Navigating hospitality for a modern India

For four decades the default grammar of Indian hospitality was imported. Chandeliers from Vienna, marble from Carrara, buffet pyramids that nodded at Geneva and Tokyo in the same breath. The pitch — to the Indian guest and to the foreign one — was that the property had got past being Indian. It was, finally, world-class.

In 2026 the most-talked-about hotel in the country is a 14th-century Rajawat fort. The highest-ranked restaurant in India is Avartana — modern South Indian inside ITC Grand Chola, Chennai. The bar most-cited as a benchmark is ZLB23, hidden behind a service lift inside the Leela Bengaluru and decorated in a 1920s register with a single layer of Kyoto wallpaper. The Indian hospitality establishment has not become global. It has become specifically, articulately, premium Indian.

This essay is about what that shift means for anyone operating, building, or financing hospitality in India over the next five years.

The customer is younger than the building

India's Gen Z will control roughly 45% of the country's travel and tourism spend by FY2030, growing at twice the category average. They already make 34% of online travel bookings. Seventy per cent prioritise experiences over things. They discover hotels and restaurants on Instagram reels, not travel magazines, and they book hostels, villas, boutique properties and one-off rooms over chain rooms by a wide margin.

The millennials still outspend them ($6,031 per year on travel versus $2,622 for Gen Z, per Business Standard, 2024) — but Gen Z is the taste-making layer. What Gen Z calls "the vibe" — the Athangudi floor, the terrazzo bar, the regional cuisine done seriously, the property that doesn't try to look international — is now the brief every Indian hospitality builder works to.

The customer is sufficiently young, sufficiently digital, and sufficiently aware of India's own craft and cuisine traditions that they can detect colonial pastiche on sight. They don't want the chandelier. They want the textile.

The product has flipped — vernacular is now premium

What used to be dismissed as "ethnic" by chain-hotel design committees in the 1990s is now load-bearing in luxury positioning. Athangudi tiles, Chettinad teak, Channapatna toys, Maheshwari weaves, blue pottery, terrazzo with brass strip inlays, hand-poured lime plaster, Pala-style stone carving, kalamkari prints, artisan brass — these are no longer the "Indian touch" appended to a Western base. They are the architecture.

The properties leading this rewrite of the grammar:

• Visalam, a CGH Earth heritage hotel in Kanadukathan, Chettinad, in a 1939 Indo-Deco palace with Athangudi tiles, Burmese teak, Belgian chandeliers and British cast-iron columns.
• Six Senses Fort Barwara, 48 all-suite resort in a restored 14th-century Rajawat fort, two original palaces and two temples folded into the property.
• The Oberoi Rajvilas, named World's Best Hotel by Travel + Leisure's 2024 World's Best Awards — built around chhatris, courtyards and a haveli vocabulary, not a chandelier.
• Ahilya by the Sea in Goa and Ahilya Fort Maheshwar on the Narmada — Yeshwant Holkar's restored Holkar properties, the case study for treating regional craft as core IP.
• SUJÁN, twenty-five years old this year, twelve-tent camps in Jawai and Sher Bagh — Jaisal and Anjali Singh's category-defining argument that small, tented, deeply local is what luxury looks like in 2026.

The chef has become an auteur

In 2010 a fine-dining restaurant in India was a hotel restaurant, mostly. By 2025 the standalone auteur chef has become the centre of the country's serious eating. Manish Mehrotra at Indian Accent (still the international ambassador), Hussain Shahzad at Papa's (12 seats above Veronica's in Bandra, reservations gone in three minutes when they open the first of every month), Prateek Sadhu at Naar (a 16-seater in Kasauli, six-hour drive from Delhi, books out three months ahead), Ajit Bangera at Avartana (#1 on the Condé Nast Traveller India 2024 list), Niyati Rao at Ekaa, Aditi Dugar and Varun Totlani at Masque (#19 on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2025).

Two patterns in this cohort are worth naming. First, the cuisine has gone regional-Indian-premium — laal maas, niramish, undhiyu, alleppey curry, Mappila cuisine, Bohri thali — all priced and presented in a register that the same chef-tier was charging for European tasting menus a decade ago. Second, women chefs are central, not token: Aditi Dugar (Masque), Niyati Rao (Ekaa), Garima Arora (Gaa Bangkok, two Michelin stars — first Indian woman), Mythrayie Iyer (Farmlore), Anita Sapavadia (Sapa). Six of the top forty rooms on the Condé Nast 2024 list are women-led or co-led.

The Indian chef is now the brand. The Indian chef's name on a press release sells covers.

Tier 2 and tier 3 is no longer the future — it is the present

Tier 2 and tier 3 cities are growing 25-67% YoY in hospitality versus 2-3% in metros. Indore is taking ₹400 crore of hotel capex to grow from 8,500 to 10,000 keys by 2026. Lucknow, Coimbatore, Kochi, Bhubaneswar, Vizag, Surat are now primary expansion markets — not afterthoughts that brands open after they've saturated the metros. The Postcard Hotel's 2025 openings include Ranthambore, Tirupati, Kanha, Chicalim, Jawai — none of them are metros, all of them are now branded boutique destinations.

