Hotels and Restaurants: Travel, Pre-fab Hotel, Jindal Hotels Ltd, Apodis Hotels & Resorts, India

Modular Pre-fab Hotel in Vadodara

Jindal Hotels Ltd is planning to build modular hotel in Vadodara. The 210-room three-star business hotel will be launched by 2010 and could be perhaps the first hotel of its kind. It will subsequently assemble similar hotel rooms for other hotel chains.

The company has already identified a plot on long lease and is currently in the process of getting necessary permissions and licenses for the project.

Piyush Shah, MD of JHL says, 'this will be a movable property, but not a temporary structure. It will be developed based on the modular hotel concept and could possibly be the first one of its kind in India.'

"It's an approach to developing hotels in a much faster way compared with the traditional brick and cement process," said Shah.

The approach to building the pre-fab hotel involves assembling hotel rooms at the factory level and transporting them to the hotel site in containers — just like other goods that are loaded on the ship or heavy-duty trucks.

"The rooms are then placed at the actual hotel site, where they are bolted on to the heavy duty steel columns. The approach works much more efficiently by way of saving construction time and other costs," says Shah.

On an average the cost of setting up a three-star hotel room is in the region of Rs 2.2-2.5 million. However, the per-room set up cost in case of a pre-fabricated or modular hotel is only Rs 1.5 million. It also takes just over 6 weeks after the plinth work to keep it ready. A modular hotel can go up to 15 floors with 500 rooms or even more.

In fact, there is 640-room property already operational under the Premier Inn brand in London according to the report. Moreover, "If one particular market reaches an over-supply stage, the excess rooms can then be dismantled and put on some other location where the demand supply gap has not been bridged yet," says Shah.

A few other hotel companies are looking to enter, particularly in the budget to three-star segment. Trikona Capital Group is planning to make a splash with this concept in India with its hospitality vertical Apodis Hotels & Resorts.

Envisaging the potential of the concept, Jindal Hotels have decided to also set up the country's first modular hotel room factory near Vadodara. The company will assemble the hotel rooms here and also supply them to other hotel chains. "A 30-acre land has been acquired for the factory. The company will source the outer casing of the container from China," says Shah.

Another property that is experimenting with this concept is the Kerala-based Vythiri Resorts. The management has already put up two modular huts that were imported in a container from a Malaysian firm on a trial basis. Based on their success, the promoters intend to add 6-8 modular huts in the near future.

Nov 17, 2008
Source: Indian Wine Academy
URL: http://www.indianwineacademy.com/item_3_263.aspx