a slow process and would wake up people to a new category in hotels. The first 12-18 months are going to be difficult. It’s going to take the industry three years to reach the numbers we had towards the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. Hence, domestic business is key. We have 180 billion domestic visits taking place through bus tickets, train tickets or airline tickets. Even if a miniscule 0.5% can be converted for our hotels, that’s a significant number of people who can come to our hotels. It is going to happen, and we are going to target domestic travel especially for the upper upscale or luxury hotels, where international travellers are over 50% of their target.”
Sharing the corporate business perspective, Khanna says, “Today, corporate hotels have around 65-70% Indian nationals. I think that while it will take
“There is no better time than now to get your education, because there are no jobs in this industry as experts are predicting that recovery might take 1-3 years. This is the best time for young people to start their education and spend time in college. There could be no better opportunity for people to experience the changes while getting educated, so that they are far better prepared and skilled to meet the new normal, which will come post the recovery. If there is ever an opportunity to start attracting good talent into our industry, it is now because we can now educate them for really what is going to be the new normal in the industry. Also, There is no better time than now to encourage your people to go and get themselves upskilled and relevant to the future world,” Along with that, hotels will have to do a lot more product improvement and process improvement. In terms of pricing, we need to be patient. Let the machine rule the pricing instead of getting pricing run by emotions, so that we probably will not have such a huge debt where it will take us years to come back to the same price as before COVID.”
Homestays and other guests
In this scenario, smaller enterprises, including homestays, might be jeopardised. Lamba says, “In the short term, homestays
– Dilip Puri
same protocol as in-house guests. They will be thermally scanned at the entry and follow the same norms as everybody else. There might be pre-registration for those who book in advance. There will be very little contact. Guests would walk into the hotel, go straight to the front desk to pick up their envelope for the key card, which will be lying ready, and go straight to you room. We might be seeing selfcheck-in kiosks in hotels very soon. Ultimately, even walk-in guests will be able to use their mobile phones to check-in.”
Also, hotels need to decide if they want to open everything or they want to contain or manage the crowd. They have to manage business, manage crowd and still create good experiences.”
Rates and legal liabilities
According to Puri, those with a longer runway of cash flow and working capital will survive this crisis. However, he says, “India has already tasted the big institutional private equity players,