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With architects and hoteliers facing the challenge of profitable designs, we brought together the Who’s Who of the industry to speak their minds in the first edition of Hotelier India’s ‘Think Turf’ series in partnership with Hafele India
Hafele India is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of hardware fittings. Its high quality supplies include Architectural Hardware, Furniture Fittings, Kitchen Fittings and Access Control Solutions. Hafele India is a preferred partner of many of India’s leading hotels. For more information please visit www.hafeleindia.com
Hotelier India: Can you indeed, ‘profit’ from your hotel’s design?
Sanjay Sethi, MD & CEO, Berggruen Hotels: We are a very young company, and one of the critical challenges we faced when we started off was to develop a commercially viable proposition with the design of the hotel, because, very often, you get land whose shape could vary extensively from the intended design. Therefore, we had to have a design to make it viable for us to buy land which could be twisted or turned around.
The solution was to keep a concept which had a cookie-cutter room design but had the flexibility and malleability to adapt to the shape of the land. So when we started working on the designs, we had set ourselves the intent of giving a certain look and feel to the hotel, yet making revenue to non-revenue spaces efficient enough to deliver low gross area per room. We actually have 440-450 square feet gross built up area per key. with our room size of 230-235 square feet.
Manoj Bhatia, CHA: In the Indian scenario, if you have a cookie-cutter model which says you are going to have the same set of rooms, business centre, restaurants, and so on, and you want to replicate that across the country, I don’t think this is a good idea. I disagree with this concept because certain cities in India do not have the business traffic but they have high food and beverage business. The F&B business, in one of our former hotel companies in Ludhiana, used to make double the revenue they make from rooms. We Indians spend a lot of money on non- business events such as weddings, receptions, and others. And for that you need fairly large spaces.
Vijay Thacker, director, Horwath HTL India: We find that viability issues are most often stressed because owners do not retain integrity to the product that they originally wanted to build. There is nothing wrong in being called the owner of a three-star or budget hotel. Everybody can’t make five-star hotels. But many a time, the owner wants to build a three-star hotel with five-star facilities. The moment you try to do that you get the worst of both.
Rajiv Puri, senior director, design management, Asia Pacific, Marriott International: It is very essential to have a key element which is directly in proportion to revenue. The challenge which we faced in the country when we came in with the Courtyard brand, was to educate our partners about the design model. There are lots of things owners want to do which we find were not needed for the Courtyard brand.
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Hotelier India: What are the challenges you face?
Prem Nath, Prem Nath & Associates: There are many owners who don’t know anything about hotels, they just want the best hotel.
Vijay Thacker: Sometimes owners don’t have the perception about what is best and what it costs.
Jurgen Wolf, MD, Hafele India: We had a similar kind of experience with independent owners or developers who thought they would decide what goes in since they are paying the bill. The other aspect is that many want the best for the cheapest price. But I would say things are getting better than what it used to be earlier, because lots of international groups have more influence now.
Rajiv Kaul, SVP, The Leela Palaces, Hotels & Resorts: What is the best? I tell them to show me the hotel and in most cases, it’s not even the status of a JW Marriot, and they talk about luxury. In India, luxury and five-star are vastly abused terms. They are used very loosely by everybody. There is a mistaken notion of luxury because everybody is getting excited about the marble they are using. Nobody is getting excited about the shower pressure, or what the specification of pipes used, are.
Sanjay Sethi: One of the critical things we should keep in mind while designing hotels is that we need to consult with our end users, the customers. We conducted this exercise of interacting with our customers to understand what exactly they want. Today, we have been able to design a hotel which has literally been designed by our customer. Very often, owners and developers forget that customer element.
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