Corporate travel still below pre-COVID but retail travel bookings up 20%: Lemon Tree Hotels

Lemon Tree Hotels saw a recovery in quarter three after a lacklustre year due to the coronavirus pandemic. To discuss Q3 numbers and business outlook CNBC-TV18 spoke to Patanjali Keswani, Chairman and Managing Director of the company.

Corporate travel, which is a big pool for the hotel business, is 30 percent of the total basket currently this is still lower than pre-COVID levels. However, retail travel has been the saviour for the industry seeing a spurt of approximately 20 percent.

“Corporate travel typically was about 45 percent of our business. Today it is about 30 percent. But retail, which used to be about 1,200 rooms a day today is 1800 rooms a day for us in the owned portfolio, I am not talking managed hotels, which means the rate of growth of retail travellers, which incidentally is the highest rate that has grown by 50 percent.”

The resort business has done better than the hotel business and Lemon Tree acknowledged this.

“Since we started our management of other hotels, we do have a fairly large portfolio of resorts and it is true resorts are doing better than business hotels,” Keswani said.