Boutique attack

HOSPITALITY: New properties will complete the Park's presence in all key metro cities.

Corporate executives at any of the Park hotels sometimes have a giggle. No matter how often they live out of suitcases around the country, or even the world, the Park chain continually surprises them.

Whether confounded by design so modern, it makes most conventional hotels seem dowdy, or because the cuisine has a twist so compelling, they're overwhelmed by it.

And now with The Park opening in Navi Mumbai later this month (or perhaps the early part of next month), India's financial capital will get a taste of what the other metros already know "" that in a crowded market you can be small yet distinctive.

"There's a lot of demand in that area," says Priya Paul, president of the chain, who has insisted on collaborations with the slickest design shops of the world for her hotels. Still, she's hedging her bets "" other hotels are to follow, but even now Navi Mumbai isn't exactly teeming with people who will fill the 80-room property as soon as it is soft-launched.

The twist, therefore, has been in creating a hotel school on the same premises. "It's primarily for us," says Paul, who hopes to absorb the bulk of the 60-odd students the school will churn out every year.

Besides a one-year management trainee programme, it will also offer a three-year degree course, as well as a one-year certification course. "We're plugging a training gap in the market," says Paul.

The Navi Mumbai property isn't a new one, though it opens as a hotel for the first time. A part of the group for almost two decades, the shell has been in place for as long, and has just been completed at a cost of Rs 35 crore by London-based Project Orange, a design consultancy that was set up by a former colleague of designer Terence Conran.

"The rooms are large, and there's a contemporary edge to ethnic materials like cane and bamboo," says Paul.

Completing the group's major metro presence will be its Hyderbad hotel that, at Rs 270 crore, is both its largest and most expensive.

To open by mid-2008, the 280-room hotel overlooking Husain Sagar lake includes for the first time for the chain a retail ele-ment spread over 40,000 sq ft. "We'll populate it with our own brands like the Oxford book store, as well as high-end luxury brands," says Paul.

A boutique group, Park is now clearly also looking at other markets more aggressively and would like to signal its presence with at least another property in the National Capital Region, one in Mumbai proper, and get into the leisure segment (which it could announce sometime very soon).

Meanwhile, The Park in Delhi is completing a Rs 40 crore metamorphosis. "There's much more synergy between all Park hotels now," says Paul. The implications of the hotel management school in that direction could be vital.