Demand Vs Supply

The wide gap between demand and supply needs to be reduced, but hotel owners and developers feel the need for greater support in the wake of various challenges.

- Rashmi Naicker

Leading developers in the hospitality sector, Vinay Gupta, VP, Asset management, SAM- HI Hotels Pvt Ltd, Nirupa Shankar, director, Brigade Hospitality, Naveen Jain, president, Duet Hotels and Varun Chaudhary, executive director, CG-Corp Global, discuss the various challenges they face and what are the expectation from the government to ease the increase in supply.

With the government’s focus on developing tourism, how is this being reflected in terms of its development and expansion in the hospitality segment? 

Vinay Gupta: The industry has definitely gauged interest from developers and private equity funds off late and attracted investments. While the current scenario of the hotel industry is expected to further strengthen towards the year end and over the next year, some investors are likely to commit slowly, given to the past distress in the industry. However, it will be right to say, that with time the sector has matured. The development of projects is carefully planned keeping in preference the choice of target audience – business or leisure travellers. The location of a property plays a key role and with the growth of business travellers, IT parks are the trending expansion hubs. During our recent discussions with most hotel operators, they have indicated growing demand and market expectation to perform better in the coming year. However, we need to get a few fundamentals right, like initiating new manufacturing projects, increased infra spend, greater liberalisation of tourist e-visas, better connectivity to sites of interest for international tourists, etc.