TravTalk India Online Magazine
With domestic boom in the Indian hospitality sector, Marriott hotels and resorts in cities have been witnessing occupancy between 90 and 95 per cent, says Arun Kumar, Market Vice President- North India, Nepal and Bhutan, Marriott. He also shares plans to further boost business in India and Bhutan markets.
Nisha Verma
With Bhutan opening its borders for tourists recently, Marriott is making sure that Indian tourists put the destination and their two properties in the country into their next holiday itinerary. “We have two beautiful hotels. Le Meridien Paro is closer to the airport, resort kind of location and close to Nature. Then we have Le Meridien Thimphu, which has a city centre location. Both have been successful hotels in the past and unlike many other operators, we did not close the hotels. We continued to run the hotels and worked with the owners to make sure the business is moving along,” he shared.
He explained, “As the country opens, we are expecting tourism to pick up in Bhutan. Despite being small, Bhutan is managing tourists in a structured manner. India is still a big market for Bhutan and with the market opening, we are expecting tourists from traditional source markets like India Singapore and Thailand. We want to help the tourism of Bhutan to recover what it has lost in the last two-and-a-half years.”
Working with Bhutan govt
Sharing how the government is supporting the industry, he said, “Tourism in Bhutan was traditionally driven by tour operators and we had to manage it through them. For the first time, government has opened it and people don’t have to book through the tour operators but can book directly online too.”
As a source market, he revealed that. “India has a massive number of Marriott Bonvoy members, where we have actively promoted Bhutan as a destination, along with these two hotels. We have 700,000 members in India and moving forward, we have plans to get into other source markets of Thailand and Singapore,” he said. He added, “In terms of expansion, we are in talks with many developers. We would like to see a luxury brand opening in Bhutan.”
Managing India boom
Talking about the big domestic boom seen in India, Kumar said, “It’s fantastic to get business back into the hotels. We have some city hotels with occupancy between 90-95% which is encouraging.”
Managing ARRs
The increasing ARRs in the last one year has been the talk of the town. “This boom of business and this average rate growth has helped us to get our profitability back in place, which has helped us to spend and reopen all the facilities, areas much quicker than we thought, and we are going to add more services into these destinations,” he claimed.
Kumar claimed that they are seeing growth in secondary and tertiary cities more than the metros. He revealed, “This in South Asia, and specifically India, we have seven projects that will open. In our market, we have two new openings—Westin in Rishikesh by end of November and a Le Meridien in Amritsar to open by mid-December.”
MICE and G20
Talking about working with the government on G20 Presidency of India, Kumar pointed out, “We are actively working with the G20 organising committee because we have over 100 hotels in India, and we want business at the end of the day. This is the first time that the government has taken so much interest in developing some of these. We need more international conferences to come into India.”
