AccorHotels Group set plans to expand its Raffles, Mercure, Novotel and Ibis hotel brands in India. The hotel group is upping its focus on India’s leisure sector, developing luxury hotels in commercial and industrial areas and bringing its Raffles brand to the country for the first time.
“We will be signing pacts with the property owners in weeks or months,” Jean-Michel Casse, COO, India and Southern Asia, AccorHotels, said in a statement. “These luxury hotels will come up in Mumbai, Jaipur and Goa.”
The group also plans to add four additional hotels in Kochi, Chennai, Vijayawada and Kolkata, three of which will operate as Novotels while one will operate as an Ibis. These will expand AccorHotels’ portfolio of 47 hotels with 8,500 guestrooms under nine brands in 22 cities in India. Then, Accor will open another set of Mercure Hotels in Ahmedabad in 2019.
As part of this expansion plan, Accor opened Sriperumbudur’s first Mercure hotel near Chennai on Mon., Mar. 5, 2018. The new Mercure Chennai Sriperumbudur is Accor’s sixth property in Chennai and seventh in Tamil Nadu. “The new hotel has 100 rooms and is located in the industrial are Oragadam just opposite to Apollo Tyres unit,” Neeraj Govil, CE, SMP Management Group, said in a statement.
Accor is mapping out these new plans to expand its presence in India after selling off its 40-percent stake in India’s Barque Hotels, which operates a 1,100-room portfolio of Formule 1 hotels, to Samhi Hotels last year. However, the hotel group expects to increase its current number of guestrooms to 10,000 by the end of 2018.
AccorHotels acquired Singapore’s Raffles Hotels along with Fairmont and Swissotel approximately a year and a half ago.