Hospitality major The Indian Hotels Company Ltd will be adding eight more hotels under its The Gateway Hotels and Resorts brand in 18 months.
The total number of properties under the brand will go up to 32, said a senior official here Saturday.
After initially expanding the Gateway Hotels chain through a mix of new properties and conversion of existing ones, the company will now be looking at greenfield properties.
"Currently, we have 24 hotels under the Gateway Hotels brand and we will be adding eight more hotels over the next 18 months. The current room inventory under the brand is 2,200," Prabhat S. Verma, chief operating officer, Gateway Hotels told reporters.
He was here to launch the 200-room The Gateway Hotel IT Expressway Chennai, the first hotel under the Gateway brand here and the third in Tamil Nadu. He said in three years' time, there will be more than 40 hotels under the Gateway Hotels brand.
Verma said the Gateway Hotels earned a revenue of Rs.350 crore last fiscal and the target for the current fiscal is around Rs.450 crore. "For 2014-15, our target is Rs.550 crore," he added.
According to Verma, the revenue mix between room rent and the food and beverage for the Gateway Hotel chain is equal and the occupancy ratio across the chain is around 60 percent.
He said the Chennai property, involving an outlay of Rs.150 crore, is expected to break even in one year's time.
Queried about the expansion mode Deepa Misra Harris, senior vice president (sales and marketing) said the company had followed a mix of new properties and converting an existing hotel to the Gateway Hotels brand.
She said 22 of the existing properties are legacy hotels, converted to Gateway Hotels brand.
Going forward all the properties will be new properties, she added. The Indian Hotels is planning to set up Gateway Hotels in Sriperumbudur near here, Shimla, Hyderabad, Pune, Faridabad, Corbett (Uttarakhand), Chandigarh and other cities.
The company is also looking at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu for setting up a hotel.
