FORTY years ago, hotels in Bombay were Mom and Pop operations. The owner of the hotel was also its general manager. (Happily, this tradition continues even today at the West End in Marine Lines which is entirely a family-run affair.) You would never have trouble finding a hotel room and there were rooms to suit every man�s budget. Visualise the scene: you entered a hotel in Bombay and a guy with a bow-tie signed you in. It turned out he was also the bell-hop, he manned the taxi desk, did the laundry, served as the butler, and was the odd-man for odd-jobs!

The old hotel rooms were a bed, a chair and a table. When you needed to use the phone, you picked up the receiver and told the operator: �Give me a line!� There was no direct dialling. Today, you can connect to the world from your hotel room with ISD, fax, e-mail, video-conferencing facilities. Then, in the mornings a bearer would knock on the door with the tea. No need to call for room service. Just look at it, the refined butler service of old is now coming back! At places like The Oberoi and the JW Marriott Hotel, the managements go out of their way to provide personalised butler service to guests.

I�ve been in this industry for 25 years since the time Holiday Inn opened on Juhu Beach and I�ve watched it grow from charming old world hotels like the Ambassador, Ritz and Grand Hotel in South Bombay to five-star de-luxe properties that are large, ostentatious, awesome and that make you gape at them in wonder! The suburbs were where the �filmi� hotels were located. These were not called �filmi� because they resembled Bollywood sets, but because the film stars patronised them. And top of the heap were the Sun-n-Sand and Holiday Inn. But the big news in Bombay then was the Oberoi Sheraton and the Taj�s new wing, the Intercontinental. It was the brand new boy in town! Rai Bahadur Oberoi opened the swanky new Oberoi Sheraton. It was meant to be a big challenge to the hotel industry in South Bombay because earlier, everything was just Taj! Taj! Taj! People thought Rai Bahadur had gone mad! Not true. Because for its location, you just couldn�t beat the Oberoi Sheraton. It stood on the most precious real estate in Bombay. And there was Rai Bahadur himself making sure that the new hotel ran smoothly.

But he had opened at a bad time. There was a crisis in the Middle East and the Arabs stopped coming to Bombay. The Oberoi Sheraton�s occupancy dropped. Rai Bahadur�s hotel was losing money. It was not being perceived to be as successful as the Oberoi was in New Delhi. And the Sheraton group too was new to India. But Rai Bahadur Oberoi was absolutely indefatigable.

The story goes that he used to stand in the Oberoi Sheraton�s lobby and try to figure out what was going wrong. He soon found one major problem! The room service kitchen was struggling to cater to India�s first 35-storey hotel. Tea and coffee-makers were unheard of in those days. Can you imagine the room service dealing with 300 bed tea orders in the morning! Guests are finicky about their morning tea. Some want it light, some strong, some with masala, the foreigners without milk and sugar! The room service was going crazy!

Anil Madhok (of the Sarovar Park Plaza Group today) was the room service manager in those days. He�s lucky his early years there didn�t discourage him from the hotel industry for good! For despite having swanky restaurants like the Samarkhand and Supper Club, the Oberoi Sheraton was taking a terrible beating in F&B and rooms. It just couldn�t match the style and prestige of the Taj Mahal Hotel. The Taj was Taj, it got the most happening banquet functions in town that the �Who�s Who� of Bombay came to attend. And even in those days, the Taj was importing chefs for its old Chinese restaurant!

The Holiday Inn opened with an international chain that was not known in India. Ours was the second Holiday Inn here. Agra opened before that and closed. Indians recognised the Holiday Inn only as a motel. It was a huge task to construct the image, I can tell you. Indians used to travel only to Europe and the US and not to the Far East where the Holiday Inn standards were very high. On Juhu Beach, the Holiday Inn was the first classy hotel to come up. Its neighbour, the Sun-n-Sand, was a prestigious address. But then people took a look at the Holiday Inn with its big, swanky rooms all opening onto the sea, its employees who were all ex-Oberoi and consequently the best-trained management staff in the country, and its restaurant Neptune, known for jazz evenings, and F&B Manager Mervyn Locke handling the flambe trolley and making a pepper steak!

Meanwhile, in the city, a fierce tussle was on between the Taj and the ITC for the Nagpal family�s President Hotel. The Taj ultimately muscled its way in and credit for this must go entirely to Ajit Kerkar. But the President was dormant for a long time and the ITC to counter its loss, quickly opened the SeaRock in Bandra. It was actually an apartment building which the ITC did everything to convert. The SeaRock�s first general manager was D. Sabharwal. It proved to be a difficult hotel to run. Everything seemed wrong. The rooms were small and there were pillars everywhere, so it was difficult to carpet the place. The ITC tried hard and came up with the idea of promoting the SeaRock through its legendary cuisine. It started the Dum Pukht restaurant here with the celebrated foodie Jiggs Kalra, but even that did not help. Bombay was not ready for this kind of heavy food!

Round about this time, the enterprising Captain Krishnan Nair opened his Leela Penta at Sahar. The Centaur Airport was then the only functional hotel in the suburbs, and it was affected immediately. People started wondering why they were staying at Centaur when there was a property like the Leela just down the road. Also the airline crews that were staying at Taj and Oberoi moved into the Leela. But the Penta group had the image of a downmarket airport hotel so Captain Nair upgraded his property to a Kempinski hotel.

