How Brand Logic Played out, to Cover the Market, Evolving into a wider cross sectional play across styles and price points?
With Deepika Rao, Executive VP, New Businesses, IHCL
2017 marked our first year of reporting profit after seven to eight years of losses. So it gives you a sense that the sector was facing a tough time prior to 2017. So in 2017, we had a PAT loss of 63 crores. But you can see the transformation and the brandscape that we have actually deployed. I’ve just shown you data to FY 2024. I just want to qualify that we are in our silent period. Our board meeting is on the 5th of May, so I’ve not updated this to FY 25 figures. But the previous fiscal, you can see the PAT has swung close to 1,300 crores; from a debt of 3,000 crores, net cash of 2,000 crores and that’s really the brand scape that I’ll talk a little bit more about from being more mono brand to being multi-brand and the portfolio really how we have scaled and eventually. If you see this is reflecting in shareholder confidence and during the last fiscal year, IHCL reached the milestone of one lakh crore market cap so that’s really been our journey.
And to take this forward, something that our whole industry is benefiting from is, the past three fiscal years, we’ve all witnessed double digit growth. And that’s because the demand trends are looking very strong. So India’s movement up to being the fifth largest global economy is something that has meant that discretionary spend has gone up, demand continues to outpace supply, and of course we’re hoping this year, the foreign tourist arrival goes beyond 10 million, which is what we saw in the pre-COVID times.
On the supply side, it’s not catching up as fast. So as long as demand keeps outpacing supply, we’re able to drive revenue growth through rate growth. What has been fantastic is the number of airports that has opened and that’s really enabling more travel. Before actually the hospitality part of travel and tourism, it is the travel infrastructure that’s very important. So I can tell you all that the two new upcoming airports here in NCR at Jewar and at Mumbai, our air catering business is also going to open two new units there. So more airports mean even allied businesses like air catering is also seeing a push. So to just try and see what does this mean for us and how we looked at the next five years till 2030, I’ve covered this, the India growth stories, so favorable macros.
And what are the brands that will help us to navigate this? Before that, our company is almost 121 years old now. And we have a legacy of pioneering destinations, whether it was Rajasthan or Kerala, but we continue building on that pioneering legacy. I don’t know if you all, many of you may have visited this resort of ours in Andamans. So we’ve gone to the island groups of Andamans, and very soon, actually we are opening one on the first of May in Lakshadweep in Bangaram. That will be followed by a second one in May again in Bangaram. So we’ll have two there. And then in Suheli and Kadmat. So the Lakshadweep Island groups are also going to see some good quality branded accommodation coming in.
Northeast is something we’re very focused on and the right brand for the right markets. You may not see that many Taj branded hotels today, but definitely we see a scope for our Vivanta and Ginger brands here. Kivedia, you’re all familiar, that is the destination which has the Statue of Unity. This fiscal year we’re opening two brands, which is a Vivanta and a Ginger here. So we continue to want to build new destinations in the country. The most important thing in building brands is we need to achieve what is optimum scale for that brand. Now if you’re a mid-scale brand, that number would be different. If you’re a luxury brand, that number would be different. But we are very focused on each of the brands we need to achieve scale in order to be relevant. So we closed the last fiscal year with a portfolio of 380 hotels. Out of these, 137 are in the pipeline. So if we were to not, you just let’s say for a moment, if we stop signing any more new deals, we will still be able to open easily 20 plus hotels for the next four years or plus because of the kind of pipeline that we have.
Talking about new formats, one of the brands that I oversee directly is our Homestay brand. And last fiscal year, that has crossed a portfolio of 300. So this is a very new segment within our hospitality offerings. There’s more than one brand. There are other players as well. And this is clearly telling us that people are looking for new formats of leisure. So that’s really our footprint today, 380 hotel portfolios, 300 home stays. So these are our brands.
