In what will be the first for the country?s hospitality as well as the IT industry, the InterContinental Hotels group, one of the largest chains of hotels globally, has set up a captive centre in Gurgaon. The global service centre will take care of the finance and accounting work for the 4,400-strong hotels chain along with doing business analytics and market research. Though other international hotel chains like Hyatt have outsourcing contracts with IT firms such as Genpact, none of them have their own captive unit in the country.
With a capacity of 500 seats, the centre currently has 395 employees. Rajiv Malhotra, vice-president and head of the India centre, told FE that the capacity of the centre can anytime be increased to accommodate 750-1,000 people. Currently, the centre takes care of the transactional and payable accounting globally and part of the taxation work for the Americas and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. It also services the analytics division, which includes projects like expense analysis or market surveys.
The India centre is one of the 13-14 global delivery centres that the hotel chain has in countries such as Philippines, Mexico, Europe and the US. Malhotra added that in future there are other processes that could come India?s way. ?The operations in the country were started way back in 2003. However, they have been scaled up only now given the good business proposition,? he said. By setting up a captive unit, InterContinental has actually bucked the trend where companies are looking at outsourcing more to third party IT firms instead of setting up their own dedicated centre that exclusively services the owner. Rajiv said that the hotel chain has a diversified strategy in this area, where it has also outsourced some part of the work to BPO firm WNS and also a part of it to HCL Tech.
?We are also about to announce another outsourcing deal with a different IT firm. However, the captive centre offers great value while being a cost saving proposition along with building the hotel?s brand in the country,? he said.
