Malaysian hotel group Tune Hotels have announced an aggressive roll-out plan for India with a target of 100 new hotels over the forthcoming years. The first 100-room property will open in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on 1st April 2013 and will reflect the core principals of the Tune Hotels brand – international class accommodation that offers great value and great savings.Tune Hotels have identified the Indian market as a huge opportunity and will be looking to bring their unique set-up to the tourism market. Most hotels in India tend to have 100 rooms per property, but Tune would look to have between 100 and 200 rooms. The brand will also look to focus on the Indian wedding market which offers huge potential for the visiting friends and relatives (VFR) market and the opportunity to house a full family in one single hotel.
Mark Lankester, CEO, commented: “We are delighted to be opening in Gujarat and have a full strategy in place. Normally we would target larger locations, such as Delhi in this instance, but when we looked at the background and history of Gujarat, we identified that it is the best performing economy in the whole of India.
If you look at one state which has more citizens living abroad, it is Gujarat, with one million in the UK and US respectively. This is a huge market, and as such, the strategy is for five or six hotels to ideally open in Gujarat in the next three years to target the opportunities that arise with the VFR and business traveller markets.”
The Gujarat hotel will be closely followed by a 120-room hotel in Bhiwadi, Haryana, by the end of 2013 and a 200-room hotel near the New Delhi Railway Station in early 2014. Besides Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai are the other major capitals that Tune Hotels are looking to confirm a presence. Others in the pipeline are in Neemrana and Jaipur in Rajasthan, Chandigarh, Punjab and Bhavnagar, Gujarat.
