The man with big plans for the Taj
The Indian Express — December 17, 2004

At seven this morning, Raymond Bickson, the managing director of The Indian Hotels, will board the company jet with 11 others for Jodhpur to make a presentation before the regal owners of Umeid Bhavan. In September, India's largest hotel company ousted the $60-million Aman Resorts chain in the bid to manage that 111-year-old Rajputana Palace. This latest meeting between owners and management is to finalise the design details of the project that will crown the group's revamping plans.

For 49-year-old Bickson, it will be the culminating performance of two years steering the largest craft in the Indian hospitality industry. "There were the three years bad starting from September 11, and SARS. But we're on a roll now," Raymond Bickson. And the task is huge — even for a man of Bickson's proportions. The 5 ft 11" generously built Hawaiian took over from Tata stalwart, RK Krishna Kumar, in January 2003. The same year, the group's flagship, the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, turned 100, and from that start-off date, Indian Hotels has set out to increase it's 56 property portfolio by almost 15 and more hotels year-on-year.

The first of their Indione properties — budget hotels that will cost less Rs 1,500 a night — opened in July in Bangalore. "Every single day of the year, some 5,000 sales people from just Hindustan Lever travel across the country; most of them stay in overpriced, horrid places. It's an under-served market and we want to stop that gap," he says. And the scouts are out for acquisitions in China, the Middle-East and Africa. Which all seems a bit too much work for a man wholed 15 years as the affable head host of The Mark in New York.

Acknowledged as one of the grand hoteliers of the world, Bickson was hand-picked by Krishna Kumar to inherit his post. (As GM of a favourite haunt of Ratan Tata's, Bickson knew the boss, but had no idea who he really was. "When he told me that 'my company owns hotels' I didn't realise he was talking about the Taj Hotels.") And since his arrival, Bickson has imprinted the worldliness he was chosen for into the century-old enterprise. He dusted some dowdiness of the Taj menu by roping in Masterchef Masaharu Morimoto to set up the now hugely successful Wasabi at the Taj Mahal.

In a country with less than 90,000 hotel rooms, Bickson says the possibilities for improvement and introduction are vast. But stopping that gap takes Bickson away from his wife and two teenage girls for at least 20 days of the month. "India now is like China in the late 80s, it's exciting, so working till midnight is the last thing you think about," he says.