Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL) has set up a 100 per cent subsidiary called Roots Corporation Ltd (RCL) to develop and launch, what it terms, ‘unique value hotels’ which will cater to corporate executives, traders, senior citizens, professionals, tourists and religious pilgrims.

These hotels will, however, not be under the Taj brand and will be exclusively known as unique value hotels, competing with other budget hotels in the country. 

The first prototype of the hotel will be launched by the end of June or July in Whitefield, Bangalore and former IHCL special projects chief operating officer (COO), Sheila Nair, will be the COO of this newly formed subsidiary. The subsidiary was incorporated on December 24, 2003. 

Ms Nair told FE that the new subsidiary has been set up with a mandate to develop and launch the unique value hotels. 

According to an industry official, the room rates of the hotel chain will range between Rs 1,200 and Rs 1,500 per night and will cater mostly to travelling professionals and tourists who are on a lookout for accommodation. These hotels will be located in technology parks, pilgrimage centres, transportation hubs, etc. 

Each hotel will roughly have about 100 to 200 rooms built on a standard modular plan and would be rapidly scalable in terms of room numbers. 

An IHCL official had earlier stated that a move for creating such hotels will enable the company to achieve a higher topline growth, while the bottomline growth would continue to be driven by its chain of five-star hotels both in India as well as overseas. 

The official further added that IHCL has identified the market for such hotels, for which, it feels, there is vast potential in the country.