Marriott has grown more compared to competition: Rajeev Menon

Marriott Hotels India has been on a growth spree opening up new properties. Rajeev Menon, Area Vice President, South Asia, Marriott Hotels, was in Delhi recently for the Global Sales Meet in Delhi. Business Today spoke to him about the state of the industry and developments in his company.

Q. How has the current economic environment proved for your business?

A. Slowdown no doubt has impacted every sector, and the hospitality industry is no exception. It came at a time when our industry was creating capacity. There were 50,000 rooms about four years ago. Today we have over 75,000. This increase happened when there were visible signs of economic slump across the world. In addition to this, the industry has also had to deal with inflationary pressure, including the critically needed energy that has seen a 60 per cent increase in cost. All of these factors have made times challenging. There has been a 4 per cent slump in the hotel industry. Marriott Hotels, on the other hand, has actually bucked this trend and grown by 5 per cent.  On our stabilized portfolio, we are driving better premium and grown more compared to competition. We command 18 per cent premium versus our competition.

Q. Could you elaborate on your presence?

A. In all, we have 23 hotels in India under the Marriott umbrella. Overall we have added over 5,500 rooms. Of this, we have 11 hotels under the Courtyard umbrella in the mid-range. Five hotels are under the JW Marriott range, one of which will be launched in Delhi this November.

Our first Fairfield, which is in the budget/affordable hotel space, has been launched in Bangalore. We have two of our hotels under the Renaissance range in Mumbai, one of which belongs to the Marriott Executive Apartment range. (Renaissance are luxury hotels that seek to weave in some distinctive local ambience in the choice of their locations.) Under the Marriott brand we have one each in Goa, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The good news is that within a year of opening our hotel in Bangalore, we have achieved 80 per cent occupancy.

Q. How are you looking to grow?

A. All our properties in the affordable, or budget range under the Fairfield range have tremendous scope here and we are looking at this range as big drivers of our business. We are on track of our stated goal of having 100 hotels in India by 2018. In fact 47 of our hotels are already under various stages of construction. Seven of these are coming to Bangalore. We have seen tremendous response from tier II cities such as Pune, Goa, Agra, Raipur, Guwahati, Amritsar Cochin and Lucknow. All hotels are managed by us here. We are not looking at the franchise model in the near future.