You can look at brands in terms of themes as well. So whether it is our boutique leisure brand, which we just acquired in January of 2025, Taj Safaris, and of course, I just talked to you all about Ama Homestays. This was our latest addition to the brandscape. On 1st April, IHCL is now operating the Claridges New Delhi, a very iconic hotel in this city. I think most of you are very familiar with this hotel and this brand. So this is in recognition of the fact that even within luxury, customers want different formats of luxury. So this is going to speak to those who want the more boutique, the more, not the large scale format of luxury. So this is going to speak to those who want the more boutique, the more, not the large scale format of luxury offering. So first April, we’ve actually now included this within IHCL’s brandscape. Just to tell you all, I was talking to you earlier about how scale is relevant in each brand. So if I just look at the horizon from 2017 to 2024, Taj has crossed 100, more than 100. Actually, now it’s more than 125, both in domestic and international. Ginger is now, today, 103. And if you look at the upscale and the upper upscale space, even the Vivanta Gateway are now crossed 100. So it’s important that we achieve scale, because that’s the only time you’ll be able to actually build itinerary circuits and be available for the customer wherever they’re looking for you.
At the same time, we haven’t taken our eye off some of the other brands within the hospitality ecosystem. So, F&B, for example. In India, I think F&B clearly is at least 40 to 50% of your total revenue, which is unlike the Western Hemisphere. Indian cuisine brands like Loya, which just opened in Taj Mahal, Bombay, in the month of February.
Qumin is very interesting on the other hand. It’s a very young brand. We have food trucks. We have an app. This is another brand that I oversee as well. So just glad to share with you all that now Qumin is going to be in quick commerce with another Tata company of ours, Big Basket. We’ll soon come to Delhi, but we’ve just piloted in Bangalore. So now, because quick commerce is something that is clearly seeing a lot of traction. Both Starbucks and Qumin are going to now be a part of Big Basket. So, F&B is clearly a space we need to continuously innovate, not taking our eyes off customer satisfaction, because we’re in the service business, clearly a B2C business. Focus on customer centricity is important across our group.
Just some scores on how we’ve performed and kept it above, actually, 72, our NPS. Our key enablers in this journey, we are a listed organization, so governance, part of the Tata group is clearly our guardrails. We’ll continue to stay focused on that. We are in the business of, I sometimes say, delivering happiness, and you can’t do that without your colleagues. So our focus on, these are some of the key focus areas, and of course, looking at technology as a lever.
Just moving quickly on people, we’re close to about 50 skilling centers now in the country. And you know, we’re not creating this bench trend just for IHCL and its growth. It’s a pool of talent for the hospitality and the retail. So it’s not that one has to seek a job with us. We are giving on-the-job training. We’re doing certification. But the student is free to search for employment even outside of IHCL. Our target is to reach 100,000 trained youth. PAATHYA is our ESG plus framework. We’re very conscious that the next decades of tourism has to be responsible tourism. This framework we launched only three years ago, but it has been something that as a part of the Tata group, we’ve always been committed to. So it’s very simple. We focus on six Ps, which cover the whole spectrum of culture, heritage, social responsibility, and as well as environment stewardship. So in terms of renewable energy at a portfolio level, we are close to 40% of our energy requirements is now on renewable energy.
So these are our goals for 2030. In a strategy we never change our purpose, we never change our values. Those remain the same. You just look at different enablers, different strategic initiatives. So our goals really, as you can see on the right side of the pyramid, double our revenue growth from FY24, reach a 700 hotel portfolio, we are at 380. We have taken an audacious target on ROC here at 20%. For our sector that is very impressive. We are currently in the late teens, so 20% is going to be something that we are confident of and we want to put ourselves up for. And of course, don’t lose focus on the customer.
Destination Goa, transforming into a Tourist’s First choice, now nurturing Rural Tourism
With Avduth Timblo, MD, Cidade Goa, and founder, The Goan newspaper
I’m not a hotelier, and I’m also not a journalist. But you get branded along the way for doing a few things here and there. So I’m qualified to talk on this industry because one has supported it from outside. And also I’ve had to do a few other things more out of necessity than a vision. We come from Goa. And when someone asked me, are you a Goan? I said yes, but when did you go to Goa? And the answer is 1,000 years ago. And we have a continuity of that nature and it has been very nice, this journey along.
