For Chender Baljee, building the Royal Orchid Hotels brand in less than ten years was not smooth sailing. In the ?70s, Baljee invested his family fund to start Harsha Hotel, now operating under the Ramada brand, but the hotel had a low start. As a support, Baljee started two restaurants and one bakery unit in Bangalore. With business shaping up in the later years, Baljee decided to take the plunge to start something big. Despite fund crisis, leasing problems and closure of his two restaurants, he went ahead to build the first five-star property in 2001, spread over three acres on Bangalore’s Old Airport Road.
Today, the group has 15 properties across eight cities in India and plans to add another five by March next year.
In 2003, when the hotel industry witnessed a boom, for Royal Orchid there was no looking back. Chender Baljee leased a hotel at MG Road and renamed it Royal Orchid Central. Next year, he succeeded in winning the bid for Hotel Metropole in Mysore. By 2004, Baljee had four hotel chain under his company?s wing. With the company?s turnover touching Rs 16 crore, the company started on new projects in Hyderabad, Jaipur and Pune. To fuel further growth, Royal Orchid Hotels went public in 2006 and raised Rs 130 crore through its IPO.
?It was my father’s passion to build a brand that has a global image,? says Keshav Baljee, president and co-promoter of the BSE-listed Royal Orchid Hotels.
For Baljee junior to enter the family business was a conscious decision. In 2006, he left his job as an investment banker with Lehman Brothers in New York and joined ISB, Hyderabad, for an MBA course. ?At that time we were going public and I wanted to be part of the business. It was then that we converted this business into a hotel development company,? says Keshav Baljee.
Today, Royal Orchid Hotels is one of the fastest-growing young hotel chains in India, with five business hotels in Bangalore, two in Pune, one in Goa, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Navi Mumbai each and two heritage properties in Mysore. It primarily operates five and four-star hotels. The group has also planned an international foray by 2012 with a beach resort at Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The Bangalore-based company consists of hotels directly owned by the group and its subsidiaries, joint venture hotels and properties under management contract from third-party owners.
With plans to tap into smaller cities, Royal Orchid Hotels recently launched a five-star property in Hospet, Karnataka. ?Royal Orchid Central is our largest brand today, it fit perfectly into this strategy as it is an important hub of commercial activity in Karnataka,? says Keshav. The Bellary region is the home of large steel corporations and several global companies like Posco and Arcelor Mittal. Seeing opportunities in smaller cities, the hotel chain plans to add 700 rooms in its new properties by March 2011. The expansion will initially cover Mussourie and Shimoga. The company also plans to build five-star properties at Hyderabad and Jaipur, with an initial investment of Rs 180 crore and Rs 120 crore, respectively. Having achieved a pan-India presence, Royal Orchid Group plans to have 4,000 keys by 2015. ?In tier-I cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, we look to own hotels, while in the tier-II and tier-III cities, we are exploring managed and leased properties,? says Baljee junior.