Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group is aiming to add 170 hotels to its Indian portfolio over the next three years. Currently, the company has 84 hotels open across the country and another 56 in active development, leaving another 30 to be signed.
Those 84 hotels are located in 60 cities, including 16 properties in state capitals. According to Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group’s CEO (South Asia) Raj Rana, the company invests in brands, distribution systems and revenue-driving platforms. For brick-and-mortar units, Rana said that Carlson Rezidor relies on its partners. For example, the company has signed a deal with Best Tech, a hospitality company that will build 49 Park Inns and Radisson Hotels.
That growth plan may prove challenging since, as Rana noted, the company's growth is organic and does not include mergers and acquisitions.
While Carlson's growth was previously focused on India's northern region, it has expanded into the south over the last two years. “As much as 30 percent of our inventory now is in the south,” Rana told PTI.
“We typically follow a sort of hub-and-spokes strategy to expand base,” he said, which has the company open in an unexplored market and then expand in other cities in the region.
Talking about the difference in hospitality industry in India and other countries, Rana said that in India, 70 percent of hotels were unbranded--offering a strong opportunity for growth.
Carlson Rezidor in the APAC Region
Last year, Carlson Rezidor opened 14 hotels across the Asia Pacific region, with regional Compounded Average Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17 percent since 2010.
In China, the group opened its first hotel under the Park Inn by Radisson brand in Libo, bringing the property count in the country for Carlson Rezidor to 16 hotels in operation and 24 under development. The company signed deals for Radisson Red hotels in Guangzhou, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“Asia Pacific continues to be one of the most promising and energetic growth regions of the world,” Thorsten Kirschke, president, Asia Pacific, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, said in a statement. “The underlying hotel performance on a like-for-like basis has yielded robust improvements of 8 percent GOP growth. We continue to be on track to achieving our goal of attaining 200 operating hotels in our Asia Pacific portfolio by 2020.”