Rohit Vig, Vice President Development, StayWell Hospitality in an exclusive interview with Travel Trade Insider spoke on a range of subjects concerning the Indian hospitality sector. Following are the excerpts from the interview.
Q. With the number of coronavirus cases steadily declining, how is it resulting in demand for hotel rooms?
A. We are seeing a good trend after almost 18 months, the tourism sector is showing a steady recovery in India. Primarily it is because of the governments early measure to start the vaccinations drive. Further all branded hotels have implemented safety measures at all the touchpoints.
The strong efforts by all states and industry leaders has further boosted the confidence and helped the country to drive domestic business primarily as a core segment. The easing of travel restrictions also helps the people to rediscover the local attractions especially at the leisure destinations.
However, for international travelers, I believe it’s take a long time to see the recovery even though we have opened our skies.
The resurgence of the second wave of Covid this year had again impacted the recovery path. Nonetheless our hotels in India, especially Park Regis Goa and Leisure Inn Grand Chanakya Jaipur have shown a great recovery to our surprise after the reopening from the second wave of Covid in 2021 – during which our hotels were closed for almost 75 days.
For us, the key demand generators segments are referrals, local social/meeting groups, support from the travel trade consolidators and OTA’s partners. Our Indian revenue generation team working relentlessly with new mythology to drive the business and regaining the confidence with guests. To summarize, at present the demand is largely led by leisure travel, ‘staycations’, wedding MICE which results in higher F&B revenues. Some business travel in specific sectors also aided to recovery.
Q. Which are the domestic markets where you have a presence that are faring well for you as a hospitality player?
A. StayWell applies proven methods of management to increase each property’s value proposition to customers. The highly skilled team at StayWell revenue generation team worked cohesively with the hotel sales team to drive business from the core feeder markets and through their established relationships with the local business partners/Travel agents/ consolidators and with OTA’s.
The strong global platforms and tactical campaigns, which have been drafted inline to the guest’s requirements. Our sales offices at Delhi (NCR) and Mumbai along with the hotels helps us to drive maximum business from these cities and through local cities where hotels are located. Apart from these, we are generating good queries from new cities, especially the drivable distance for Social functions.
All leisure markets have done extremely well but Jaipur has been the leader in the pack. Our budget for next year is going to surpass 2019 if this trend continues – there is a lot of pent up demand.
Q. How is the current demand from international markets? Do you view a long road to recovery for inbound tourism segment?
A. At present at our hotels, we are not seeing any demand from the international market, it is predominantly due to the various ongoing restrictions as imposed by the respective countries and I fully endorse this. We need to be careful and our domestic market is so strong why take the risk specially with the new variants. Seeing the current sentiments, this segment could be the last to recover. We as hoteliers need to rethink new areas and opportunities to overcome this loss.
Q. How is the demand from domestic MICE market? Are corporates now organizing physical conferences, meetings etc?
A. As we all witnessed the second wave of the pandemic which had a very harsh effects on the general public and was far steeper than the first, we have not seen revival of the MICE Market yet. Even though in the last couple of weeks we have had several enquiries and some our hotels have held events for the MICE segment. We expect a long road to recovery for MICE and can see the recovery to pre-Covid levels by FY2024.
Q. What are your future expansion plans?
A We are part of one of the largest hotel management groups in Asia Pacific, StayWell Holdings and its parent company Prince Hotels Inc., offers a diverse portfolio of properties across a combined network of about 129 open and operating hotels worldwide.
Our brands and offerings include The Prince Akatoki, The Prince, Grand Prince Hotel, Policy, Park Regis, Prince Hotel, Leisure Inn Plus, Prince Smart Inn, and Leisure Inn. Each brand offers guests quality experiences ranging from luxury to lifestyle through to midscale.
Prince and StayWell plan to grow their portfolio to over 250 properties in the medium to long term across Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
Our approach is to increase our domestic presence with local opportunities, especially in India, China, and South East Asia and accelerate our presence in new growing markets of Middle East, Thailand and Singapore along with Africa.
StayWell has 8 properties currently under development in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.