Oberoi Group CEO Vikram Oberoi on India's Future in Hospitality

29.03.2024 - 02:09 / skift.com / Sean Oneill

Vikram Oberoi, CEO and managing director of the Oberoi Group, knows luxury inside and out. Oberoi-branded hotels — recently ranked as “world’s best” by Travel and Leisure readers — are quite familiar to Oberoi himself: He spent the first decade of his life in the Oberoi Grand, Kolkata, before a stint in the Oberoi, New Delhi.

Oberoi attributes the company’s success to responding to guest feedback, emphasizing quality over quantity, and considering employee needs. Oberoi sat down with Sean O’Neill, Senior Hospitality Editor at Skift, at the Skift India Summit 2024 to discuss the company’s future, competitive advantages, policies affecting hotels, accessibility, and what’s in store for India’s economy.

Here are some of Oberoi’s thoughts on India’s future in hotels, shortened for clarity. Watch the full interview below.

Oberoi: Our vision for 2030 is to expand both the Oberoi brand and the Trident brand. We’d like to open 50 new hotels by 2030, so that’s what we’re focused on delivering. Some of the hotels will be smaller. One of the things that we’re working on… are smaller hotels in beautiful locations (that) have a strong sense of place. All our research on guests tells us that that is something they would deeply value.

Oberoi: I sometimes feel our rates in India should be much higher, and I’d urge all our colleagues to drive rates up because you have amazing hotels, whether it’s Taj, it’s Leela, it’s Oberoi. Our hotels are world class in India. If you compare us to hotels in other parts of the world, our rates are very often fantastic value for money. In fact, beyond that. So there’s an opportunity to catch up with the rest of the world on rates.

Oberoi: When we look at the actual rates achieved for our domestic guests, vis-à-vis guests coming from other parts of the world, the rates in a particular hotel vary from location to location. But our average room rates for our Indian guests are higher than (what) it is for overseas guests, in leisure and also in our city hotels.

Oberoi: As an industry, we need to do more to really highlight how important hospitality or the tourism sector is in employment. We have a young population. People need jobs. If we’re going to drive economic prosperity, job creation is very important. I think hotels and the tourism sector do very well in that regard. I think we need to talk about that more and educate the larger community on the enormous employment generation that comes from our business.

Oberoi: Some states have actually given hotels industry status, and there are many benefits with that: lower property taxes, better tariffs for electricity. There are cost savings on that. I’d encourage more states to do that.

At a central level, EIH (the Oberoi Group’s parent