The Janpath Hotel is fighting the odds with a novel plan to bring it into the limelight.
Travellers are rarely generous when it comes to spending on what is not value for money, location be dammed. If The Janpath Hotel, the India Tourism Development Corporation’s off-again, on-again hotel managed to increase its average room revenues from Rs 1,600 to Rs 5,100 in the boom years (2007-08) before a slight dip to Rs 4,566 thereafter, blame it on the room crunch in the capital city. Despite being labelled a dump in online reviews, it contributed to ITDC’s profit (Rs 63 crore in 2008-09), one reason the corporation decided it was in urgent need of renovations if it was to survive.
Extensive renovations have been on for a while, but Janpath, unlike its neighbouring Imperial, does not have good bones. Built as a hostel in the 1950s, it resembles a hostel still. But in the eighties, when there was a glut of rooms in the city and tourists nowhere in sight, the hotel had given away rooms as offices and halls as exhibition spaces on leases that lasted too long, responsible in large part for its tacky image. Janpath did not make it as part of the BJP government’s disinvestment package in the nineties on the suggestion that it was to be converted into a Bharat Paryatan Bhawan, a tourist reception centre. Through those years, the corporation had been loath to spend on what might have become wasted expenditure, so Janpath took a turn for the worse.
If it is now being revived, the reason might have to do with it turning into a landlord in a way it can guard its bottomline without losing out on its role as a hotel. There is no denying that its location is attractive, even if open space is at a premium. So it launched a two-pronged effort to raise the bar and turn it from a low-rent four-star hotel to a ditzier five-star property, even if it occupies the lowest rungs of that market. The first part was obvious: Comprehensive renovations — but not, says its CMD, razing it to rebuild, because of the high costs involved — Rs 200 crore by some reckoning.
Instead, in just under Rs 30 crore, it has glazed the corridors that provide the arms of the ‘H’ shaped building with the extensive corridors that lead to the hostel-style rooms, though in all fairness, the rooms have now been upgraded with Norwegian wood, 12-inch international mattresses, and by ITDC standards, almost luxurious bathrooms. The corridors are being provided with paintings, Czechoslovakian chandeliers and onyx pillars. A swimming pool is being built to be ready by next year, and a garden on one side of the building is being landscaped. The lobby is being redesigned, a sunken lounge will be created under an atrium-style roof, and the entrance is being paved with dark cobblestones.
But that’s nothing compared to the additional Rs 20-crore or so its restaurant partners have probably spent to renovate parts of the hotel, one to create the oriental restaurant and lounge Mismo, and the other the high-profile, Rohit Bal-designed, over-the-top Italian restaurant Cibo. Now, another restaurant will partner with the hotel, to create the hugely popular south Indian non-vegetarian restaurant Swagath, complete with an aquarium from which diners can pick the fish they want prepared. There is talk of giving out another part of the hotel for a barbeque restaurant, though a vendor for it still has to be selected. And one wing of 42 rooms is being given out in similar partnership to create what the CMD refers to as “the biggest in-room spa” in the city. “Before the recession, we had targeted $400-600 for these spa rooms,” he said, “but now, we’ll wait and see the market.”
The changes are apparent, even overwhelming, largely because Janpath wasn’t something you spoke about in polite terms earlier. It might not make the cutting-edge of design — the building has no architectural merit to speak of, though the size of its remaining 148 rooms is probably more generous than most others in the city — but there’s enough happening to draw in the chatterati and glitterati to put it in a league it earlier did not even have aspirations to.