COIMBATORE: Anita Davaram Mathias manages a group of properties, all belonging to a travel-obsessed couple who inherited it from their families. The couple has a clutch of businesses, but three years ago, they started their favourite venture and opened seven properties for travellers to stay in. Then, they posted them online and guests started pouring in.
They have clients for about 60 sixty per cent of the year, says Anita. Kotagiri, Coonoor and Masinagudi Masanagudi are the hubs of homestays, as there are so many families here who have settled for generations and their ancestors come with huge acres of properties. bungalows and villas. in the middle of the reserved forests or even very close to them. Today, almost all of these homestays are going online to reach out to more people. customers. Their biggest advantage? Their heritage.
Anita, who has listed two of her properties under Airbnb and the rest under various other sites, including Booking.com, says, “Coonoor used to be a space for Army barracks. The owner’s great grandfather purchased a property from a British army officier in 1893. It was passed on to him, and in 2010, he renovated it for tourists.” Most of the properties on offer in this town are heritage bungalows, many of which are right in the middle of the beautiful Nilgiri forests.
It isn’t all chatty breakfasts with cheerful guests, though, cautions Anita. Clients are extremely demanding. “They have so many requests. It could be anything from asking us to light their bathrooms entirely with candles or organising an impromptu wildlife safari in the middle of the jungle,” she laughs. She says they need to constantly work on standing out in a sea of homestays. “Most of our guests are travellers are aged between 30 andto 40. They want to trek or go mountain biking. Some come here for the golf. We also get writers and artists who find this space a great source of creativity; they just sit here and write away!”
“People are sick and tired of structure and predictability,” she adds, explaining why travellers are looking beyond hotels. An obsessive jam maker, she adds a personal touch to at the sprawling ‘180 degree Mc Iver’ Villa by serving customers home-made jams, whenever she finds a stock of fresh strawberries.
At Strathearn, a 120-year-old Scottish bungalow, charming 69-year-old host Leenu Kurien occasionally surprises her clients with birthday cakes. The villa, wrapped by a huge garden, is right in the centre of Coonoor, nestled in the Nilgiri hills.
When her daughters left to live in Bangalore, Leenu found herself alone, and lonely, in the huge 64-cent property where she lived. Opening her home to travellers seemed like an ideal solution. “When I started five years ago, the ‘BnB’ (bed and breakfast) concept was fairly new in Coonoor, when I started. I had a hard time getting clients. But now it has been picking up.”
BnB is still a new concept for Tamil Nadu, she says. “However,The Government has not still does not consider it as a unique phenomenon. They have not brought guest houses and BnB type arrangements under a separate category from bigger commercial offerings. The same rules and regulations apply tofor both.” Annual renewal amount is huge and not almost unaffordable for a small scale BnB like mine. How can they treat my personalised, small scale bnb arrangement as the same as a commercially driven hotel?”
