For global hospitality company Hilton, India is an important market. Deploying five brands across 24 hotels in the country, it plans to double its footprint in the next five years. The focus is on ensuring customer experience with the right brands in the right market. During his recent visit to India, Ben George, senior vice-president and commercial director, Asia Pacific, Hilton, spoke about how the company is excited to contribute to the overall growth momentum in India. Edited excerpts from the interview:
Waldorf Astoria is coming to Jaipur in 2027. Do you plan to open more properties in the luxury segment?
We’d like a Waldorf Astoria in primary cities given the legacy and the reputation we have built for the brand. But we tread cautiously. Every time we decide to put a flag over a hotel, it’s about finding the right partner in the right location as it makes a symbiotic, successful relationship.
Waldorf is Hilton’s crown jewel. We ought to be more careful, and the reason being that across Asia Pacific (APAC) we have only six Waldorfs. We opened our first Waldorf Astoria in the APAC in Shanghai in 2012. In Sydney, we waited to announce our foray last year, until we could have views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. If we couldn’t get that premium location, we weren’t willing to do it. We are excited about Jaipur and certainly look at Delhi, Mumbai and Goa as possible locations to sustain a Waldorf.
What about Conrad in India? Any plan to go beyond the two—Conrad Pune and Bangalore?
Waldorf is traditional luxury, Conrad is modern luxury. It’s a similar set of criteria, slightly less tight but the location for a luxury hotel will look at a certain price bracket relative to a full-service or a focus-service hotel. It would be counterproductive to put a luxury hotel in a location which supports a focused-service hotel, as the investment to build a hotel is quite extensive.
India is a big wedding market, and with the upcoming wedding season, how do you plan to cater to this segment?
The Indian wedding market is over $50-60 billion today. India has a very strong market given the size, scale, investment and commitment. F&B, for instance, is a bigger part of hotel wedding operations in the APAC than it is in Europe or the Americas. Jaipur is a great market to support heritage, luxury, royalty, wedding and tourists. While Waldorf will cater to the wedding market, Kukas in Jaipur has emerged as a wedding haven in the last five years. DoubleTree by Hilton in Kukas has 60% of the business coming from weddings. For Hilton in India, 12-40% of room share comes from weddings. So, we are actively scouting for opportunities to expand our footprint across Jaisalmer, Udaipur and Jodhpur. We will focus on bringing our luxury and premium offerings to Rajasthan. Wedding Diaries in India, launched in 2021, offer bespoke experience of wedding, micro-cuisines and in-hotel experiences with select wedding planners. Out of 24, except one, the rest are wedding-focused hotels in India.
With a fair share of big brands like Marriott in India, where does Hilton position itself?
We have deployed five brands across 24 hotels in India—and we plan to double this footprint in the next five years. From Hilton’s perspective, we have been around for over 104 years; so, it is very much a long game. Other brands are operating more hotels than us but it gives an opportunity to grow in markets where we are not operating. Across APAC, we are the fastest-growing hospitality company.
India’s domestic tourism is a big market. How do you plan to cash in on the gravy train?
Domestic travel, especially the leisure segment, gave wind to the hospitality industry this year and is expected to continue to rise. India is the fastest-growing and the fifth-largest economy in the world with a growing population which consists of the youngest population and underserved accommodation market (2.6 million rooms to 1.4 billion population). It presents huge opportunities for us, to close key city gaps and build up local talent to fuel this growth. The increasing discretionary spending within the upper and middle class has fuelled demand for luxury brands over the last decade.
Delhi, Mumbai, and especially Bengaluru, have been successful with some great assets and more hotels to come. Pune, Goa, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi and Udaipur—all these cities spell opportunity for us. The macroeconomics is moving in favour of India with massive diversification, infrastructure development and new airports. The economy is growing at a rapid pace, and we would contribute to the overall growth momentum. More consumers are coming to India now than there have ever been before because of affordability and accessibility. Our RevPAR (revenue per available room) grew more than 90% y-o-y in Q1 this year, with India, southeast Asia and Australasia outperforming 2019 by 20%, driven by rate increases of over 30%. We saw a strong increase in demand in India, driven mainly through weddings and domestic corporate sectors such as retail and banking.
India has been an important market in the APAC. What have you planned in terms of restructuring the brand?
There is no restructuring now. We design brands to ensure that it fits and that there’s a reason for it to exist. Be it True, Hampton, Hilton Garden Inn, DoubleTree, Hilton, Conrad or Waldorf Astoria, we have got a brand for any part of a customer life cycle. On average, we open a hotel about once every three days across APAC. We opened about 120 till date, and we will open about 126 hotels this year across Asia Pacific, two in India—Varanasi, Bengaluru—and one in Kathmandu.
What sort of ARR (average room rate) do you expect in the coming months?
ARR in India will remain buoyant given the hospitality experiences offered in return. The realisation of travel being a need more than a privilege will keep domestic demand high and pricing strong.
Any specific offering for millennials in India?
I’m not the biggest fan of categorising people into demographics. You could have somebody who belongs to a different generation whose propensity to spend may be slightly lower. So, we ensure to have brands across all types of demographics. For budget-focused travellers, we have a focused-service hotel, for highly affluent millennials to experience modern luxury, we have Conrad.
But what’s important is how we take the stress from travel. Travel is meant to be enjoyed, and not be a stressful experience. Our loyalty programme, Hilton Honors, has about 170 million members, and the app can search, book, check-in and choose a room using a floor plan with embedded Google Maps, or use a smartphone as a room key. All this is contactless and easy. No other brand is doing this at this scale. It can reduce the amount of plastic keys that hotels use, enable millennials or Gen Zs to share feedback or safely social distance.