The economics work because the cost base flips. Tier 2 retail rents run at roughly one-tenth of metro highstreet rates. Land for hotel projects is easier. The local customer is pre-conditioned by aggregator delivery and OTT streaming to know what good looks like — and to pay for it when they encounter it.

For an operator with a brand and a working unit-economic model, the next ten years of expansion is mostly outside the seven cities everyone has been talking about for thirty years.

Wellness has become the product

Six Senses Vana (82 rooms in 21 acres of Sal forest, Dehradun, 5/14/21-night programmes), Ananda in the Himalayas (100-acre Maharaja's Palace estate in Narendranagar, 25,000-square-foot spa, named World's Best Wellness Retreat by Condé Nast Traveller 2023), Niraamaya Retreats across nine properties — these aren't competing with Indian hotels. They are competing with Switzerland.

The unit of consumption is no longer the room-night. It is the programme — the 14-night detox, the 21-night Ayurveda intensive, the 7-night meditation residency. Average ticket: ₹3 to ₹15 lakh per guest. The maths is closer to a private clinic than a hotel, and the customer is global.

The wedding is load-bearing infrastructure

India's destination-wedding market was USD 16.25 billion in 2024 and is projected to USD 55.4 billion by 2033, growing at 14.8% CAGR. The October-December 2024 wedding season alone generated ₹6 trillion in business across 4.8 million weddings, average spend ₹36.5 lakh, destination wedding average ₹51.1 lakh. One in four Indian weddings is now a destination wedding.

The implications for hospitality are not subtle. Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kumbhalgarh, Ranthambore all hit 75-80% hotel occupancy in 2025. Heritage hotels are pricing wedding windows at 10-15% premium over peak ARR. Taj, Oberoi, ITC, Marriott have launched dedicated destination-wedding packages bundling venue, cuisine, rituals, transport and guest management. The chain that wins the next decade of Indian luxury is the chain that gets the wedding playbook right.

Capital is finally treating Indian hospitality as an asset class

For the first decade of the 2000s, hotel capex in India came mostly from balance-sheet debt and family-office equity. From 2024 onwards it is a different conversation.

Blackstone bought 50% of Taj Aravali Udaipur for $100 million in December 2024, repositioning it as Taj Exotica Resort & Spa Aravali. Ventive Hospitality, the Blackstone-Panchshil joint venture, listed on Indian exchanges in December 2024. India's branded room inventory crossed 200,000 keys in 2025 for the first time; 32,500 rooms were signed in the first nine months of FY26. IHCL added 30 hotels and ~3,000 rooms in CY2025; Lemon Tree opened 21 properties and 1,601 rooms. SaffronStays — boutique villa portfolio at 1,250+ keys across ~400 homes — is raising $5-7 million to push ₹500 crore revenue.

The structural maturation is real. Hospitality financing in India is moving from bank-debt to private credit, REITs and sovereign-allied capital. The asset class is being priced like an asset class.

The constraint that nobody on the cover slide names

India is short approximately 1.5 lakh trained hospitality professionals. The IHM system produces ~30,000 hotel-management graduates a year against an industry need of 3.8 lakh. Sector turnover at entry and mid level runs 40-45%, versus 15-20% in other industries. The industry is operating at 60-70% of its pre-pandemic staffing levels.

This is the constraint underneath every expansion plan, every IPO prospectus, every "we'll open thirty hotels in the next three years" announcement. The cooks, the captains, the housekeeping, the front office, the brigade, the bartenders, the sommeliers — they do not exist at the wage points the financial models assume.

The brands that have built durable hospitality businesses in India have all done the same uncomfortable thing: stopped pretending the market will train their staff for them. Oberoi STEP, IHCL with its CII-EHL programme, Westlife with Welingkar, the auteur-chef alumni networks (Indian Accent under Mehrotra, Olive under AD Singh, Hunger Inc as a five-brand academy) — these are the ones whose growth is funded by their own pipelines.

The next decade of Indian hospitality will not be built by the brands with the best architects. It will be built by the brands with the best training programmes. That sentence reads dull on the page and is correct on the ground.

Where this is going

A modern India hospitality property, circa 2026, looks roughly like this:

• It is built on a regional craft palette (Athangudi, terrazzo, brass, jaali, lime, hand-loom) instead of a global luxury one (marble, chandelier, polished granite).
• It is small enough to be specific (12 to 48 keys) and large enough to be operationally serious.
• It is run by an auteur — a chef, a sommelier, a designer, an owner-operator — whose name and editorial voice is the brand.
• It charges premium, in confidence, because it isn't apologising for being Indian.
• It treats wellness, regional cuisine, and the wedding economy as core revenue lines, not adjacencies.
• It is built in a city or town that, in 2015, no chain hotel would have considered.
• And it has thought hard about how to train and retain the brigade, because the brigade is the actual product.

The colonial-luxury era is over. What is replacing it is more interesting, more specific, and more profitable than what came before. The operators who see this, and price into it, are building the assets and the brands that will define the next twenty-five years of Indian hospitality.

Kaam Hire is the hospitality-only hiring platform behind this blog.

Kaam Hire is the hospitality-only hiring platform that powers this blog. If hiring is on your mind — try it.