Tatas launch indiOne hotel
By Our Corporate Bureau | 26 Jun 2004
The chairman of IHCL, Ratan Tata, told news persons after inaugurating the hotel that this new segment will redefine the Indian hospitality industry.
The hotel is located at the heart of India''s Silicon Valley at Whitefield near Bangalore. The company plans to open 150 such hotels across the world though a dozen of these will be set up within the next one year in India. The cost of the hotel near Bangalore is around Rs 10 crore.
Earlier, at a press conference, management guru C.K. Prahalad, who co-created the concept for the Tatas, said the ''Smart Basics'' hotel would create a separate category of hotels. "Instead of replicating best practices, we have created next practices," Prahalad said. The high tech, high-touch hotel concept took two years for concept-to-road fruition.
IHCL managing director, Raymond Bickson, said a new subsidiary - Roots Corporation - had been created for operating these hotels. This concept had tremendous scalability and would follow a no-discount policy, according to him. "We want to redefine the hospitality industry just as the Japanese did it for the automobile industry," Bickson said. The Roots International Chief Operating Officer, Sheila Nair, said indiOne would soon be seen in pilgrimage centres such as Hardwar, Tirupati, Rishikesh and smaller towns such as Coimbatore and Ludhiana.
