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At last year’s board meeting, just before the AGM, Indian Hotels Company Ltd had approved Raymond Bickson’s appointment as MD & CEO for five years. While it’s a surprise that the Hawaii-born Bickson has stepped down before the end of his term, his 11-year stint at the helm of the Taj group saw him set a blistering pace.
In 2003-04, IHCL had 62 hotels and a total room inventory of 7,942 rooms. Now, the chain has 127 hotels and 15,690 rooms. However, company losses widened last FY to Rs 590 crore from Rs 338 crore the previous year.Bickson could not be reached for comment after the announcement of his resignation. His tenure at IHCL saw him articulate a brand architecture for the group, which saw the hotel chain clearly segmenting its brands: the Taj, Vivanta by Taj, the Gateway and Ginger.
To anybody who had a hard time understanding this brand segmentation, Bickson, who has trained with the best hotels around the world, would compare it with Tata cars: “A Ginger would be a Nano, a Gateway would be the Indica, a Vivanta would be a Sumo and if you go to luxury, it would be Jaguar Land Rover. So, they all have cars, they all drive, but they are all different, some have leather seats, some plastic, some no radials, so it's similar.” Bickson was firm in his belief that the Taj group had to protect its turf and market share from the spate of foreign brands entering India, be it a Hyatt or a Marriott. In an interview a few years ago, he said, “We have a 25 per cent share. We are the largest player and how do we stay the largest, that's the point! In every brand, in the segment that we compete in, we need to be number one, two or three. The story is how do we make sure that for the next 20-30 years we protect the brand from the new companies.”
His stint at the Taj group saw it making aggressive forays abroad. It has 17 hotels in its fold, including luxury properties such as The Pierre in New York which it acquired, and a Greenfield hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. “The idea is to double the (overall) inventory and de-risk the model by having one-third (of revenues) from overseas,” Bickson had said.
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