Hotels set up own institutes

Lest the shortage of trained manpower take the sheen away from the booming hospitality sector, leading hotel chains are busy setting up training institutes to source required manpower.

Royal Palms India, for instance, has set up a world-class hospitality training institute to train, develop and hire professionals in the hospitality sector.

Sources say the international hospitality major Carlson too is planning to set up a huge in-house training facility in New Delhi. The Kohinoor Group is expected to follow suit by setting up its own institute.

Other leading hospitality majors which have their own training institutes include The Indian Hotel Company (Taj Group), The East India Hotels (Oberoi Group), Royal Orchid's college of Hotel Management and the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, Manipal.

A new player in the market, Berggruen Holdings which is launching budget hotels under the brand name, Keys, is also setting up its own hospitality education venture where it will train students.

The company plans to introduce a one-year vocational education course for certificate-level education initially in four metros.

The current shortfall in availability of hospitality professionals in India is approximately 35,000. This gap is expected to widen and likely to reach 100,000 by 2010 when an additional 40,000 would have been added.

Budget hotels are poaching professionals and the hospitality sector is losing professionals to the airline industry.

"The average number of professionals for a three- or five-star room is 1.5 to 2. With the sector all set to add 100,000 more rooms, the shortage is bound to increase," rues an industry source.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the travel and tourism sector in India is likely to generate $90 billion in revenues and close to 28 million jobs by 2014. In 2007, India is expected to attract nearly 5 milion travellers.

Dilawar Nensey, joint managing director, Royal Palms Hospitality Training Institute, says: "It is difficult to get quality professionals, hence the institute shall serve the twin-purpose of feeding our demand as also create well-trained hospitality professionals who have worked hands-on in a luxury hotel as a part of their curriculum. Freshers hired by us shall also be trained at this institute."

Royal Palms may open up the institute to other hospitality majors after two years. Industry analysts point out this is just the beginning. More international and Indian majors are planning to enhance the capacity of their institutes with India attracting more travellers for business, tourism and health reasons, resulting in the revenue per available room increasing 31 per cent in 2006.

(With inputs from Kalpana Pathak)