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Indian Hospitality Industry Performance Report

Arun Prabhudesai — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:41:38 +0000

This year has not been good for any of the Industry, except I guess for Medical Industry in India (Thanks to Swine Flu, recession related diseases :)).

The tourism in India has seen a steep decline over last 12 months and the effects of that have seen Hospitality Industry in India cut to half.

ASSOCHAM recently released the report on the performance of Hospitality Industry. Mumbai terrorist attack combined with the global slowdown, have severely impacted the bottom line to the extent of 64 per cent of the Indian hospitality sector, as per the analysis carried out by the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

The average net profit of 10 hotels has declined by 65 per cent in Q4 FY ’09 as compared to the Q3 FY ’09.
Out of these 10 hotels, in Q4 FY ’09, 8 hotels have registered decline in net profit on sequential basis.
The interest cost of 10 hotels went up by 51.65 per cent in the fourth quarter of FY ’09.
The fall in total income was about 4.47 per cent as compared to the third quarter of FY ’09.
The total expenditure in fourth quarter of FY ’09 rose by 7.47 as compared to the third quarter of FY ’09.

I think that we now have seen the worst (atleast I hope so), and the coming quarters will see a turnaround. Hoping for a much better 2010

Here is the complete report by ASSOCHAM:

Indian Tourism Industry on a downward trend?

Arun Prabhudesai — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:20:24 +0000

The tourism statistics in the first quarter and up to MAY’09 as compiled by the Department of Tourism shows a sharp decline in the industry by a whopping 40-45%.

This depressing situation can either be defended by obvious reasons which every sector seems to be falling trap to. i.e. Recession or specifically for this sector even Terrorism can justify the letdown.

These factors did play their parts but are these the only reasons are the question?

Recently, I happened to run into few students of my age (or may be younger) from London while returning back from Mumbai, obviously taken back by the fact that most of them have already explored many parts of the world on their own..(Intention here is not to highlight my grief and envy for these not so qualified tyros, who happened to look more contended to me, thanks to Indian technocrats burning midnight oil to work for them) but to highlight RECESSION couldn’t be a major reason to hamper tourism in India, cost affordability is high for them.

So, these students looked perplexed regarding their itinerary, as they had nothing to keep this confusion at bay. Call it their ignorance or impetuosity they were holding onto a book, INDIAN TRAVEL DESTINATION (travel guide) to guide them (Was really surprised by their inquisitiveness)

At the same time I was feeling sorry for the sad state of administration and management here to capitalize on such customers they could cater and give life to their tumbling balance sheets.

Moreover, the escalating cases of robbery, molestation against these visitors have added fuel to the problem. Ugly incidents of rape, sledging, bluffing gives hard time to these holidaying tourists to trust in our law and order system. Tourism police seems to be mourning with our belligerent politicians on the recent issue of the latter’s security. After all they are big assets we can’t afford to loose.

According to Tourism Statistics India, tally of domestic tourists is almost four hundred times more than the international tourist, which clearly shows that the scope of growth for tourism industry is wide if exploited optimally and efficiently.

Anyways coming back to those students, Out of many doubts befuddling my mind about what could/should be done to tackle this problem, one thing that propped out in my mind instantaneously was, why do we have only four to five tourism trains in India? Let me take you through some of the statistics on one of the most celebrated tourism train called Palace on Wheels.

Palace on Wheels

India’s first luxury train started in 1982 on 26th of January.

Concept derived from the royal background of the coaches, originally meant to be the personal railway coaches of the erstwhile rulers of the princely states of

Rajputana
Gujarat
the Nizam of Hyderabad
And the Viceroy of British India.

Route followed

Eight day journey
Departs from New Delhi
travels around Rajasthan with stops in Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Sawai Madhopur, Chittaurgarh, Udaipur, Bharatpur, and Agra.

Facilities and capacity

52 rooms, allocated to single, double and Triple occupancies
104 passengers in fully booked tour.

PALACE ON WHEELS TARIFF (PER PERSON, PER NIGHT)

Occupancy Type	(Lean Season) August’09	September ’09 to April ’10
Single Occupancy	US $ 500.00	Us $ 670.00
Double Occupancy	US $ 375.00	Us $ 500.00
Triple Occupancy	US $ 340.00	Us $ 450.00

This excludes tariffs and taxes.

So, the average cost comes out to be around Rs.3500-4000 for eight days of bliss and royal treatment. This not only serves the purpose of luring the customers but satiates the inquisitiveness of visitors for our rich culture and heritage and saves them from all the confusions and doubts, which sometime curtails them to take a plunge.

Can’t we come up with more of these ventures to tap the market instead of brooding over ill fate and covering our limitations with macro issues?

These grass root reforms require commitment not just from people in the authority but also from people like us, to come out with interesting strategies and plans to make it happen. If those students can dare to enjoy on their convictions why cant we!

