Tata group's IHCL to foray into home delivery of food and beverages

With the Covid-19 pandemic hitting the hospitality industry hard, Tata group's Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL) is planning to venture into other areas of revenue generation, including home delivery of food and beverages.

"We have had a really nice response to our Hospitality@Home service, where customers can order our products for take away from our hotels across the country.

"Very shortly, we will also be announcing our plans to begin delivering our products to customers. All of this is aimed at helping take our hospitality to our customers' homes," IHCL Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Puneet Chhatwal told PTI on Thursday.

IHCL has also been working on programs like 'Dream, Drive, Discover, Delight' where one can book its standalone villas and bungalows while also observing social distancing, he said.

"We will also have technology detox offers because guests have been in their homes for a long time and have been on their phones, or watching television a lot more than usual.

"We will be offering many Ayurvedic treatments as part of this offer. And we have many other offers that we are working on," he added.

The Tata group's hospitality arm posted an over 24 percent jump in net profit for the year ended March at Rs 363.74 crore, as compared to Rs 296.12 crore in the previous fiscal.

Asked if the company will be able to reach its FY22 target of properties in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, Chhatwal said, "In terms of the Aspiration 2022 targets on property numbers, you have to know that we are already way ahead of reaching these targets by 2022."

"We had a target of opening 15 hotels per year for Aspiration 2022, but we have already opened over 50 hotels in the last two years, and our portfolio is now at 200 hotels," he said.

The company had a target of 27,000 rooms for 2022, and it has already surpassed 25,000 rooms, he said, adding that the remaining 2,000 would been easily achieved in the next two years.

"We have to now look at 2020 as a year of correction and for this we have the R.E.S.E.T 2020 strategy. After R.E.S.E.T is rolled out in the next few months, we will come back with new targets, all of which will be higher than those set for Aspiration 2022.We are very confident that we will meet these higher targets as well," he said.

R.E.S.E.T (Revenue Growth, Excellence in Guest Wellbeing, Spend Optimsation, Effective Asset Management and Thrift and Financial Prudence) is a five-point agenda to address the challenges posed by the unprecedented global crisis and help the company navigate through these difficult times.

Meanwhile, Chhatwal said he feels the industry has already begun moving towards recovery, with hotels reopening in multiple states as they come out of the lockdown.

The hospitality major is already getting very encouraging responses from people who want to come back to its signature restaurants, book intimate weddings and take a much-needed break from their homes, he said.

"By September-October, we will see domestic travel begin and we believe that in 12 to 18 months, business should come back to pre-Covid-19 levels. In the long-term, we remain very confident about the outlook for the industry," he added.