Mandeep S. Lamba, President (South Asia) HVS ANAROCK in one of the webinar threw some light on the revenue aspect of hotel industry post-pandemic, he stated, “For the hotel sector the revenue losses during pandemic has been recorded as 10 bn. Everybody is still guessing what will be the recovery. The significant aspect is the govt talks of supporting the hotel industry but nothing much has happened on the surface. We are suggesting govt to use the taxes paid by the employees and how those can be utilised by the govt. Reduction and rationalising the GST so that hotel gets some relief is needed. Every enterprise should be given a loan on the GST and what income tax has collected. There should be a working capital fund which govt should put in which will assist the employees to be in jobs. RBI has come up with restructuring issues- there is fair amount of challenges and not all hotels will be benefitted. Prima facei it seems that not everybody will be benefitted from this plan. In terms of revenue generation, some business have come back to hotels, leisure seems to be sector where there is some surge again. Corporate travel is very slow to boom as they have shifted to WFH culture and not opened fully. Hotels are trying to do generate revenue from different avenues such as ancillary revenue, food & beverage business , home deliveries platforms in hotel, reasonable amount of success in these avenues. Others are co-working spaces, urban warehousing, laundry services, facility management for offices, all the facilities that are inside the hotels that can be utilized.
He further added, “As and when pandemic is over, there are more revenues that they can generate as they will get, fair amount of focus and attention is giving to hotels. Our prediction is we should reach pre-pandemic occupancy level around the 3rd quarter of 2022, and RevPar level at 3rd quarter of 2023. Bounce back will start in the middle of next year. As standards of medical fraternity will rise somewhere in the next year as most of the people will be inoculated and hopefully some vaccine will be there.”