(This guest post has been submitted by our regular reader Kirti Agarwal)

Travel Thursday: India News Digest

Arun Prabhudesai — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:40:51 +0000

Travel Thursday is our weekly news Digest that brings you buzzing stories about Travel & Tourism in India.

We start this Travel Thursday with some great positive News !

Udaipur is Voted as the World’s Best city for travellers – WOW !

Now thats a real biggie and unbelievable to a certain extent. However it is true –

The recent travellers poll conducted by popular Travel & Leisure Magazine has voted Udaipur, India as the World’s best city for travellers.

Udaipur, also known as the ‘Venice of the East,’ took the crown by trumping last year’s winner Bangkok. Udaipur sure has done something right to its visitors to secure the top position from ranked nowhere last year.

The Top 10 cities in the world

Rank-09	Rank-08	Name	Score
1	-	Udaipur, India	87.94
2	3	Cape Town	87.69
3	1	Bangkok	86.80
4	2	Buenos Aires	86.22
5	-	Chiang Mai , Thailand	86.18
6	5	Florence	85.61
7	-	Luang Prabang , Laos	85.45
8	8	New York	84.65
9	7	Rome	84.63
10	10	San Francisco	84.53

Babu’s given order to travel only by Air India

Looks like a depressing news for our busy autocrats so addictive of the luxuries offered by this developing nation of ours.

For our readers knowledge this is a change from the government’s travel policy of at least three years that allowed officials to travel by private carriers as well.

This is one of many measures taken by government to put some life into diseased Air India run by National Aviation Co. of India Ltd. Although experts claimed that this measure won’t do any good for the debt stricken company.

Lets have a closer look on some of the Company’s attributes.

Sr.	Name	Air India Limited
2	Ownership	State Owned
3	Main bases of operation	Mumbai (Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport) Delhi (Indira Gandhi International Airport)
4	Destination in India	Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, Kozhikode, Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram.

Do you think with such confined network connectivity they would be able to cater to our babu’s/ didi’s (pun intended) whimsical and obviously URGENT travel plans?

Would like to support it with few facts I could gather

Say Mr. Narendra Modi wants to take up a flight to attend One Parliament session in Delhi. He’ll have to get up real early (which I doubt he would want to) and board one and only available flight at 8’ in the morning! U MUST B KIDDIN ME!

And say if some veteran actor turned MP from far south wants to attend the same session he’ll make his presence felt by spending minimum of 29 grands of Government ( or can say our money as well!) Gosh…29 grands just to see him on national T.V throwing his chappals on his peers.

Experts say the rot in Air India predates the financial crisis. Backed by powerful unions, the airline is bloated, badly managed and not held to account, they say.

Some of them are of view, "Air India is still an iconic brand, but unfortunately it has a reputation which is of an unreliable and shoddy airline."

So, the moral of the story is, Mr. Patel go and study what’s stopping your company to earn money rather then forcing people from your fraternity to direct the bailout money in bits and pieces to the ailing company. Throwing money blindly will only perpetuate the sick and loggerheaded management to loose more.

These tricks won’t garner votes neither will it do any good to those 31,500 employees living under the fear of being thrown out any minute. Shield our company from oil prices fluctuation then only may be we see any chance of flying via healthy and robust AIR- INDIA again.

Although the attempt to approach adept industrialist Mr. Ratan Tata is a thoughtful move, but bluffing is not acceptable as people are well informed now!!

AREN’T we?
(Guest post submitted by Kirti Agarwal)

Thats it for this episode of Travel Thursday. Catch up with us again next Thursday for more buzzing travel stuff !

Travel Thursday: India News Digest

Arun Prabhudesai — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:54:57 +0000

If you are new to Travel Thursday, here is a short explanation of what it is.

This will be the first edition of our Weekly News Digest of Travel Thursday.

Chartered Flights to Watch Solar Eclipse..WTF !

Yes, you heard me right, the notion of Solar Eclipse being a bad omen seems to be fading away.

Indians in large numbers, are now actually hiring Chartered flights to see Solar Eclipse, so that they can view it without any disturbance as for as long as possible.

Indian Travel agent Cox and Kings is chartering a Boeing-737 for the two-hour journey from Delhi to Gaya in Bihar so that passengers can follow the total solar eclipse, and seats are filling up fast.
[source]

And it not only Indians, Infact, astro tourism has been on rise in India since last couple of years and many foreign tourists are coming to India just to see this Solar Eclipse.

Interesting uhh… yes we do bring you some interesting stuff as well :) and there is more, read on…

Wine Tourism: Is it the new trend?

Just read this article on Wine Tourism, but I sure sure have my doubts about the wine manufacturing in India. We are probably infants in the art of wine making.