We ventured into the hotel industry because we found a location. And that location was tested in our own wisdom and our own minds. And part of our family said, we’re going to endeavor. That’s how Cidade Goa started. We were happy to find a very highly talented architect, Charles Correa, that gave us a further impetus into how we should go ahead beyond architecture and into tourism. I’m a little bit anti-establishment. And older I go, older I become, that component of me is increasing. So I’m not going to hold back to say a few things. How we have suffered, how we have enjoyed the suffering by changing things around.
I remember in the early days of Cidade Goa, I was running around with the Director General of Tourism, their offices, and they said, no, you cannot be a five-star hotel because your lobby is not air-conditioned. And then, you don’t have carpets. Now, these were the terms and conditions which we have come through, and Navin has been a witness to all these things. We fought these battles along the way and brought certain amount of wisdom. One of the biggest battles that one fought was there used to be only one flight to Goa, Bombay-Goa, 737, carrying 119 passengers. There was no way tourism could have come up. And every time you petition to Indian Airlines, anyone else in India, so no, no, we have to first fulfill the Delhi-Bombay quota, and then this quota, and that quota, it was a quota raj. And we looked around, we said, there is no future for tourism. Until someone said, why don’t you get charters here? Because Maldives had started charters. So we fought tooth and nail, that took two years, until we had a prime minister in 1985, he himself was a pilot. He said, yes, I would welcome a direct flight from Europe to Goa. And that was the open sky policy from which started tourism in Goa in November 1985, it was the turning point. So our investments could bear fruit and being from a business family, capital is respected. We are from a mineral industry, we are in shipping, we are in steel, we are all over the world, quite unseen.
But again, now we are looking forward to tourism in Goa in a different angle. Goa has got two airports, a population of just 1.5 million, and we’ve got 130 landings into Goa so that’s a big development for Goa. Why am I trying to tell you all this is to come to the point of new trends in tourism. Please remove all your hats, because all this, what’s happening now needs to be disrupted. And what do I mean by disruption? It has to be accelerated changes. If you disrupt too often then itself the establishment may be no longer valid. We recently opened a small 24 key resort. And the resort is ready, the guests are enjoying, but we haven’t announced it. So don’t take my words of now as announcement. The resort has all its functional aspects, but it is not a destination.
So it’s not going to give you the kind of ARRs which Maldives gets like $1,000 or some very elite properties get $2,000. It’s going to reach there. But India isn’t ready for it as yet. As I said, Maldives had charters and we had one flight. Now we have overcome that period, we’ve opened our skies, we have gone into variety of market-oriented development and that has yielded results. Tourism is on its way up. Navin just brought about definition of tourism. It’s a great unifier. So sometimes when I looked into back in history, what were the great unifiers of India? What things come in my mind? One is cricket. One is Bollywood. Sometimes I say ‘dosa’ is a unifier. It’s all over from north to south, or maybe tandoori chicken for those of you love that. Again, these are unifiers.
So this resort that we just opened, it isn’t dependent on the government. It doesn’t, well right now we’ve got some electricity, it will not want electricity, it will not want water, and it will not want connectivity. So how do we get people into that resort and how do we make it? It’s a big challenge. We have the Arabian Sea, we have a lagoon, we have a five kilometer river and it’s hundreds of acres of property, but just 24 keys. So again, goodbye to all the infrastructural government beggings that we did for decades, and it’s called OTG, off the grid. It started working, by next year it’ll even prove that it is possible for this disruption to happen, or this necessity to happen. So it is so rural because Navin told me you’ve got to focus on rural tourism.
So, it’s beyond beach, beyond urban surroundings and beyond all that we consider as tourism of suit and tie and ballrooms and so on. The most important part is we are going to crash the investment needed per key by 70%. Now once that happens, then the trend takes place. An emerging trend is that if you continue spending, I remember with the Nairs here, they were just happy that this was commissioned but it costed 18 crores. So I said 18 crores for 300 rooms. It says land was half of it. Even then, three crores per key.
And that started my pulse rate going up. And I don’t know what happens when you get into these kind of financial modeling. Finally, it doesn’t yield, and what doesn’t yield doesn’t grow, so therefore if the tourism has to grow, you better get ready to be disrupted or bring the cost down and down and down until it becomes affordable. Then only we can have a double digit growth. That’s what I hope I succeed in the next one year because it’s my hands off effort which has been going on for 30 years and if that happens and it’s likely to happen because I’ve seen it now, the proof of the pudding is there. So you’re all welcome to come and experience it yourself next year.
