This year, Worldhotels will be launching a series of initiatives focused on innovative and segmented sales, marketing and e-Commerce solutions, Roland Jegge, Executive Vice President Asia Pacific, Worldhotels, revealed. “These initiatives will help hotels achieve optimum results in targeting luxury and leisure guests through the use of social media and advertising campaigns as main leverages,” he added.
Globally, Worldhotels is aiming to develop and support 50 hotels under its portfolio by the end of 2014 and out of that about 10 will be in India,” he said. According to him, India is likely to contribute five per cent to Worldhotels’ global sales by 2014, compared to about two per cent at present. “We have seen a dramatic increase in bookings from Indian customers over the past years and there is a large amount of upper upscale hotels being built which could qualify for the Worldhotel brand and respond to our need to offer more hotels for our customers travelling to the Indian sub-continent.” Asia Pacific as a region contributes about 20 per cent to the company’s total sales.
He further added, “India is very important to us. It is now the second year that we have an office here. We are now strengthening it with sales force to develop the business and also to produce RFPs and domestic business for our Indian hotels, which will come to double over the next one year.”
The destinations being looked at are Hyderabad, Pune, Goa, Kolkata, and also Colombo and Dhaka. “In cities like Delhi and Mumbai, we currently have two hotels in each but we can easily add two/three more properties in both cities because the business is so fragmented,” stated Naresh Chandnani, Regional Director- Business Development, Indian Subcontinent & Maldives, WorldHotels. They are also looking at tier-II cities like Aurangabad, Jaipur, Indore, etc. The properties range from business hotels to large resorts.
Moving forward, the hotel brand is looking at driving outbound business from India to our hotels overseas informed Chandnani, “This year we will focus on promoting our international hotels in India. This will help us showcase our brand and services that we offer. We have already started catering to large Indian MICE and wedding groups at our hotel in Bali that has a huge convention centre, conference hall and meeting space.”
For the Indian market Worldhotels launched its very own Guest Loyalty Programme at a recent hotel investment conference in Mumbai. “A loyalty programme is the ultimate resource for hotels to stay in direct contact with their guests and keep them from going through third parties,” Jegge said, adding that it is time the hoteliers reinforce the strength of belonging to a global group.
