Kolkata: The Tatas wants to do a Tetley for its hotels business. The Indian Hotels Co. Ltd. (TIHCL) is eyeing properties overseas to have a more balanced global representation of its hotel business. Properties that are being looked at are in the US, UK and China.

TIHCL is also aiming at bolstering the `Taj' brand of hotels and creating new categories higher and lower than it. While Taj hotels will cater to the company's super-luxury properties, another super-deluxe category will be created above the Taj properties which will be used for the 'palaces'. Another will be promoted for hotels which do not comply with the Taj specifications. R K Krishna Kumar, managing director, TIHCL, told newspersons here on Tuesday, "We are going into a categorisation beyond the Taj. The palaces will be our super-deluxe hotels which will be marketed as leisure destinations along with exotica. For properties which may not be in line with the Taj hotels or for our budget hotels we may use another brand like our 'Gateway' brand."

"We also want to have a small affordable high-quality chain with a global representation under our belt. We may do an acquisition and our source markets like US is important. Currently, our overseas properties are concentrated around the Indian Ocean," he added.

Mr Kumar, expected the hotel segment to do better in the second half of this fiscal. With the current hotel occupancy at the Taj hotels being around 62-65%, he feels that this will increase to 70% by January next year. However, foreign corporate tourist inflow won’t be much. International leisure travellers contribute only 15-20% to TIHCL’s total revenue foreign tourists.