“The hospitality industry has bounced back like never before; the good times have returned. We are looking forward to a great few years. What happened is that the economy itself has recovered quite well. So, as the economy recovers, automatically, it has to result in benefits for the hospitality industry.
Another major boost to the sector is that we have got a lot of new roads within the country, for example, the Shimla-Chandigarh Road is near completion and will very soon get commissioned. This will reduce the distance and travel time by about two hours. Similarly, the Bangalore-Mysore Road is almost complete, reducing travel time by two hours. Due to improvement in connectivity, there is going to be a boost for tourism across the country. We have also seen the growth of religious tourism coming up in places like Ujjain, Ayodhya, and other places that are really booming. So, I think this government has done well in this regard.
Another trend we’ve seen is long weekend getaways. Long weekends in our country do help a lot because youngsters today don’t like to take one long holiday, they’d prefer to take three or four short vacations in a year. This has also been a contributing factor.
The hospitality Industry expects the government to provide us with a uniform industry status across the country. Today, only some states have announced this status for us along with some very good measures to help the hospitality industry. However, this is not the case with all states. The central government should put in place similar policies across the country and that will really help the industry to grow. We must keep in mind that this industry provides a lot of employment and the multiplier effect of this industry doing well has a positive impact on the economy.
We request the government and finance ministry to provide us with long-term loans. In the hotel industry, there is a huge gestation period, which means, it takes three to four years to build a hotel, then another two to three years to stabilize, and then, the repayment starts, which causes a lot of distress. So internationally, hotel loans are 15 to 25 years. A similar structure should be implemented across the Indian hospitality industry too as it will really not cause much NPAs and distress as in the past.
I think it’s a good time for the sector and we are looking forward to it. As a company, we have aggressive growth plans. We are already 78 hotels, with 24 openings slated by September 2023. In total, we will cross the 100 hotels mark very soon.
