Lemon Tree Hotels saw a recovery in quarter three after a lacklustre year due to the coronavirus pandemic. To discuss Q3 numbers and business outlook CNBC-TV18 spoke to Patanjali Keswani, Chairman and Managing Director of the company.

Corporate travel, which is a big pool for the hotel business, is 30 percent of the total basket currently this is still lower than pre-COVID levels. However, retail travel has been the saviour for the industry seeing a spurt of approximately 20 percent.

“Corporate travel typically was about 45 percent of our business. Today it is about 30 percent. But retail, which used to be about 1,200 rooms a day today is 1800 rooms a day for us in the owned portfolio, I am not talking managed hotels, which means the rate of growth of retail travellers, which incidentally is the highest rate that has grown by 50 percent.”

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The resort business has done better than the hotel business and Lemon Tree acknowledged this.

“Since we started our management of other hotels, we do have a fairly large portfolio of resorts and it is true resorts are doing better than business hotels,” Keswani said.

For full management commentary, watch the video.