IHCL Makes The Right Seleqtions

The hospitality marque upends the concept of discerning luxury hotels by launching SeleQtions, its collection of curated hotels that are slices in time and offer immersive experiences. Puneet Chhatwal, managing director & ceo of IHCL, in an exclusive conversation with Hotelier India.

Hospitality in the modern-day world is about exclusivity and uncommon experiences. With SeleQtions, IHCL’s newly launched vertical, the hospitality group offers an ensemble of curated experiences in a peerless collection of properties, in different geographies across India.

Each hotel comes with a beautiful story underlying it, either because of its historical lineage and long legacy, or because it displays a sense of place. They offer experientials brought alive by their architecture or unique locations.

Puneet Chhatwal, managing director & ceo of IHCL says, “We are looking at creating a clean 'brand-scape’, with no confusion between Taj and the other brands from the group. At IHCL, we reimagined the first Ginger, followed by Vivanta, and then found that there was an overlap between Vivanta and Taj properties. We wanted to clean up the brand-scape and ensure that none of our properties have an overlap.” So, when IHCL decided to opt for management contracts with well-established properties, an accepted way to expand footprint and networth without making any major financial investments, the hospitality marque launched SeleQtions. “Getting into management contracts will help us not just expand our footprint but also leverage and monetise IHCL’s strengths such as branding, distribution, sales and marketing networks. The hotels under SeleQtions are well-established in the marketplace, so they don’t have to stay in the pipeline for three to five years, as it happens with hotels we are constructing from scratch. They allow us a quick six-month turnaround. The move to management contracts is in line with our strategy of margin expansion of 8 per cent,” he says.