Wedding ceremony bells convey pleasure to accommodations enterprise as states raise curbs

Manbeer Choudhary, chairman of Jewels Group of Hotels that runs five-star hotel Noor Mahal in Haryana, is a relieved man. With declining Covid-19 cases and easing of curbs on social gatherings, bookings for big, fat weddings at Noor Mahal are picking up once again.

“The operations have normalized because Haryana has scrapped the disastrous measures since February 16. All restrictions have been removed,” said Choudhary, who is also Jewel Group’s managing director and president of Hotel and Restaurant Association of Haryana.

“Earlier, we were getting wedding bookings for 200-250 guests, and now future bookings are coming in big numbers…for about 500-600 guests,” he said. “The fear psychosis among people seems to have vanished. We are handling about seven to eight booking requests every day.”

After a dismal start to the year due to the highly transmissible Omicron variant and the ensuing travel curbs, February looks promising for hotel chains, thanks to a substantial decline in cases, the return of business travel, large-scale weddings and easing of curbs in some states.

Even in states such as Delhi, which has continued with the night curfews and a cap on crowd strength at social gatherings, hotel bookings have revived.

Tarun Thakral, COO of Delhi’s Le Meridien hotel, said the property is booked. “After January, which witnessed lockdown-like measures, many weddings have been booked at the hotel,” he said.

A spokesperson for ITC Hotels said February looks “quite optimistic”. “It is heartening to see Welcomhotel Amritsar, ITC Grand Bharat, ITC Grand Goa and other ITC leisure destinations in Jaipur and Agra be favorites for weddings,” the spokesperson said. “There is an equally high interest from guests regarding social events at our business hotels like ITC Maurya, Delhi and ITC Grand Chola in Chennai.”

Manish Tolani, vice-president and commercial director for India at Hilton, said the pace of bookings and occupancy has picked up across the board as cases declined and the demand for events and accommodation went up.

“Leisure destinations, key metros like Mumbai and Delhi, and tier-two markets such as Lucknow and Ahmedabad are seeing a greater pickup in social gatherings,” he said. Tolani said domestic corporate houses might have adopted a hybrid style of working for the near term, but they are encouraging business travel again.

Most cities and markets recovered sharply in February, said Jaideep Dang, managing director, Hotels and Hospitality Group, South Asia at JLL.

“As businesses opened up in the new calendar year with revised travel budgets, we saw business hotels ramping up both in occupancies and room rates in February,” said Dang. “Flight bookings to most business locations, such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad, saw an uptick. Weddings in February saw better capacities with the ease in restrictions. Furthermore, some spillover of the wedding business from January to March is giving Encouragement to hotels in the first quarter of 2022.”

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts is seeing an uptick in occupancy rates and bookings in markets such as Gurgaon, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Chandigarh, Udaipur, Lucknow, Varanasi, Jalandhar and Amritsar.