Significant challenges ahead
HOTELS
The pandemic has affected the entire hospitality and travel trade industries equally. During the pandemic, we were expanding and adding hotels at the Leela Palaces, Hotels, and Resorts. We were slightly insulated and used this time to create opportunities out of this adversity. We opened three hotels - The Leela Gandhinagar, The Leela Palace Jaipur, and The Leela Bhartiya City. We used this time to bring in technology, hire some of the best talent in the industry, and set up our systems and processes in the organisations. We had brought in some cost synergies to bring in efficiencies. In 2022, we are working on very interesting and exciting openings.
In 2022, we expect to close the RevPAR gap by 2019, which, incidentally, was a high point for the Indian hospitality industry in the last decade. We sense a proclivity towards personalisation of experiences, staycations at untapped leisure destinations, hybrid models for business and corporate meetings; an inclination towards intimate weddings, and small-scale, cosy social events will continue. We plan to primarily focus on expanding our luxury and premium brand portfolio in India with the Raffles, Fairmont, Sofitel, and Pullman brands. Furthermore, we look forward to some of our muchawaited new openings, like Novotel in New Delhi City Centre and Jodhpur, an ibis in Mumbai Thane and another in Hebbal, Bangalore.
In 2022, we expect the travel and hospitality sectors to do much better than the previous two years. With the vaccination percentage high for India, domestic travel is going to be the basis for good business. I expect better occupancy, more so because business travel will increase. It is expected that by April 2022, international travel will be back. I also expect better ADRs this year, which will drive RevPAR growth. However, by the second quarter of 2022, we will be in a position to assess what 2022 can be for the industry. I hope that there is no further pandemic wave which will allow the travel cycle to roll at full momentum and give hospitality industry the much-needed boost to balance losses faced in the previous two years.
The year 2021 was surprisingly pleasant for us because One Rep Global was founded during the pandemic and currently has 14 clients. The last one year has been a year of growth and expansion for our company. We have just announced a new client on board-Caesar’s Palace Dubai. Being an optimist, I believe that once Omicron variant will settle down, we have four or five clients in the pipeline who are ready to sign up. There is a beautiful London hotel coming up for outbound very soon. There are also many more hotels in Europe and some other countries. Clearly, we are on the path that we envisaged, which is to be the biggest player in the ultra-luxury and luxury hospitality brand space, not just in India but in this part of the world in the next two years.
The Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) scheme by the Indian government has saved us during this pandemic. We are thankful to the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Finance for considering this. We utilised this pandemic period for Swosti in planning a new mega resort in Puri, on which work will start next week, and we hope that by 2023, we will be operating the first 5-star hotel on the beach in Puri. As far as Ministy of Tourism is concerned, they haven’t given any importance to the potential of Odisha Tourism in their literature, publicity, and promotions. Odisha has been greatly excluded from their publicity campaign. We are speaking to the Ministry of Tourism and the Tourism department in Odisha to take it up at the centre.
In 2021, by December 26, we had our new hotel in Havelock on the Andaman, called Tilar Siro ready to welcome guests. It’s a 25-room hotel that has 16 villas. It’s a new area for us and Andaman is an upcoming destination among Indians as well as for inbound tourists. For the year 2022, we do not have any longterm strategies because the situation is still volatile and one cannot say much about the future. However, we will continue our strategy of 2021 of wooing people travelling within India and within Kerala. Domestic tourism is here to stay. In terms of inbound, when the situation changes, we will change our marketing strategy for the overseas market as well. We are looking at 2022 with optimism and hoping that inbound tourism recovers faster.