Saraf Hotels eyes expansion through brownfield route

Saraf Hotel Enterprises is looking at brown-field expansion and scouting for properties with minimum 200-250 room capacity, a senior company executive has said.

"The future for us lies in acquisitions as greenfield expansion is time consuming and it adds more to the cost when a property is developed from the scratch. We are mainly looking to acquire properties with a minimum 200-250 rooms or even more that we will further develop to our standards," Saraf Hotel Enterprises Joint MD Umesh Saraf told PTI here.

For this, he said, the company is looking at metro cities, leisure destinations or any locations that can up over 200 rooms hotel.

"We are looking at locations with good tractions of visitor footfalls, including the metro cities, leisure destinations and any other places which can take up a over 200 rooms size hotel," he added.

The company currently has 11 operational properties and five under various stages of development.

Saraf Hotel Enterprises will launch Azaya Beach Resort Goa this week, an upscale and luxurious property.

It offers 114 rooms and suites, out of which 38 rooms feature private plunge pools and a sea facing suite.

Other properties in the pipeline include Visakha Devi, Bodh Gaya, with an inventory of 74 rooms, Hyatt Regency Guwahati with 200 rooms, Bhubaneshwar - Asian Hotels (East) with 160 rooms and Trivandrum and Jaipur - Chartered Hotels with 150-120 rooms.

Saraf said even as most of the company's hotels are under the global hospitality group branding, Hyatt, it is also looking at other international brands for its future hotels.

"We have been fortunate with the Hyatt brand. However, going forward, we will also explore partnerships with other global brands for our future projects or create our own brands," he added.

The funding of the projects, going forward, will be through internal accrual and debt.