Kishore Biyani's real-estate investment arm, Kshitij Investment Advisory, will manage 3,000 hotel rooms in the coming years.
MUMBAI: Retailer Kishore Biyani is on the hospitality beat. His real-estate investment arm, Kshitij Investment Advisory Co Ltd (KIAC), will manage 3,000 hotel rooms in the coming years.
Using a combination of business and boutique hotels and serviced apartments, the room inventory will be added through the ‘market cities’ being developed by KIAC.
Market cities are projects spread across 25 acres (5,00,000 sq ft), located within city limits and featuring retail, leisure, entertainment, recreation and hospitality projects, including convention centres, three-star, four-star, boutique hotels and serviced apartments. A majority of the roll-outs are expected to take place in regular intervals, post 2008. According to sources, KIAC is planning close to 18 ‘market cities’.
“The hotel room inventory in each of dozen-odd short-.listed market cities is estimated to be 200 for business hotels, 100 for boutique hotels and over 100 for serviced apartments. The combination of business and boutique hotels, besides serviced apartments, is what Kshitij is keen on.
However, some of the developments like the one in Whitefield, Bangalore, will feature all the three options under one roof. Thus, on an average, each of the short-listed market cities will have 300 guest rooms using the three combinations,” said the source.
Apart from these facilities, the market cities will feature shopping, entertainment and leisure options.
Market cities entail an overall investment of $350 million, which has been funded through KIAC’s second fund — The Horizon International Fund.
So, while Kshitij will own and develop the real estate, they will get into a management agreement with national and international hospitality players to brand and operate
these hotels and serviced apartments. In fact, sources also said that discussions are currently on with a host of them, but no agreements have been signed.
Some of Kshitij’s market cities are Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kochi, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram.
Going through a major demand-supply imbalance scenario, the Indian hospitality sector currently boasts of just over a lakh hotel rooms in the organised sector. The current
demand, however, is for over to 1,30,000 rooms.
According to industry reports, there are close to 155 hospitality projects under development across the country that will account for an additional inventory of around 45,000 by 2009-10.
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