Daiwik Hotels Pvt Ltd that debuted with a four-star property at Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, plans to have a chain of properties at various pilgrimage centres in the country.

The company, promoted by a group of professionals, is looking to set up hotels in places such as Srisailam, Tirupati, Madurai, Kanyakumari, Thiruvananthapuram, Srisailam, