JOIN USStarwood Hotels to bring in more brands to India
US-based Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the largest international upper-upscale hotel company which manages nine distinctive brands globally, namely St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, W Hotels, Westin, Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton, Le Meridien, Aloft, and Element, aims to bring new brands to India, a top executive of the company said.
Talking to Deccan Herald, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide President (Asia Pacific) Stephen Ho said, “Globally, we have nine brands and we will open the first St. Regis this year in Mumbai, and the first W Hotels property in Goa next year. We also want to introduce our new brand ‘Element’ in India.”
The company also wants to grow its Sheraton portfolio. “Right now, we have Sheraton Bengaluru and Delhi, and we will open a Sheraton in Hyderabad. We are trying to expand our Sheraton, Westin and Le Meridien brands in gateway cities, tier-II markets as well as resort locations,” Ho said.
Globally, the company has 1,200 hotels in operation, including 300 in Asia-Pacific. Under-construction hotels“We have another 250 hotels under-construction and this year, we will open 36 new hotels out of which eight will be in South Asia. The good thing is that we have opened more hotels than any of our competitors in the last five years.
“In the hotel industry, it is very important to turn your pipeline into hotels because you can have 200 hotels, but if you never open them, you will never get to 400 hotels. “So we make it a point that we are able to open the hotels we sign on. In India right now we have 43 hotels in operation and another 39 in the pipeline. This year we will open eight new hotels in India,” Stephen Ho said.
Since we started in 2006 where we formed our own regional office here, we have never looked back. We started with only two people and today, we have over 150 people at our regional and sales offices and our customer contact centre,” Ho said.
To add more resorts
He added, “We will open Le Meridien Dhaka later this year. We have also opened a beautiful Le Meridien in Thimphu a couple of months ago and another one is coming up soon at Paro (also in Bhutan).”
“So we are expanding our footprint in South Asia by consolidating our presence in existing markets and entering newer markets,” Ho added.
Ho said the company is looking at strengthening its resort portfolio with the opening up of Le Meridien Mahabaleshwar Resort & Spa (Maharashtra) later this year, the Le Meridien Hotels in Bhutan and the W Retreat and Spa in Goa.
“We operate the Westin Sohna Resort and Spa (Haryana) and the Sheraton Full Moon Resort and W Retreat in the Maldives and have resorts under development like Westin Bekal Resort & Spa (Kerala), Westin Khandala (Maharashtra), Westin Rishikesh (Uttarakhand), and Sheraton Kosgoda (Sri Lanka).”