Indian Hotels to invest Rs 100 cr on budget hotels

"We will be offering one new hotel for every six weeks in the next one year," said the CEO of the Indian Hotels Company Raymond Bickson.

Indian Hotels Company Ltd on Tuesday said it will invest Rs 100 crore in the next fiscal to set up budget hotels across the country and bid for Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation's (IRCTC) tender for operating hotels.

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"We will be offering one new hotel for every six weeks in the next one year," Indian Hotels Company Ltd Managing Director and CEO Raymond Bickson told reporters here, while announcing the renaming of its smart basic hotels project, earlier known as 'indiOne' to 'Ginger'.

Bickson said the investment, excluding land costs, for a hotel having 100 rooms would be about Rs 10 crore.

By the the end of 2006 Ginger hotels would be opened in Bhubaneswar, Pune, Mysore, Thiruvananthapuram, Durgapur and Goa. Work would also commence on hotels in Agartala, Tirupur, Pondicherry and Nasik within the next couple of months, he added.

On the bids to partner IRCTC in operating budget hotels, in which Railways will provide land, Bickson said, "we have a keen interest in it and are closely looking at it".

He also said the hospitality major would launch service apartments projects in cities like Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai.