The situation this time is dramatically different: Ajay Bakaya

The MD of Sarovar Hotels and Resorts speaks about turning one of his properties into a Covid care unit for the elderly and business beyond the pandemic wave.

With 95 hotels and 7000 plus keys, Sarovar Hotels and Resorts is a substantial part of India’s hospitality landscape. ETHospitalityWorld caught up with Ajay Bakaya, the managing director of the company and doyen of the industry for a chat on what the industry was going through at the moment.

“The situation this time is dramatically different. When we talked last time, it was about the larger lockdown and the first major downturn of business—but peoples' spirits were not battered, they were still not scared. Unless you had comorbidities or working from, you were going about doing your business and we were seeing the impact in hotels—we saw many more people drive into our resorts, we saw people on flights come in, we saw corporate business pick up,” Bakaya said about the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 adding that during the first wave, there was also a market for those who had Covid but were asymptomatic who used the hotels to quarantine.

The difference this time around was whole families were getting infected and preferring to quarantine at home—those who were looking for care, weren’t considering hotels, but hospitals. There was also the fact that people were just not traveling.

“20 percent of my hotels are shut down at the moment. The other 80 percent are doing an occupancy rate of 20 percent if you put it all together. So it's poor business and in very few hotels are we able to do operational break-even,” he said when asked about Sarovar. Bakaya however did give us some positive examples of what his company was doing.