Home / COMMENT / Hospitality Trends / Where opportunity calls

Alan D'Mello is online editor of hotelierindia.com

Top of the week to you.

Taking up career opportunities outside of your home city or region is something I have spoken and written on many times for at least six years. It is now coming to bear.

Deepak Bhatia’s move to Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, is the latest and best example of taking opportunity where it calls. Bhatia, executive chef at Mumbai’s Hyatt Regency till last Wednesday, has moved on a promotion to Baku to head Hyatt’s three projects there. I was surprised at his choice because India is booming and Hyatt and all other brands are in pitched competition for customers and flags. Though from what I understand, Hyatt’s Baku restaurants regularly do 400 covers a day and Bhatia, as group executive chef, will manage its two hotels and a convention centre there. Definitely a move up even though it is in Azerbaijan.

Chef Bhatia is a standout example because he has moved not to head an Indian restaurant as many Indian chefs used to do, but to manage a property as any international manager would.

Happily, I see this happening more frequently at the local level here. Madhu Joshi, former communications manager at the Indage Group, of the wine and restaurant fame, is now the communication and marketing manager at Novotel’s HITEC Convention Centre in Hyderabad. Joshi had to move as Indage is a troubled company. An opportunity came up in Hyderabad and she took it. The thing is that she took it. Four years ago, she and many like here would not have made the move.

Story continues below

Advertisement

COMMENT Comment on this article

Anurag Bajaj is another good example to back my point of view. From general manager at the Marine Plaza Mumbai, Bajaj moved to Kenya in 2006 to head Sarovar’s projects there. Africa is a tough and rough continent to put it mildly. An executive chef from my operations days had his house robbed twice despite having company accommodation and security. But Bajaj, has made it work for him in the three years since moving there and is now general manager and director at the very plush New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salam, Tanzania. Good on him because it puts him in a rare club.

Also, hotel companies such as Starwood are keenly aware of the need for a strong Indian management cadre. It is making a major play for India by launching almost all of its brands here. To back up its strong pipeline, Starwood is training and cultivating hand-picked managers across the group’s Indian operations who will in due course, be the mobile squad who troubleshoot, launch and manage its investments here.

A reflection closer to home of this professional migration is in the Hotelier India Awards this year. With a focus on innovation, the key clause is that submissions will be accepted for work done in earlier companies and locations so long as it is implemented after December 2007. We do not want to deny good work at the cost of career progress. Because the best are always in demand everywhere.

Have a good week.