Looking at his example, the other hoteliers either began renovating their hotels or planned to start new properties. The President went in for a massive facelift and Vithal Kamat came up with this ambitious project called The Orchid at Sunder Advani�s old Plaza Hotel Bombay Airport. This hotel had been on sale for many years and Vithal picked it up for a good price. At that time, the government raised the FSI for hotels from 1.5 to 2 and we all benefited. But most of all Vithal Kamat. He raised money and built his Kamat Club and a flight kitchen, plus a disco and pool. He he took business away from Centaur.

Among the new hotels that are truly impressive is the JW Marriott Hotel in Juhu, a 350-room property owned by the Rahejas (G. L., Chandru, Deepak, Vijay and Rajan) and Hindujas (all four brothers), with Marriott holding a management contract. The Renaissance Mumbai Hotel and Convention Centre at Powai is owned by C. L. Rahaja and managed by the Marriott, and the Residence in Powai by another brother, Kishore Raheja. And there�s the Meridien owned by Balwa who also owns the Holiday Inn in Ahmedabad, and K. N. Goenka of Conwood Builders, who has a lot of properties under different brand names.

The Regent at Bandra, which is supposedly being sold to the Taj, has Lokhandwalla as the owner and the Regent as franchise. Which is unusual because in most parts of the world, Regent has only been in the management. But I hear the Regent has become a tremendous liability and I believe they are talking to potential investors, but nobody is willing to come up with this kind of money. The Regent would like to redo part of the hotel but Lokhandwalla will not agree. Maybe the Taj will take it up, after all.

Coming up at the airport is the Hyatt Regency Bombay (Asian Hotels Ltd.) by Shiv Jatia and Sushil Gupta who owns Wimco and few other industries. It should have 362 rooms. And the Intercontinental with 350 rooms by Lalit Suri of Delhi who owns the Maharaja Palace in Srinagar and the Ashok in Bangalore (which is an ITDC disinvestment). In the Vakola-Santa Cruz area will come up the Grand Hyatt with 498 rooms, a Rs. 700 crore property over one lakh square feet retail space. This will be a good mid-town hotel and will take care of the Bandra-Kurla Complex where there are already so many corporate headquarters like ICICI, Wockhardt, plus the American School, computer centres, shopping malls, boutiques. And once the consular corps moves there with their consulates, this will be an in place in Bombay.

Meanwhile, the ITC has been capitalising on its Grand Maratha Sheraton, a 350-room property that is strong on its food. The cuisines that have done will for the ITC in New Delhi and the South, which are the Dum Pukht and Bukhara-Peshawari, are also drawing crowds to the Grand Maratha Sheraton at Sahar. The ITC is also working full steam on its Upper Worli hotel which should open next year. I believe it will have a huge lobby, atrium, lots of retail space, its 250-plus rooms will all be on one level and going up to the ninth floor. The Park Hyatt, another brand name, will also be developed at Worli, though of this there is not much news even now. That was South-Central Bombay. While in the city proper, Ravi Ghai�s InterContinental with 60 rooms and top-of-the-line London cabs and butler service is fast nearing completion. He is going to take away the top-of-the-line business people who are now going to the Taj and Oberoi, just watch.

There are other properties coming up in suburban Bombay to take the number of new rooms in the Northern suburbs upto around 1,335. There is the InterContinental with 350 rooms near the Sahar Airport, a Vama hotel in Juhu, I think it will have 125 rooms, and the Trident in the Bandra-Kurla complex. This is really exciting news because Bombay needs something like the Trident (with 350 rooms). It is a different quality of hotel, good, functional, with exclusive eateries and swanky service, but not with five-star rates. Plus, Sanjay Narang is planning a new flight kitchen and an apartment hotel and country club at Sahar.

The new concept in Bombay is that of apartment hotels. The Taj is coming up with its Willingdon Mews at Cuffe Parade that will have 250 apartments, then there is the Grand Hyatt Apartments and the Meridien Apartments in the suburbs. Overseas, apartment hotels are big business. Especially in Singapore, Hong Kong and the US. They are large-sized, not matchboxes, and they are one, two bedroom apartments with lot of space. Business people appreciate them because they can conduct meetings in the rooms and also entertain guests and associates. Apartments hotel rooms are more livable in than hotel rooms for a long stay. They provide breakfast and a minimum service. An expat who travelling with his wife, and who can cook, feels at home in such a place. The apartment hotels come with coffee shops and bars and in case you want something quickly, there are small grocery stores open.

But we need more tourist and business traffic to justify all this. The hotel industry in Bombay is at a developing stage. Bangkok was at this stage five to eight years ago and Singapore reached it ten years ago. Even Dubai developed like anything over the last five years. Some hoteliers are sceptical about involving international brands with their projects, but I am in favour of bringing foreign collaboration to the hotel industry. Not only does this give us a competitive edge, but the Indian chains are urged to shape up and improve. And it�s not that the international hoteliers are here to take our market shares and go away. They have lots of new ideas. They know hotels. They run them around the world.