I recently wrote about Indian Hotels Co. Ltd., ICHL, having bought a majority share in Indian lifestyle-hotel firm Tree of Life.
It is a tale of two Indian conglomerates coming together, as IHCL is owned by Tata Group, and Tree of Life is owned by Ambuja Neotia Group.
A day after that was published in Hotel News Now, IHCL re-entered the news with the announcement that it is to take over management of New Delhi’s Claridges Hotel, a famed property in the Indian capital that first opened in 1955.
IHCL will have a 25-year management contract in place for the hotel starting next April.
Its owner, Claridges Hotel Private Ltd. — there is no connection with the hotel of the same name in London — has two other hotels: the Claridges Nabha Residences in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, approximately 110 miles southwest of the foothills of the Himalayas and approximately 200 miles north of New Delhi, and the Aalia Jungle Retreat & Spa, about 25 miles southeast of Claridges Nabha and sits adjacent to the Rajaji National Park Tiger Reserve.
The Times of India reports IHCL signed a management contract for The Claridges Surajkund in 2013, which is no longer part of CHPL as it rebranded under another of IHCL's brand flags as the Vivanta Surajkund.
Despite being extremely fortunate in being able to travel, and having always wanted to, I did not get to India until last Christmas, and Claridges was the first hotel my traveling companions and I stayed in when we arrived from the international airport.
It is a somewhat luxurious place, although for my tastes it has a little too much glitz, complete with gaudy wall art and mirrors.
I am not sure what plans IHCL and Taj Hotels has for the place. After all, it is managing the property, and there has been no indication that the place will be rebranded; probably not, given the hotel’s illustrious history.
Perhaps it will be so along the lines of Claridges New Delhi by Taj?
The hotel has a large semi-circular lawn in front of it, and on both nights we stayed there that lawn was host to Indian wedding celebrations.
Indian weddings are notorious for being fun, long and loud, and these two were no exception.
Indian weddings are part of the culture of India, and one feels awful coming to India for the first time in a desire to experience small slices of that culture only to wonder aloud to the check-in staff how long the musical bands for Wedding A and Wedding B were going to continue for.
It well could have been the same band, and they might not have stopped playing between the two weddings.
We were told the bands would finish at 11 p.m., which I think they did, only to be followed by DJ A and DJ B for several hours.
Experiencing the five senses of Delhi, I felt, was slightly augmented by feeling a little out of it the next day through lack of sleep, and we knew we would have two weeks of blissful silence and nature to follow New Delhi as we journeyed through the state of Rajasthan.
IHCL released its latest earnings results last week, with Puneet Chhatwal, its managing director and CEO, stating approximately 25% of its 2024-2025 projected earnings would derive from Indian weddings, according to The Economic Times of India.
The newspaper also quoted Chhatwal as saying he believed there would be 5 million Indian weddings expected to take place in just this November and December.
That’s a lot of noise!
I’d love to return to India, so bring on the noise, I guess?
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