Notwithstanding the global slowdown and the resultant drop in occupancy, ITC Ltd will stick to its Rs 10,000-crore investment plan for setting up luxury hotels across the country.

Speaking to a group of media persons at the company’s recently launched luxury hotel – ITC Grand Chola, in Chennai, Nakul Anand, Executive Director, ITC Ltd, said the company pursues an aggressive investment-led growth strategy to add more super luxury hotels, “with responsibility”.

Captive energy

“Responsible luxury will be the single major USP (unique selling proposition) of our products,” he said. For example, he said the electricity requirement of the 600-room new property – Grand Chola – is met by renewable energy generated by the company. It has set up six units of 2.1 MW wind mills in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

According to him, the company has renewable power generation capacity of 70 MW across the country, and close to 55 per cent of the hotel chain’s power requirement is catered to by renewable sources. And, the company will take the total renewable energy generation to 100 MW in the next few years, with new capacities in Maharashtra and Karnataka.

“In fact, our ITC Sonar is the first hotel in the world to get carbon credits,” declared Anand.

Capacity addition

Besides, he said, in the next 2-3 years the company will add 1,000 rooms.

The plan for the next five years is to add 5,000 rooms, he said. The growth trajectory will be across all the four brands (Luxury Collection, WelcomHotel Sheraton, WelcomHeritage and Fortune Hotels). The group’s current strength is 8,600 rooms from over 100 properties.

In addition to this, there are over 40 hotels under various stages of development which will be either owned or managed by the company. “Our plan is to have approximately 150 hotels in the next five to six years in the premium segment.”

>ravikumar.ramanujam@thehindu.co.in

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