Hospitality industry sees welcome boost from India's G20 presidency

As President, India will host nearly 200 meetings across the country that thousands of delegates are expected to attend along with media, govt officials, event managers, private sector representatives

India’s G20 has well and truly begun. The inaugural meeting of G20 under India’s presidentship is taking place in Udaipur. It is a meeting of G20 Sherpas, who officially act as representatives of the heads of state. The main venue of the meeting is a hotel property belonging to Tata Group’s Taj Hotels. Other major hotels in the city are also said to be packed, and this is quite apart from the usual tourist influx.

As President, India will host nearly 200 meetings across the country. At an all-party meeting on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the G20 presidency would help showcase parts of India beyond the conventional big metros, bringing out the uniqueness of various regions of the country.

With thousands of delegates expected to attend these meetings, plus accompanying media, event managers and private sector representatives, the G20 is expected to provide a substantial boost to the hospitality and tourism industry in the areas which will host the event, a welcome development after two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which the touch services sectors were the worst affected.

“A big opportunity is that brand India gets the visibility across G20 nations, in a much bigger way, and gives you the potential to pull in much more tourist inflow later on,” said Nandivardhan Jain, chief executive officer at Noesis Capital Advisors, a consultancy firm for the hospitality industry.

“The hospitality industry is fully geared up for G20. They have realised its potential and are working towards it. Quite a few hotels in markets like Goa, Udaipur, Agra, cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc are preparing and upgrading themselves to host delegates and already working with the government,” Jain said.

Jain said that hotels had already started hiring more people, especially chefs, as there will be a demand for global cuisines as delegates from various nationalities will be visiting.

The places which will be hosting the G20 meetings include Bangalore, Chandigarh/Punjab, Chennai, Guwahati, Indore, Jaipur, Khajurao, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, Rann of Kutch, Surat, Kerala, Udaipur, Rishikesh, Patna, Aurangabad, Siliguri, Gangtok, Hyderabad, Ahmadabad and Ranchi, among others.

And it just won’t be hospitality. Over the past month or so, officials from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of External Affairs and the G20 Secretariat have not only been booking hotels for the global delegates but also mapping all the tourist hotspots in and around the host cities. Since the idea is to showcase India’s cultural legacy, the tourism sector will also get a fillip.

As per data compiled by Noesis, for the hotels in the host cities, occupancy is expected to rise by 12 to 15 per cent and the average daily rate (ADR) is expected to rise by 10 per cent.

The G20 events will lead to direct requirements for around 100,000 room nights, if one takes 200 events, 200 rooms per event, 3 nights minimum. And this is just for the G20 delegates.

As per Noesis, the indirect room nights requirement could be even higher, from 150,000 to 200,000, factoring in Indian and global media, government officials, private sector representatives, organisers, and people conducting cultural events, among others.

However, the counter-view is that the boost in the host cities may not have that much of an impact on the larger hospitality sector.

“There will be a positive impact for the hotels in the cities where these events are happening, but nothing more, nothing less. The industry is currently already doing quite well, as foreign tourists are starting to come back. In the overall scheme of things, 100,000-200,000 additional room nights do not do that much more for the larger industry,” Manav Thadani, co-founder of Hotelivate, another hospitality consultancy firm.

The ongoing Udaipur meeting is the first meeting of the Sherpa track of G20, the other track being the Finance Track. The first meeting of the Finance under India’s leadership will be of the central bank deputies and senior most finance ministry bureaucrats of the member countries, or Finance and Central Bank Deputies (FCBD) to be held in Bengaluru from December 13-15.

There will be two gatherings in India of what is considered the apex meeting of the finance track – that of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors - one in February and the other in July 2023. The February meeting will also be held in Bengaluru, it is learnt.

The summit meeting, of G20 Heads of State, will be held in New Delhi in September.