At the busy Teli Galli area in Mumbai’s Andheri East, a 10-storey new Ginger hotel is getting ready to greet guests. Walk in and you find a cheerful red brick wall-lined coffee-counter serving espresso, café latte, Americano. It also doubles up as the hotel’s check-in counter. You can literally grab a coffee as you are being checked into your room.
Low networking tables and benches dot the reception area — ideal to park your laptop and work. From here, General Manager Arif Asmath leads you to the well-equipped gym, proudly showing off the Power Mill, an elevated treadmill with steps. “I don’t think any other hotel in the country has this,” he says, describing how it has been installed after much research into the workout habits of Ginger guests. From thoughtful tweaks to the amenities in the rooms, to creative twists to the menu at the all-day dining place The Square Meal, a lot of thinking has gone into the making of this hotel.
Rahul Pandit, the young, dynamic managing director of Roots Corporation Limited, which runs Ginger hotels, has virtually set up camp here, overseeing last-minute things before the hotel launches. He points out that the average demographic of guests who stay at this chain is between 25-45 years, and it’s reflective of the age of the hotel staff as well — so their uniforms have got younger and more contemporary too.
Fourteen years ago, when Ginger first came up, it was an idea slightly ahead of its time. The budget and mid-market segment had not been penetrated by brands, though Indian startup Sarovar had begun creating the category through a chain of hotels. Despite early promise and the love it got from its first set of customers, Ginger never really scaled up to the expectations one had. There are just 38 Ginger hotels across India today, even as newer Indian chains such as Lemon Tree, Red Fox, The Fern, Mango, have stolen a march, expanding rapidly, and foreign chains such as Ibis, Formule1, Fairfield by Marriott, Four Points by Sheraton have winged in.
Part of the reason for that was that Ginger was focusing a lot on building its own hotels, a time-consuming process, while most of the others had an asset light strategy. And then came the recession — upscale hotels dropped their prices steeply, and almost all the midscale and budget hotels had to cut rates, in turn, affecting their revenues and growth plans. British budget brand Premier Inn that had entered India with grand plans announced it was packing its bags and leaving, even as Keys, a mid-market brand specially crafted for India by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen’s private equity fund, looked to sell off some assets. The entry of players like OYO, which gave tech, branding and distribution reach to mom and pop hotels across the country, wounded the likes of Ginger.
Pandit outlines ambitions of crowding the India travel map with the Ginger brand, setting up 500 hotels in a few years. “A budget hotel has to take care of four things — bed, bath, breakfast, and broadband,” he says. “If I can give you an incremental value over other hotels in all these four — soundproof walls ensuring great sleep, a superior shower experience, a breakfast that may not have great variety but where every bite is tasty, and high-speed secured broadband, why will I not get a repeat visitor,” he says.
But Ginger has far more competition now, apart from all the foreign chains. Nearby in Andheri itself, an unprepossessing 50-room guest house Traveller’s Inn is getting funkily transformed and re-branded as an i-Stay hotel, a fairly new budget brand, aimed at millennial guests. I-Stay, promoted by IntelliStay, hopes to penetrate the railway station market all across India.
Meanwhile, The Fern and Beacon hotels are pushing deeper into tier-two and tier-three towns. Param Kannampilly, founder of Concept Hospitality, which runs these brands, describes how he will be adding 27 hotels in places like Dhapoli, Sholapur and Karjat. “Altogether, we are adding 700 rooms this year,” he says.
Chitra Narayanan is an editorial consultant with Business Line who writes on consumer behaviour but keeps an interested gaze at the travel and hospitality sector