How Google is Changing the Way we Travel!
With Nupur Gupta, Head of Travel Vertical, Google India
Do you remember these times, the good old paper maps? I still remember that when I traveled with my family back then, we would have these huge maps in our hands just to navigate and to decide how to go through the day. Fast forward to today. Look at what’s possible.
A friend recently went to San Francisco and came back talking about her travel in one of those self-driving cars. Truly mind-boggling, sitting in a car without a driver. This shows how much our travel industry has evolved, thanks to technology, from paper maps to self-driving cars. AI now represents the next leap in our industry. As we think about the future of travel, there are 2.4 billion reasons to be excited. That’s the number we see international trips skyrocketing to. In the last few years, in the last few months, Google and Deloitte have partnered on a research report to build a vision for the future of travel in 2040. I’m going to share some snippets from there because it highlights the center stage that India will be taking. Starting with the global number, the inbound arrivals are expected to double, are doubling every 15 years. Now we can’t predict the one of events and conflicts that impact the industry on a short-term basis, but we believe that over a long-term 10 to 15 years period, the trend will hold.
And with that, with confidence, we predict the inbound number to be 2.4 billion. Now, how do we see the travel landscape changing? 42% of the outbound travelers are actually coming from just five markets. This is actually a consolidation from 2019. Four of the markets have held their positions, but India, with a very fast pace of growth, is emerging as the fifth one. India is said to be a dominant force in the global travel, with demand increasing fivefold by 2040. Now what’s driving this growth and key considerations for all of us in the room?
One, Indians are fast decision makers. We’ve seen that Indian travelers book international flights with an average lead time of 50 days, compared to much larger for their peers. Also, India’s online travel sales are projected to reach 60% by 2028, presenting a massive digital opportunity. Talking about online, we see that the travel journey is becoming more and more complex. People are researching more than ever. It feels like travel is fun, but planning can be a big pain. Three out of five travelers don’t even know their destination when they start researching. Think about that for a moment. The journey begins with a blank canvas. And the amount of time researching? On an average, it’s a whooping 303 minutes per trip.
Now what does it mean for us and for the industry? That’s where AI has a huge opportunity to step in and make travel planning and the journey both more fun and easier. Now, not only does this new wave of innovation come at the right time from consumer perspective, but also when I talk to our partners in the industry, they all say that today companies want to delight consumers with better customer experiences and support. And at the same time, they want to streamline processes, improve operations, and become more efficient. The answer in current situation is AI.
Now let’s dive into some of the travel consumers and their behaviors. Today, we see our consumers seamlessly and simultaneously moving across three key behaviors, searching, streaming, and scrolling. We are constantly on, constantly connected across multiple devices, phones, TVs, laptops, and often switching between them and across these three key behaviors. So let’s look at each of these behaviors and what AI can do in each of them. The first one is Google search. That’s code to what we do at Google. And Search continues to be our moonshot, with triggering 5 trillion searches annually. Search has improved and improvised impressively over the last few years, both in terms of the questions you ask and the results that Google Search provides. The questions that people are asking are getting more complex and visual, and the output richer. Think about how we search.
Gone are the days of typing keywords. We’ve had voice search for a few years now, but the biggest growing search type is actually visual. With Google Lens, you can search images. You can use videos to find out more about things you see. And the latest feature is Circle to Search. No matter what you see on your phone, which app you are in, just circle, tap, and voila, you have all the information about it. How relevant is that for travel? We’re already seeing 20 billion visual searches per month. Now, not just the inputs, the outputs are changing too. Our latest breakthrough on Google Search is AI overviews. It brings the best of two worlds together, the power of LLM experience with Google’s core search systems, connecting us to get high-quality results from the web. What does it mean for the business? How does the search behavior on your website compare to the natural search behavior that users have today?
One such example is Trivago. Trivago has made searching for a hotel more conversational and more fun. With Google Cloud technology, they have launched what they call Smart AI Search and see that Trivago today shows an AI-generated summary of the highlights of the hotel. So now, instead of going through hundreds of reviews on each hotel, you actually get a summary of the highlight.
