Claire Barrie, Vice President – Global Sales, Synergy Global Housing, shares her perspective to the trends and importance of India as a market for extended stay accommodation. Excerpts from interview:
How do you see the emerging trends in extended stay accommodation in India.
We have seen huge opportunity for us. There are 2 areas of business: incoming to India and outgoing from India. There is equally significant domestic business in India. I visited India to understand the ground reality of the market.
When we go to visit any clients internationally, the first thing they seek is to get help In India as they think that India is very difficult market. This is a misconception.
There’s huge growth going on in India. The growth is unbelievable, and it is all modern. We’re seeing that in all our numbers.
We don’t offer one type of product. We offer a breadth of products. We offer a three star for people with maybe lower budgets or different expectations, different level of employee and then equally we would offer a high-end property.
What is your Synergy’s current operational profile, and which are your major markets right now?
Synergy is headquartered out of Silicon Valley. So, we have a lot of tech clients. Historically, our major source markets have been Northern California, Southern California and then we also move East Coast to New York, London, Dublin, and Singapore. In India, when we look at our numbers, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi Bengaluru is giving good business. Our office is in Bengaluru. The reason we located our office in Bengaluru is that it is IT hub. We have consultants here and we’re trying to listen, learn and then grow rather than grow and make mistakes.
What is the total inventory of Synergy and how do you see the growth prospect?
Well, synergy in 2022 did 1.5 million room nights which is significant. We have two areas: One is into our own product, which is really America, England, and Ireland. But what we also do is to supplement this with suppliers, partners, and other properties etc. We partner with other properties to offer varieties to our clients to say that you only have to come to synergy, we can offer you variety, we can offer you where you need to be. We get driven by the clients. If the client suddenly got growth in an area where we didn’t have, we can go to our partners, get the inventory and then be able to supply that to our clients.
Hence, it’s very difficult for us to say we have X number of apartments because it changes all the time. But 1.5 million room nights last year is good. We are about US$ $360 million company now, and the biggest market currently is US for synergy as a group.
Are you also looking to tie up with properties here in the India to cater to the inbound to India?
Yeah, the plan is first of all to listen and learn and have experts with us. Its hugely significant to our big business especially in the market to not to make mistakes in the market that we don’t know. Right now, our goal is to be able to either lease, or manage, we wouldn’t own and buy, but we would lease or manage a property. We have had clients say to us if you could just open in India, we would fill in tomorrow. The demand is very, very huge for us here.
Our next goal is to make sure that we have more people. One needs to visit India to touch it, feel it, experience it, not just India, but the people, the culture, the expectation, the demand, the way we do business, the huge opportunity exist here.
That’s why I am in India and bringing the rest of our business over here. We always serviced India out of Singapore until more recently when we opened in Bengaluru. Even in the first two months of this year which is quietest months of the year, we have seen our business double, triple in India.
With 1.5 million room nights last year, what sort of growth you are expecting this year 2023 and where does India stand in that growth thing?
India is going to be the biggest growth market for us. The US and the Europe will be flat. It may even be a little bit behind last year. So, that is why our focus now is India. The reason I say that is because we have quite a lot of tech companies and we know what’s happened with the tech companies. I don’t have to go into that. So, that’s why we’re like okay we don’t want to diversify our presence. Our biggest growth market is going to be India. We saw it last year and we’ll see it again this year.
We are very new in the market. But I would expect that probably it will be at very conservative 20 per cent growth in India this year. We would like to see that really at 40 per cent as we are investing in it.