But effort by Karnataka Wine Board must be applauded to take this initiative of Wine Festival

Conceptualised by the Karnataka Wine Board on the lines of wine festivals popular in many western countries, the city’s first wine festival is targeted to promote wine tourism in the state. The three-day mela (festival) will be held in the Lalbagh Botanical Garden. [source]

So if you are in Bangalore, and are even remotely interested in wines, you must visit this mela. And if you do visit it, don’t forget to let us know about the kind of wines that you tasted.

I am happy about Wine Tourism, But this kind of tourism in India is not something that I am proud of at all !

..And here are some peculiar reasons to tour India

We have already seen Astro Tourism and Wine Tourism, but here is something that will surprise you even more.

Have you heard about Cemetery Tourism, yes, thats true!

Cemetery tourism is growing in India at a rate of 20% each year. The tourism department of Himachal Pradesh is ploughing a furrow with a little help from the British Association of Cemeteries of South Asia (Bacsa) to promote it in India. Read more about it here.

And there is something else called Caravan Tourism. Caravan Tourism is basically exploring the countryside using a Caravan or a RV.

The Indian Union tourism ministry has decided to announce policy initiatives for promotion of caravan tourism’ in its 100-day agenda. The ministry plans to explore Jaipur-Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur-Mount Abu, Delhi-Sariska-Ranthambore, Delhi-Jaipur-Ajmer-Pushkar as the popular routes for the caravan journeys. Read more about it here

So there you have it, our first Travel Thursday News Digest. I loved writing this one. I came to know about 4 New Tourism concepts. Let us know what you thought about it.

Note: We are looking for guest authors for our subject-wise News Digest feature that we have launched recently. As a guest author, you can pick -up any one of the 6 days (Mon-Sat) to feature your posts. Do get in touch with us if you are interested. You can mail me arun AT trak.in or simply use thecontact form

Internet on the bus, courtesy – Google

Sriram Vadlamani — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:13:41 +0000

Euphoria over Google Ocean an addition from Google where you can see what’s on the seabed hasn’t died yet. Google is out with yet another innovation of its own. This innovation is not a software or a new addition to the already feature rich Gmail. It is a bus, equipped with stuff to educate people about Internet.

Real Nice. I like this approach of online and offline from Google. For a software company it makes sense be gung ho on the Internet with innovations in storage or cloud computing. But Google is different. This bus proves it all.

Now, this might be reminiscent of a similar bus launched by Microsoft in China. That bus was equipped with computers and Internet connection for people to work. That was done to deal with traffic jams. That was of course Microsoft’s view of a bus. Google’s bus is to educate the people of Tamil Nadu about the use of Internet.

Red bus, Yellow bus, Volvo Bus and now Internet bus.

The journey starts (started) in Chennai on 03 FEB 2009 and ends on 13 MAR 2009 at the famous Tiruvannamalai. Next stop for the bus is in Vellore tomorrow. Google bus has a website where you can see an animated route map. It has photos, videos and an Orkut community.

Few pictures :

The bottom image is inside of the bus. That is sleeker than any modern day homes. The bus will criss-cross across Tamil Nadu around 40 odd days and educate the people how Internet can be used. Its main focus : Information, Education, Entertainment and Communication.

That pretty much sums up the uses of Internet. It will mainly concentrate on the use of Internet in regional languages. Research says that 19% of people in Tamil Nadu prefer to browse Internet in Tamil.

On a lighter note, Amit Agarwal has a post about : “What do you use Google for?” The results might actually surprise you.

Watch this message from Google Bus :

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Now Indian Railways introduces Chartered Trains to boost tourism!

Sriram Vadlamani — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:39:39 +0000

Chartered : hired for the exclusive temporary use of a group of travelers; “a chartered plane”; “the chartered buses arrived on time”

I tried looking for the meaning of ‘Chartered” using define:chartered in Google and that is what I got. The definition mentions about a plane and a bus. No mention of a train. I bet Lalu Prasad Yadav did not check the definition for Chartered.

Ever since Mr. Yadav became the railway minister, Indian Railways never ceased to surprise with its innovations.

Few innovations which are worth mentioning :

Automatic upgrade of a sleeper class waiting ticket to to a empty 2nd AC chair car. It is something more of a common sense economics. It is like “why didn’t I think about it” stuff.
Introduction of a 9th berth in a coupe. This causes a little discomfort to few passengers. This was done on a trial basis and we don’t have any news if this will be done across the board.
Luxury trip from Kolkata to Goa which costs 35000 rupees and takes 11 days.

The latest innovation from Indian Railways is a chartered train. Chartered flight is something which we already know. Chartered Train by IRCTC will tailor the package based on the clients. It will take care of all the hassles of holiday traveling, food choices and sightseeing.

