As we enter 2022, India’s oldest hotel company is updating its legacy

IHCL MD and CEO Puneet Chhatwal talks about a new segment in luxury travel - the millennial Indian who now travels with family and is ready to spend big

It’s a bustling London morning, a smoggy Delhi noon, and clear azure skies in Udaipur, when Puneet Chhatwal, Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar and I meet up — online, logging in from three different cities for a tete-a-tete that has been long pending.

At first, the idea had been to meet over a meal. Perhaps at the sparklingly redone The Chambers at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi to talk about everything that IHCL (the Taj group’s parent company and South Asia’s largest hospitality company) has been up to lately — posting a decent recovery after the initial months of the pandemic, strategising cogently to cut down debt, upping its revenues a whopping 132% (in Q2 FY 2021-22 over the same period last fiscal), but above all, expanding furiously, signing up not just newer hotels but interesting ones: an all-women managed luxury residence (the Taj wellington Mews in Chennai), a 100-year-old house by the Ganga, in a town not known for either leisure or luxury (Pilibhit House, Haridwar), a hotel in the heart of the Makaibari tea estate (the Taj Chia Kutir, offering a deep dive into plantation lifestyle with permaculture and sustainability built in), and a Taj Exotica at the Palm in Dubai early next year (with a marquee Indian restaurant opening).