‘Proactive and prepared to garner more footfalls’
As the hotel strives to bring more to the city and offer distinctive experiences and sustainable practices along with unique curated events for their guests, Sumeet Suri, General Manager, JW Marriott Kolkata, highlights some of the hotel’s strategies for the upcoming months to generate more revenues.
JW Marriott Kolkata saw a good rise in the occupancies in the past few months, along with the revenue increase across the hotel departments. Sumeet is happy to mention that, as of May 2022, they have begun crossing the 2019 numbers. He anticipates that they will begin to surpass and achieve higher figures if this trend holds.
The hotel has also observed an increase in overall travel, primarily domestic travel. The pent-up demand coming in from domestic travel is far more than what they saw in 2019 and is by far making up for the inbound travel, which has not picked up to the extent they had expected.
Sumeet adds, “Since we are a business hotel and though we are not getting inbound corporate clients at present, we certainly see a good amount of domestic corporate companies coming to us. We have seen a good number of groups along with pharma and cement companies doing events with us. MICE and Awards ceremonies for employees are some of the biggest events that we have been witnessing and which are helping us compensate for the loss of inbound travel.”
During the monsoon, the JW Marriott Kolkata experiences lower occupancy rates than during the winter, as the travel prospects are reduced. There are no weddings during this season, but to compensate for that, the hotel has started to promote Staycations, which are getting very popular. Additionally, they have various offers coming in via Marriott.com that are hotel specific. This helps them make up for the slowdown they usually observe during the monsoon season.
The hotel is also known for its food and beverage experience. Sumeet
informs, “The hotel has started doing a few musical evenings which have become very popular among the local residents and have helped us to add to our revenue. The food and beverage space has become more popular and innovative than ever before and these are the months where the hotels spend some time doing significant promotions in the food and beverage area to make up for the revenues.”
While they are trying hard that get back to the pre-COVID levels in their work areas and start exceeding them, they are also working for the next 2-3 months to get maximum footfalls. Sumeet shares, “Our primary focus is on promotions, and how we can cater to the locals. There is a huge amount of pent-up demand within our community, the city, and the state, and the idea is to do innovative concepts and events that will help us bring in that extra revenue. We are doing a few pop-ups for restaurants and a few innovative events in our banquet halls which are helping us generate revenues.”
Sumeet adds, “We are also focusing on bringing in groups. Here, our strategy is to ensure that we get room and banquet business together, and only if we do not have any room business that we sell banquets closer to the date. This method has helped us bring in more revenue for the hotel in totality.”
JW Marriott Kolkata’s other focus is increasing awareness of the new Executive Lounge and Boardroom on the 23rd floor, which is unique and can be used as a restaurant and event venue. The idea is to focus on the elite class to book them so that they can use the lounge or even get them to do some niche events.
“We have also developed some innovative promotions for the Spa and Salon to add to the revenue with some great success. Our focus continues on ‘Marriott Bonvoy on Wheels’, which was extremely popular during the lockdown period. We have continued to keep that as one of the main businesses. Our focus is also on hampers and gifting, which gets us a big chunk of business, especially during festive seasons such as Diwali,” concludes Sumeet.