Now, we’ve seen what’s possible. Here’s a glimpse into the future. Very soon, you’ll be able to point your phone camera at whatever you’re interested in, start a conversation with your phone, and Project Astra will find you information in real time for your neighborhood. And it’s multilingual, using native audio. What that means is if you switch between different languages while conversing with the phone, it will still understand. It will still respond to you.
Moving on to the next consumer behavior, which is streaming. As consumers, we all love watching videos. For travel, it’s about exploring the next destination, the next set of activities you want to plan, or the hotel that you want to choose. And when it comes to streaming, YouTube clearly stands out. It continues to be the number one streaming platform, not just on the mobile, but on the big screen, too. We see 1 billion hours of content watched on big screen daily.
And if you ask, what content are people watching? Travel is one of the most popular categories. And like I said, people watch these videos to explore the next destination, to review the hotels, look for activities, look for restaurants, and so much more. Now, again, what does this mean for the businesses? AI actually opens up huge possibilities for creating compelling visual content, especially with images and videos, and all of this in a much more efficient way. A quick example of Agoda. They’ve used multiple different AI offerings and capabilities from Google Cloud.
First, Gemini to create concepts and ideas of what they want to show. Then they used Imagen to generate images and a storyboard of them and a storyboard containing the images. Now, the final output has to be video. So, they’ve used view to add motion and bring the content to life. Result, the creative team has been producing marketing content at 25% of the time at a fraction of production cost.
The last behavior is scrolling. Now one reason our users take an average 303 minutes to plan their trips is because of the incredible amount of information that needs to be dissected and digested. Flights, hotel options, reviews on multiple platforms. And we all also know that visual content is much easier to grasp, to make that first right impression. And that’s how at Google we are developing our products further.
When we think about the Google products, search, YouTube, Maps, the strong ambition is to make it more visual, make it richer. So what you see today is when you ask for the weekend fun activities, you get quite a few visuals, and they immediately let you decide on what the experience would be like.
One last example for today, Klook, a Hong Kong-based travel company, has a strong focus on activities and things to do. There are tons of activities and reviews on their platform. Today, they’re using AI assistance to summarize the information and personalize the recommendations.
One question for all of us in this room. How do we get from seamless experiences to bookings to deciding the right offer and truly help our consumers?
The answer is easy and complex at the same time. Summing it up, I took you through a few examples from the industry and hope they were inspiring. They actually touched upon some of the top trends that we are seeing in travel this year. Assistive Search, AI-powered content, and AI agents.
Sustainability as Choice and Urge to be in Business
With Ashwini Khurana, Founder and CEO, Karma Lakelands
Now that he’s declared me an environmentalist, I have to start with something I didn’t plan to start with. Can anybody guess how much I think about the environment? When I die, I’m going to be going six feet under from soil to soil smokelessly because I don’t want to cause combustion. And that’s not the Hindu thing at all, but what’s good for the environment is what I think about. I’m the CEO of a company that has a resort and residences, a golf course, Karma Lakelands. A few months ago there was a bloodless coup in the company and they told me that today onwards you are not the chief executive officer but the chief eternal optimist.
So that’s the full form of my title today. Karma Lakelands is a 270-acre award winning golf resort, India’s most eco-friendly golf course. We’ve been declared no chemical use. And we have a couple of unique things. Recently we opened the country’s most unique golf hole, the signature hole. The green is in the shape of our map.
I’ve been thinking about the topic of the day, what’s trending? So what’s trending at my place? Seven different things, seven different words that define us all. Clean, green, serene, responsible, sights, sounds, and smells. If you fix these seven aspects, you’ve done a good job. So what do we mean green? 270 acres, the problem with India is it’s full of Indians, a sea of irresponsible humanity, a lot of litter for example. Every employee, 725 of them, have one thing to do every day. A bending exercise. Bend your back, bend your ego. Pick up a piece of litter at least once a day. Put it in the bin.
People are surprised when they come to the resort. Is it Singapore? Well, this is very much in India. The other cultural things are no honking. The guards respond to sight, not sound. Green, 250,000 trees and plants, including five forest zones. Each of these themed forests have a different story to tell, different trees to tell, and there is a serenity in the whole place. We reduce pollution consciously The amount of oxygen that goes indoors in every space is measured.
