Tune Hotels has announced plans to open 100 properties across India.
The budget hotel group will open its first Indian property in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad on April 1, and CEO Mark Lankester said that “the strategy is for five or six hotels to ideally open in Gujarat in the next three years to target the opportunities that arise with the VFR and business traveller markets”.
The group will also open a 120-room hotel in Bhiwadi, Haryana before the end of this year, and a 200-room property in Delhi close to New Delhi railway station in early 2014.
Tune also has hotels in the pipeline in in Neemrana and Jaipur in Rajasthan, Chandigarh in Punjab and Bhavnagar in Gujarat, and said that “Besides Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai are the other major capitals that Tune Hotels is looking to confirm a presence [in]”.
Commenting on the choice of Ahmedabad as the location for the first Tune hotel in India, Lankester said:
“Normally we would target larger locations, such as Delhi in this instance, but when we looked at the background and history of Gujarat, we identified that it is the best performing economy in the whole of India.”
Malaysia-based Tune Hotels is part of the Tune Group, a private investment group owned by Tony Fernandes, founder and CEO of Air Asia.
The hotel group opened its first UK property in 2010 close to London’s Waterloo station (see online news August 25, 2010), and has since added hotels in Liverpool Street (see online news October 11, 2011), King’s Cross (see online news April 16, 2012), Paddington (see online news June 27, 2012) and Edinburgh (see online news January 11).
For more information visit tunehotels.com, and for a review of the group’s London Paddington property, click here.
Report by Mark Caswell
