Over the last few years, Indian Hotels Corporation Limited, which owns Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, Gateway and Vivanta brands, has experimented with several brand strategies — right from a single brand strategy to one that involves retaining its several brands.

In 2018, the company decided to shelve its mono-brand plan and go ahead with an aggressive growth strategy under its new managing director and CEO Puneet Chhatwal. The strategy executed under ‘Aspiration 2022’ targets an 800 basis point increase in margins to 25 percent by 2022. One year down the line, Indian Hotels reported a 229 basis points expansion at the end of FY19.

How was Indian Hotels able to do this? When Chhatwal took over, he made it very clear that the company will be following an asset-light strategy. This means that the company will be more into the management of properties rather than ownership. During the year, IHCL signed 22 hotels in and added an inventory of over 3200 rooms to its pipeline via 18 management contracts and four operating leases. At the end of March 2019, IHCL reported an increase in management contracts to 40 percent from 32 percent in March 2018.

Indian Hotels has also been working on monetising non-core assets including land banks, residential apartments and building synergy with other Tata group companies to drive efficiencies. With several of these measures in place and with a focus on increasing operational efficiencies, net debt to EBITDA for IHCL has come down from 2.58 in March 2018 to 2.11 in March 2019.

IHCL hopes to continue on the set five-year aggressive plan to re-structure, re-engineer and re-imagine its positioning to cater to different segments of the market.