Mahindra Holidays to open resort in Coorg

Rs 50-crore resort to house 60 rooms in the first phase

Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Ltd (MHRIL) will be opening a resort in Coorg in Karnataka in January, 2005 with a total investment outlay of about Rs 50 crore. The resort will house 60 rooms in the first phase, which will then be expanded to 120 rooms in a year's time.

"As part of our effort to become the dominant player in the lifetime holiday business we are planning to acquire properties in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. We are also mulling the acquisition of a property in the Kerala backwaters," Ramesh Ramanathan, managing director, MHRIL, told media persons here yesterday.

MHRIL which has close to 25,000 members said that its membership base was growing about 30 per cent annually.

Meanwhile, MHRIL's Varca beach resort in Goa has been successfully assessed at level 3 of the prestigious PCMM certification (people capability matrurity model).

"We are committed towards achieving the highest-levels of customer satisfaction through service excellence and PCMM is a significant step in that direction. Our aim is to become the dominant player in the lifetime holiday business in the Asia-pacific region and eventually the world," he said.

Quality Assurance Institute(QAI) alongwith KPMG were MHRIL's partners in the PCMM assessment exercise and assisted them from pre-assessment of processes, alignment of practices to the PCMM model to the final assessment.

PCMM is developed by the Carnegie Mellon university's software engineering institute to assist organisations in maturing their people processes and enhancing quality of their workforce in order to improve long-term business performance. The assessment is normally used in the software industry and MHRIL is the first company in the hospitality industry to be PCMM certified.

"Based on the feedback from our guests we have learned that the customer satisfaction index has gone up from 4.06 to 4.20 on a five point scale. We have also witnessed a dramatic drop in attrition rates from 13 to 4 per cent thereby reducing costs by seven to eight per cent across departments," said P Senthil Kumar, head-human resources, MHRIL.

MHRIL hopes that the PCMM assessment and the increase in cutomer satisfaction will also help in increasing member referrals for resort membership. Member referrals usually accounts for nearly 40 per cent of all resort memberships. MHRIL which has spent Rs 40 lakh for the PCMM assessment will replicate it in the Coorg resort next and will implement it across all its properties by 2006.