No more room

Despite tourism's ducks-and-drakes phenomenon, it is the golden period for India's hospitality business.

When the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai celebrated its 100th anniversary in the 21st century, it should have given itself another pat on its back "" for launching the first hotel chain in the country. Only, of course, it never did, despite being India's oldest hotel, and later positioning itself as its oldest hotel chain too boot.

What the Taj did do was invest in Goa's Fort Aguada Resort at a time when no one had even heard of the union territory, and promote it vigorously as a destination for jaded Europeans who no longer wanted to go to Southampton. And it leased the Lake Palace in Udaipur from the maharana of Mewar and created destination marketing and the concept of heritage hotels long before others cottoned on.

The Taj was literally built up as a chain in the seventies and eighties by Ajit Kerkar and Camellia Panjabi, a duo that snubbed the Indian travel agent, sold overseas effectively, had the country's first celebrity and woman chefs, and created an experience of interiors that became a Taj hallmark.

But the Taj was a late starter. First off the block was the Oberoi group, even before independence, which is why Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi is widely regarded as the father of Indian hoteliering.

He was certainly far-sighted, and even when strapped for funds, went on to build epochal properties that were far ahead of their times "" even though he briefly fell into the trap of building American-style shoebox hotels.

But whatever they might have looked like outside, you couldn't fault them inside "" remember Cafe Chinois at the Delhi Intercontinental? "" with their spit-and-polish service and ever-so-slight disdain towards Indian guests.

With the Shimla properties, the decaying Grand in Calcutta, the Oberoi Intercontinentals in Delhi and Mumbai, it set standards. Who else could have taken a hearty surname like "Obrai" and turned it into a sophisticated brandname?

But the race was started by ITC's Welcomgroup with its grandiose plans to include grand city hotels, resorts, heritage hotels and "Indotels".

With the Chola in Madras, the Mughal in Agra and the Maurya in Delhi "" all with Sheraton tie-ups "" it created a buzz with its speciality Indian restaurants, its distinctive architecture and its aggressive franchising agreements which, alas, proved its Waterloo: the image was too diluted to stand close scrutiny, and you just didn't know what to expect from, say, the Mansingh in Jaipur.

What Welcomgroup did do "" and very successfully "" is open the resort market for Indian tourists in the off-season with its family packages at rates that were laughable. What it did with the Mughal Sheraton in Agra, the Taj group later did by packaging Goa in the monsoons, thereby eliminating forever the concept of a season for Indian hotels.

India Tourism Development Corporation, which was created to pioneer tourism growth in new Indian destinations, became part of the chain too, even if its growth, like Welcomgroup's, was lop-sided. But, again, the hotels did not conform to any single image "" the flagship Ashok in Delhi and the tacky Khajuraho Ashok were placed unequally at par.

Through the eighties, there was no discernible change in the chains, and attempts by mid-level chains like Quality Inn never met with success. High real estate prices, and expensive electrity and water tariffs, ensured that promoters only wanted to develop five-star hotels.

It was in the nineties that things began to change, with more international chains looking towards India as the Next Big Hope. The grand announcements for "20 hotels in all major cities in the next two years" "" Kempinski, Penta, Hilton, Radisson, Crowne Plaza "" came to nothing, and growth has been ploddingly slow, even though there are many more hotels, and many more resorts, now than ever before.

But because of the mercurial nature of the tourism industry in India, fresh start-ups have been slow. As a result, investments have been cautious.

But two things have heralded a change for the hotel industry in India. The first is patronage by Indians "" thanks to the Gulf War and the SARS scare, hotels that promoted their rooms for Indians found there were more takers than they had hoped for, and the scales in occupancies have now tilted in their favour since.

The second is a recent phenomenon "" the government's open skies policy. Suddenly, seats to and within India are no longer a problem, and hotel rooms are hard to come by. And so, if the hotel industry does not pull up its socks and go on a major expansion drive, it might miss the tourism boat once again "" and this time it'll only have itself to blame.