The package will come at a cost though. The service will be started in popular routes like Ahmedabad to Goa, Mumbai to Vaishnodevi and Mumbai to Tirupati. IRCTC is trying to woo corporate customers who might be interested in an off-site on one of these chartered trains.

Very good initiative to boost tourism and railway revenues at the same time. Sounds like fun. Would you go on one of these chartered trains? (source)

*Image source : Train Chartering

IXIGO’s launches hotel search Engine

Arun Prabhudesai — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:09:07 +0000

iXiGO, an Indian travel aggregator has announced the launch of its hotel search engine, a natural progression for their travel search.

As per the press release, ixigo hotel search engine can search and book accommodation in real time across 4500 hotels in 320 Indian cities.

XiGO’s hotel search accesses more than 30 leading national and international hotel booking websites, enabling comparisons of room tariffs of the same hotel across multiple sites within a few seconds. The hotel search engine sorts accommodation by price, star ratings, amenities and allows detailed views for maps and photos; all in a single webpage. An instant keyword search on names, addresses and filters on best value within hotels narrows down the search – features so far restricted to only select international travel portals.

I tried doing couple of searches for hotels in Bangalore and results were decent enough. Being purely a search engine, the visitors will have to visit the parent hotel booking site to do the booking.

Surprisingly in all the sample searches that I did Desiya gave some very good rates compared to other hotel booking sites.

This launch will help ixigo to increase its footprint, which is quite a very crowded space at this time. From user perspective too, this will be a useful service as it will save their time of hopping across various sites.

Give iXiGO hotel search a try and let us know what you feel !

Cleartrip.com: The most user-friendly OTA in India

Arun Prabhudesai — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:36:35 +0000

Last year I did a comparison of 10 OTA’s operating in India. The comparison was done based on 5 different parameters like Ticket fares, Flight options, Destinations, User Friendliness and value added services. In that comparison IXIGO scored quite well on most aspects including user friendliness. Cleartrip and Yatra also got good points on user friendliness aspect.

However, in a recent survey conducted by Juxtconsult, Cleartrip seems to have taken a lead over other OTA rivals in terms of user friendliness. The JuxtConsult survey conducted on the online travel portals involved most of the leading players in the OTA category – Cleartrip, Makemytrip, Yatra, Travelguru and Indiatimes Travel (surprisingly IXIGO was not included in the survey). To measure the ‘Website User-Friendliness’ Index, respondents were asked to rate the travel portals on 19 distinct parameters under 4 categories: ease of access, design appeal, ease of usage and usage satisfaction.

Cleartrip came out the winner in their research.

Over last few months Cleartrip has grown quite aggressively. They have also secured big round of funding ($18.5 million) that they will be utilizing to spread their wings offline, by opening up branches all over India.

Here is Cleartrip’s founder Hrush Bhatt’s interview on their future plans. Courtesy: WATshow

Although I do not believe Alexa rankings (My blog ranking has dropped over last 3 months even though the blog traffic is constantly increasing), I did a small comparison just to get an idea on how various Indian OTA’s are placed.

Yatra seems to be heading the race and Cleartrip coming in at second. I am surprised that IXIGO is reeling at the bottom.

Now Free Internet access and Satellite television on Indian Rails

Arun Prabhudesai — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:50:18 +0000

Indian Union Railway minister -Lalu Prasad Yadav - the darling of the masses and the favorite whipping-boy of the media has added another feather to Indian railways.

Two premium trains of India – Shatabdi and Rajdhani – will now be boasting on-board free internet and direct-to-home (DTH) services.

The premium trains have been consistently loosing market share over past couple of years to low cost budget airlines offering very competitive rates. In a bid to stem this loosing streak, the Indian railway minister is expected to announce many new initiatives including Free Internet access and DTH services.

According to ministry officials, the railway minister may also announce launching DTH services on-board a couple of tourist-specific trains to be launched later this year on lines of the Buddhist circuit luxury train service, Mahaparinirvana Special Buddhist Heritage Train.

The tourism ministry has been exploring the idea with the railways for launching at least 5-7 tourist trains as a large number of foreign tourists visiting India do not visit places beyond select destinations like Goa, Delhi, Agra and Jaipur.

“Providing DTH services or installing satellite radio on-board such trains is not unthinkable. We have conducted the feasibility study, and it is just a matter of starting the process,” the ministry sources said.

The upcoming railway budget may also open up advertising opportunities on select trains. Under this proposal, which has been successfully implemented in the southern part of the country, companies will pay a fixed fee for advertising on the trains. [source]

I had not expected much from Lalu when he was named the union Railways minister, however, in last 5 years he bought a sea-change in Indian railway services and kudos to him for doing that!

I personally love train journeys, but one of the reasons why I have preferred low-cost airlines in recent past was long train journeys break you off completely from the world – no TV, no Internet.

Not anymore!