The company is focusing its efforts on India and the country’s second-largest population in the world (approx. 1.2 billion). Hoyt H Harper, SVP of brand management at Starwood’s Sheraton Group, who spoke on the ocassion of the launch of the new Sheraton in Bangalore, said that India is currently the fourth largest market for the company but will move up to third behind China and the United States by year’s end. The company signed on 72 properties in the course of one’s year worth of work.
“There are more opportunities here than challenges,” Harper stated. “We have the expertise of expanding quickly in markets like China and intend to put some of that to use as we expand in India.”
Starwood currently has nine brands – Westin, Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton, The Luxury Collection, W Hotels, St. Regis, Le Meridien, Aloft, and Element by Westin – and six of them are already in existence in India. The company has 34 properties in India currently and would like to have 50 by year’s end and 100 by 2015.
Some of the ways the hotel chain is planning to expand is to expand its brand in India is to align itself with the Delhi Daredevils cricket team along with a major Indian exporter, Kingfisher beer, which now can be found in 52 countries. Kingfisher has got some catching up to do to match Starwood, which has places to stay in 100 countries at this point. (In an interesting twist, Starwood’s Luxury Collection is launching The Chatwal, a new luxury brand from Indian-American hotelier Sant Chatwal, as its first property in New York).
Harper compared Starwood’s expansion plan to what it was able to do in China. “Sheraton is usually our trailblazing brand if I can make a comparison to what we are able to accomplish in China,” he said. “We started with Sheraton and grew our footprint because of the brand. As we had a strong foothold in the market, we were able to bring in Westin, Four Points by Sheraton, and W. When I look at India, Sheraton will help us build a base and create opportunities to grow Four Points by Sheraton and Aloft brands. We are getting ready to open W in India by 2013. We have 34 properties as we speak and we are on target to achieve 50 properties by 2012. We have planned to have 100 hotels , either under development, in operation or contracted by 2015.”
Harper said that the company sees Sheraton initially going into “many of the Tier II cities” such as Raipur, Dehradun, Amritsar, and Indore. Some of those “at least 25 cities” will require more than one Sheraton, he notes.
From there, Starwood will expand into introducing other brands into those smaller marketplaces.