On the symbolic responsible side, we have unique things like the neighborhood. There’s a housing society, 550 apartments close by, and they don’t have any sewer lines. So what we’ve done is they’ve treated recycled water, gets piped into one of our forest zones. As I said, five of them there, 250,000 trees. Every time somebody in these societies go to the toilet, our trees are smiling. Food is on the way. Oxygen goes back as a token of thanks.
The sights are another very important thing. The aromas, the flowers, the trees that are chosen are mindfully done. The place takes in about two and a half thousand visitors a day. And the joke is, everybody’s contributing towards soil building at Karma Lakelands. Has anybody of you noticed that whatever goes through the gut of a creature is a soil energizer? The creature could be a cow, goat, chicken, a golfer at Karma Lakelands, a visitor or an earthworm. So we have all these creatures there. Each one is working towards soil energizing, compost creation. The five restaurants, their waste gets segregated into farm animal food, the fruit and vegetable peels go for the farm animals who would turn it into compost in 10 hours. The earthworms are at work, the chickens don’t mind the restaurant food leftovers, they don’t mind the negative pranic food leftovers, the non-veg, everything is turned into compost. So I share this as a trend because we’ve done different things differently. The national anthem ritual happens on the 108 foot flag every day.
The business side of us in the last three years of all these unique, different, soulful things and experiences has shown a five-fold increase. Ever since last three months, we started to talk about the map of Bharat being a green, our volumes of golfers has doubled. All I share with you is our secret that has made us successful financially, the non-pursuit of finance, a soulful experience to the visitors.
Literary Events as Tourism’s New Draw; the Jaipur Literary Festival
With Sharupa Dutta, Content Director
We present 30 festivals across 45 cities and 19 countries. But before I say anything further, I’d love to show a film on the festival, before I tell you more. Essentially, I thought before I speak, I don’t know if all of you are familiar with the festival or not. So, the first film is of course on the Jaipur Literature Festival which finished its 18th edition earlier this year. And the next one is on all, on how it’s grown internationally. We have close to nine international editions of the festival in different cities across the world.
Harvard Business School does a study on us. They’ve been doing a study on us for the last 13 years, and they keep sort of upgrading it. And they just refreshed it last year. They suggest that we had a plan and all. I don’t know whether anybody in a first off can really plan for things. But yes, I think Jaipur Literature Festival made literature sexy. We had maybe a lot of things happening in India, but we were maybe the first people to start off. While we’ve had our core values, which have been there right from year one, and of course, when we’re talking about tourism, I think the larger ecosystem, which has grown, supported and been there, has a large role to play.
Our core values have always been, you know, consistent. We’ve had democratic access to all. We’ve grown the festival. We’ve moved from being absolutely free to keeping the online experience free and we’ve started charging a token ticket money. The festival is of course hugely expensive to run. It is based in a large way on sponsorship and going forward we’re trying our level best to kind of balance out the revenue stream so that it makes it more sustainable. But I think what is also, meaning Jaipur, we all know, is a beautiful city. It has been part of the Golden Triangle forever. It was a great festival city. So Jaipur Literature Festival found its home over there. And it’s grown, and the city has grown with it.
And what we found is while within the festival, we’ve also tried to create, so while we have democratic access for all, on stage as well as off stage, we try and be welcoming to literally each and every strata of society. I think that’s one of the key energy factors of the festival. And we constantly try and work on creating an experience so that everybody coming in also has an experience. So, we of course have created high-value experiences also within the festival where you can choose to pay a premium amount to get that, but there’s also the absolute fantastic experience that we create for anybody and everybody to walk in.
And I think the crucial aspect is that in building a festival like this, as well as all our other additions, and in fact all the other festivals that Teamwork Arts also produces, is that we keep the two twins. So while literature is looked at as literature and its content, we also keep the word festival alive, that everybody who comes in must feel as if they’re attending a festival. You should feel like how you feel on Holi, Diwali, a family wedding, you should feel that. And it’s those energies together that we try and constantly keep alive while we build this and continue to build our other properties.
