NY has more hotel rooms than all of India (part 1)

It’s heartening to see the direction India Tourism is taking. Thanks to the marketing initiatives, like the ‘Incredible India’ campaign in China during the recently concluded Olympics, Tourism in India is growing at roughly 20% year on year. However, at present, India is just not geared to cater to this growth - the roughly 400 million Indians and over 5 million foreign nationals traveling in the country every year. The marketing, PR and branding is going great guns. It’s the physical infrastructure, air, rail and road travel and lodging that needs a shot in the arm.
New airports in major cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad are helping build capacity that is sorely needed to handle the growing numbers of air-travelers. And with the expansion of current airports, like in Mumbai, the congestion that we’ve been seeing at airports for the past few years, may soon be a thing of the past.

Our rail network is already pretty extensive and the focus is now on improving the service levels and quality of travel. After the success of Palace on Wheels, newer initiatives like the Royal Rajasthan on Wheels, Golden Chariot in Karnataka and the Southern Splendour project in Andhra Pradesh are great to widen the choice for travelers and further give a boost to the tourism sector.

The network of expressways and highways, too, has improved tremendously over the last decade or so. And that’s opened up the option to travel by road like never before. Luxury coaches, even the long distance ones, are now competing with trains in terms of comfort, efficiency and value for money. Online bus booking aggregators and websites have made choosing and booking a bus journey as easy as booking an airline ticket.

That leaves the accommodation bit to be addressed. Where and how do we accommodate the millions of people traveling India in a clean, safe, comfortable and cost-effective manner? Does the answer lie in just building more hotels or can something else, more innovate, be done?

India only has about 100,000 hotel rooms across the country. To put that in perspective, New York alone has more hotel rooms than that. So does London. And Beijing, in preparations for the recently concluded Olympics, built its hotel room capacity to over 100,000 rooms. We are currently about 150,000 hotel rooms short in meeting tourism demand and with the Commonwealth games scheduled for 2010, the ICC World Cup Cricket in 2011 and a spate of other international events over the next 2-3 years, the shortage of hotel rooms is only going to get more acute. It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to bridge the demand-supply gap in the near future by relying on new hotels, both planned and those already coming up. And it’s here that the Tourism Ministry has been making all the right moves.

Seeing the success and popularity of homestays in Kerala, the Delhi government has initiated the Bed & Breakfast scheme in the capital, inviting people with spare rooms in their houses, to convert them into tourist abodes. To sweeten this incentive, the income people generate from these B&Bs will not be taxed.

Other states too are adopting a similar approach. In Rajasthan, it’s homestays and heritage houses that are being given the push. In Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu it’s B&Bs. In Karnataka the Atithi Homestay initiate had quite a few takers and it’s now been given a stronger, renewed push. Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Goa already have loads of guesthouses. The nomenclature, schemes and incentives used in different states could be different but the message is clear – independent accommodations like homestays, bed & breakfasts, guesthouses, serviced apartments etc. are a great way to meet the shortage of travel and tourism lodging.

And the numbers add up. (To be continued…)

First published on UTVi