RARE India offers advocacy, market intelligence, distribution, sales and marketing support to a wide spectrum of hospitality clients. The RARE India Community currently consists of 66 conscious luxury boutique hotels and travel experiences spanning three countries (India, Nepal & Bhutan), 16 States in India alone and 53 hospitality brands. In an exclusive chat with BOTT India, Shoba Mohan, Founder, RARE India shares how the hotel industry – especially mid-segment, has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
BOTT Desk
What has been the impact of COVID-19 on independent and boutique hotels?
As the lockdown was announced when many hotels of the RARE India Community were at the end of their inbound season, some hotels lost about two months of their peak season revenue while for others, especially those in the hills, the forthcoming summer season has been wiped out completely. We should be looking at a loss of anywhere between 25 – 40% of this year’s turnover.
How are RARE India hotels sustaining themselves during this crisis?
Many hotels of the RARE India Community are small, owner driven and dexterous. When most of these hotels closed for the summer, the staff was sent back to their villages. The members of the staff who stayed back helped in repairs, upgrades, training, etc. Many of our partner hotels are great case studies for sustainability, which has been a part of their overall business strategies for a long time. It is the right way of doing business and is keeping them afloat. We have a lot of stories coming in from the hotels, lodges and cruises, which are positive and tell you the story of how our Community survived the COVID lockdown together.
What would be the post COVID-19 travel preferences that can be naturally found in this community?
Some of the key features of the RARE India hotels are the quality of staff and the number of keys. RARE India hotels have small teams, usually from the local communities, which are manageable in terms of training and tracking. Many of the hotels are located in off-beat places that are close to green zones. And also since the rooms and cottages are spread out in large acreage, guests have their own unique spaces.
Sustainable travel is said to come into perspective much stronger post COVID-19. What are the key sustainability practices that hotels should include in their DNA?
Sustainable travel is the hope as well as the challenge. There is a need to look for business innovations that address climate change, challenges of biodiversity destruction as well as some of the issues of tourism like over tourism, habitat destruction and losing the integrity of the tourist destination. Sustainability will be the obvious business choice to achieve these goals. However, when you hear about ‘bounce back’ and the post COVID-19 protocols, with ‘one use and throw’ solutions and over stress on cleaning chemicals, one wonders how this enthusiasm towards sustainability will pan out in real time.
Some easy to incorporate practices would be as follows:
- Have a robust reuse policy
- For a virus against whom the best defense is soap and water, don’t look at complicated solutions
- Streamline purchasing so that it is as local as possible, thereby reducing contact points and carbon footprints
- Redefine your hospitality idea, for long luxury has been about excesses. It can now be about experiences, learning and transformation
How do RARE India hotels address hygiene checks to ease the clients?
Every hotel has a unique set of health and safety regulations that they are following. Training and self-regulation to ensure that everyone on the property is checked for health and hygiene are some of the measures being taken All of us follow accepted international protocols set out by organizations like WHO, MOT and SG Clean as well as some that are unique to the landscape of the region.
When do you foresee travel going back to normal?
This is not very easy to predict. Novel Corona virus by nature spreads and it is a reality that eventually all of us will have it in our lifetime. There is a huge fear factor attached to COVID-19 and also many myths. The best bet to predicting normalcy will be based on a tested vaccine. Actually, it is tough to go back to ‘normal’ after this lockdown as the COVID-19 has thrown a lot of chinks in the business. One question glaring us in the face is how is it that the government hasn’t taken cognizance of an industry that contributes to so many jobs and a sizeable percent of the GDP? And most importantly, what kind of business is this that none of us, big or small, have been able to sustain at least 3-6 months of business closure. It’s really time to rethink the travel business.
How have you handled the challenges of lockdown and lack in business at your company?
We just huddled and continued with what we are good at, which is creating opportunities and value for our partner hotels. We also looked at our business model and relooked at ideas to take it to the next phase. Most importantly, we have been keeping the team positive, busy and together. Our Destination Discovery Series, which are zoom sessions and InstaLive programs, have been helping people in lockdown know more about our hotels and their ideologies. We ran a two-day event called RAREfied during the first phase of lockdown, which kind of set a pace for online engagements with the hoteliers, travellers and tours operators alike.
