Policy intervention is a must!

JB Singh, President & CEO, InterGlobe Hotels, says that the industry needs policy intervention to come out of the current situation. He adds that while there do exist opportunities for new products, there is still room for innovation in existing ones to make them more appealing to the younger travellers of today.

Nisha Verma

To go where we want to be as an industry, there has to be a big policy intervention and one cannot drive that without changing the structure, said JB Singh when speaking at the recent CAPA India webinar. “As an industry, we touch multiple ministries, right from urban affairs and home affairs to local municipalities, and we all have spent enough time to figure out that there is a need for some convergence in terms of alignment and commitment to drive this forward in a singular way,” he shared.

But, is repackaging existing products enough? Singh says that while that is important, we, as a country, have to move away from these small islands of excellence and start thinking about a holistic tourist experience. He added, “For instance, the UAE is the most researched destination for 2021. Their Twitter programmes are very powerful. We have our technology, but we have not leveraged or prepared ourselves for the same. By 2030, there will be 70 billion connected devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) will be a big $2 trillion industry. Hence, we first need to get the structure right in terms of the ministry’s perspective, so that there is adequate institutional accountability that gets built into the whole system for everything to move.” Having said that, Singh asserted that there are a lot of existing product opportunities as well.

“We don’t have huge tourist numbers even though our capacity has increased significantly. I think, our culture must be presented in a new avatar. The demographics are changing and the younger population wants something different. According to a study, by 2030, 57 per cent of the new demographic population will travel to emerging markets, and India will be one of them along with Russia, China and Brazil. Clearly, we are not in that game if our numbers are hitting at 3.3 per cent. Hence, we need to present our heritage in a different way. I think the policy must have something that can bring transformational changes. We have a lot of existing festivals like Pushkar, Hornbill and more, for the young travellers. Those need to be looked at,” he recommended.

Work on room supply

“It’s very expensive to build capacity in India because of the laws,” said Singh, adding, “Delhi will become the world’s largest metropolis by 2028. It will house 38 million people, which means that there is going to be shortage of land. Hence, it is apparent that urban affairs would move into the realm of tourism, and everybody needs to understand how things need to be structured because there are many ministries involved.”