Kahini Chakraborty – Mumbai
Shrem Hotels plans to add serviced apartments as part of its hospitality portfolio. The company is targeting to add one property each year, and is looking at having a total of 500-600 rooms inventory of hotels and serviced apartments collectively by 2018. Speaking to Food & Hospitality World on the sidelines of the launch of Grand Mercure Goa Shrem Resort, Amar S Tekchandaney, director, Shrem Hotels said, “We have an aggressive pan India expansion plan in the pipeline, but presently our focus is on the Goa market. Last year we opened the Hotel Novotel Goa Shrem Resort and today we are launching Grand Mercure Goa Shrem Resort. We are looking at first completing the extension of our 85 rooms Hotel Novotel Goa Shrem Resort by adding 64 well appointed rooms. Thereafter we will start the development of our serviced apartments by 2015. We have invested close to Rs 100 crore in the development of the Grand Mercure Goa Shrem Resort property.”
Elaborating on the potential cities for expansion, he replied, “We want to expand into Rajasthan and Maharashtra. On an average we take about 15-18 months to complete any project that we undertake. With regards to our expansion, although we are happy with our partnership with Accor group, we believe in competition and hence are in talks with other hospitality companies for our expansion. But having said that, we are still evaluating on our decision to continue and expand with Accor group.”
When asked on the reason for introducing serviced apartments, he opined, “The margins are much better in serviced apartments. Today, the industry is facing manpower challenges, and serviced apartments need not even half the ratio of manpower whereas here it is going up to two per key. Hence in order to work out a proper balance between the two we felt that if we have to have our skilled trained manpower then we should have identical amount of inventory.”