Wellness makes comeback

Ramesh Daryanani, Vice President, Global Sales, Asia Pacific, Marriott International, feels industry needs to go back to the basics to speed up the business recovery

TT Bureau

Marriott International returned with one of its most coveted events ‘The Exchange India event 2022’ (earlier called Sales Mission/ At Marriott), one of the leading B2B networking and business events taking place for the first time since the pandemic. The event took place in Mumbai and New Delhi with more than 65 international hotels in attendance.

Speaking on the sidelines of the show, Ramesh Daryanani, Vice President, Global Sales, Asia Pacific, Marriott International, said, “We have today 65 hoteliers that have come in from all parts of the world representing 150 hotels across our portfolio. This event is all about promoting tourism, MICE and business travel to these destinations.”

According to Daryanani, projections for the near future look promising. “We believe travel will continue to rebound and improve versus 2019 levels and this will be led by leisure. We are seeing a lot of pent-up demand for leisure travel across the region and the world. We are also seeing corporate travel continue to strengthen as well. With regard to meetings and events, our queries for 2023 has surpassed our expectations. We feel very optimistic about 2023. In addition to that, we are also adding new hotels. We have more than 700 hotels in the pipeline in this part of the world. Our new build hotels take approximately 3-4 years to come into the system – hence these openings will be staggered across the region. Along the way, we will also have some new conversions that will be joining the system as well,” he shared.

One of the recent conversions are six hotels in Vietnam from the Vinpearl Group. The openings has taken the total number of hotels for the group to 17 in Vietnam. “But we have a pipeline of 30 hotels overall. We have had a strong 2022 so far. RevPAR levels are 4 per cent behind 2019 levels and we see the next quarter improving as well. We feel optimistic about Q4,” he said.