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| Edited By: Ashish K Tiwari |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 26, 2018, 05:50 AM IST
Europe’s second largest hotel group Louvre Hotels Group (LHG) is a part of Chinese conglomerate Jin Jiang International, which is the second largest in terms of the number of hotels in the world and fifth largest in terms of the number of rooms. LHG has had a very good run in the Indian hospitality market with brands like Royal Tulip, Golden Tulip, Sarovar Hotels & Resorts, Tulip Inn and the latest offering Kyriad. Saurabh Chawla, global chief development officer, LHG, in conversation with Ashish K Tiwari, speaks about the new hotel brand and LHG’s approach in India.
We are a firm believer in the Indian market and have had presence since 2007 with Golden Tulip. Early last year, we acquired Sarovar to boost our presence and to become one of the largest players. At that time we’d said this is not the end for us in the story so we are now walking the talk. We have now partnered Orange Tiger Hospitality to launch the Kyriad brand in India. All our strategies are to attain a critical size and consolidate our position as number one in all the T20 economies. India being a strong market, we now have a master franchise deal with Orange Tiger for Kyriad branded hotels, which is one of our mega brands in Europe and a few other international markets.
Kyriad is a very well-known French brand and we started globalising in 2015 by launching in Indonesia. We have had huge success there. As of today, we have 12 hotels in Indonesia. We then launched Kyriad in China late last year. We have 22 existing hotels, and in a few months, we are looking at opening 80 hotels in 2019. We have also launched Kyriad in Africa and we got four existing ones. In the Middle East, we got three existing and 234 Kyriad hotels in Europe.
We feel categorising Kyriad into a stereotypical scale is not its true justification. If there was a gun on our head and we were to choose, then we’d choose full-service mid-scale brand but the idea to highlight here is that each Kyriad is different. It has its own identity and is connected by the global hotel chain’s best practices and distribution. It sort of revolves around the theme of a traveller. There are small essences of that theme throughout the hotel starting from a globe to the library where you can read books to suitcases lying around to an international beer bar.
Yes. that was the part of the deal. It is an open thing and we have no intention of doing so. Our business model is that of partnerships. As we mentioned earlier, we would not acquire any company 100% because we want that value to be enhanced so that is how it is.
It is three years plus renewal so it stays that way. We are already one year into this relationship and the chemistry in the business has been phenomenal. It has been such a good transaction for us that it has become a benchmark.
We were never looking to acquire. Vimal is a partner. He still is a partner. The commercial arrangements within the scope of the partnership, there is no intention to acquire his stake. I think the idea is to find synergies between the two entities because we are a shareholder in the two and that makes sense and that’s what we are evaluating now.
We Hotels is a combined distribution platform which connects all the 7,000 hotels and 130 million hotel members. The travel agencies which we own, all that is connected into a hub and that hub is called We Hotel, an in-house distribution platform it’s quite revolutionary. It has been six months since it’s launched and delivers three bookings a second at the moment. The idea is to double that in six months.
