Rebranded, Trident Hotels eyes W Asia

After six months of announcing the termination of its four-year-old marketing and co-branding strategic alliance with Hilton International for its brand Trident, the Oberoi Group announced a new brand identity, Trident Hotels, to replace Trident Hilton. The new logo was unveiled in Mumbai today.

Rattan Keswani has been appointed as the president of Trident Hotels to take the brand to the international market. The West Asian market is one area where the group would actively look to establish its brand, besides China, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Keswani, however, ruled out any possibility of an alliance or joint venture with any other brand for international operations.

"Trident has come to mean dependability and customers expect consistency and warmth and effective services from this brand," Keswani said.

Trident is the Oberoi group's brand, targeting the luxury and corporate segment with contemporary facilities. The first of the Trident hotels was opened in Chennai in 1988.

With the announcement, the famous Hilton Towers at Nariman point (in Mumbai) has also been renamed Trident. Reportedly nearly Rs 400 crore has been spent on rebranding by the group.

Explaining reasons for its fallout with Hilton, P R S Oberoi, chairman and CEO, East India Hotels, said, "Hilton announced a joint venture with a real estate company (DLF) after a strategic alliance with us. We did not expect them to form another strategic alliance. Also, Hilton announced that they were getting into the three-star segment through their Garden Inns. This would have resulted in our brand dilution and, hence, we thought it prudent to separate from Hilton. The alliance ends from Monday midnight."

Currently, the Oberoi group has seven properties to be rebranded as Trident Hotels in Gurgaon, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Kochi, Bhubaneswar and Chennai.

The new properties to come up under the same brand name are 436-room Trident Hotel at Bandra-Kurla in Mumbai, a 100 per cent EIH property, to be ready by the year-end.

Another 320-room property at the international airport in Bangalore and a 334-room Trident property at cyber city in Hyderabad and 200-room property in Chandigarh, all expected to come up in a couple of years.