The COVID-19 pandemic hit the hospitality sector hard and things are just starting to look up now. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Vikramjit Singh, President of Lemon Tree Hotels spoke at length about how the hotel industry is coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, industry occupancy in 2021, corporate travel and other travel industry trends.

Speaking about recovery, he said, “The large corporates are the biggest laggards predominantly because the IT companies have not started travel, their employees are still working from home. Therefore, this segment has seen the slowest recovery. However, the big surprise is leisure/retail segment; they have not only recovered but today our retail contribution is about 115-120 percent of our pre-COVID levels.”

“In tier-I cities occupancies are now catching up, they are roughly about 20 percent below pre-COVID level but the big dip is in average room rate (ARR), the average rates today are still 40-50 percent below what they were for the same period pre-COVID so the revenue recovery has not happened. However, tier-II is doing very well,” he said.

On expansion front, Singh said that Lemon Tree opened 5 hotels in the COVID fiscal and will open hotels in Coorg, Port Blair, Dehradun, Mumbai and other places.

“In the COVID fiscal we have opened 5 hotels; we opened in Dwarka, Aligarh, Jhansi, Vijayawada and Goa. So today, as things stand, we are about 8,300 rooms in 84 hotels across 51 cities and we have 2,200 room additions in the pipeline,” he said.

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(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)