Your book traces the evolution of and disruptive shifts in India’s hotel industry.
Are AirBnBs, timeshares, homestays and tech-enabled service apartments the future of travel?
Definitely. However, even as they grab a large share of the lodging market, they will co-exist with conventional hotels. What I believe will happen is that there will be greater overlap between the alternative accommodation providers and conventional hoteliers. Already you can see hotels are catering to long stay guests, putting up service residencies, and expanding into homestays. On the other hand, shared stay players are expanding into tour experiences. So, each segment will draw on features from the other.
Do you think the new concept of experiential travel is here to stay?
It’s here to stay for a long while certainly. However, everything has a habit of coming back full circle and already one can hear murmurs from a segment that they are satiated of experiences and would just like to chill in one place without doing a thing. So, perhaps there might emerge two sets of customers—those seeking experiences and the jaded set who just want to laze and relax.
Any anecdotes about India’s hotel industry?
Personally, the story that entranced me most was when I learnt that an incident at The Savoy in Mussoorie may have inspired Agatha Christie’s first Hercule Poirot novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. In 1911, at the Savoy a lady was found dead locked in her room and the autopsy showed poisoning. The case was not resolved but Rudyard Kipling apparently heard of the incident and suggested it to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who in turn recounted it to Agatha Christie. She wrote her first book in 1916 after her sister dared her to.
What, according to you, will be the impact of the current pressure being faced by the global hospitality industry due to coronavirus?
The impact is going to be devastating. In China where it all began, occupancy was in single digits all of February and that trend is mimicking in the rest of Asia and Europe. Hospitality consultancy Hotelivate has put out figures saying that Indian chains could face a loss of as much as $4.7 billion in revenues. Recovery is going to take a very long while. This means layoffs and a wretched time for hotel staff. The WTTC has estimated 50 million jobs in the travel and hotel industry being at risk.
Could you relate incidents about any particular role that the hotel industry played in past epidemics?
I can’t really say, but there is one interesting incident on the impact of an epidemic on a hotel chain. One of India’s finest hotels, The Oberoi Grand in Kolkata, actually came into the chain’s hands because of an epidemic. Where it stands today was originally a private residence of one Colonel Grand. In 1894 or thereabouts, an Armenian jeweller, Arathoon Stephen, bought the house and its adjacent buildings and rebuilt a hotel on the site in an extravagant neoclassical style. The hotel was popular, but in the 1930s, a typhoid epidemic struck Calcutta and six people at the hotel died. The hotel shut down as a result and the management leased it at a very cheap rate to Rai Bahadur MS Oberoi, who managed to reopen it soon. He bought it outright some years later.
Which are some of your favourite fiction books, TV shows and movies based on hotels?
Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, Sankar’s Chowringhee, British sitcom Fawlty Towers, and the films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Hangover, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Any plans of writing an old-world mystery with a hotel as a setting?
I would really love to. But right now with the feedback I’m getting, a ‘Hotel Confidential’ sort of book might well emerge. Real life stories can sometimes trump fiction.
From Oberoi to Oyo
By: Chitra Narayanan
Publisher: Penguin
Random House
Pages: 319
Price: `399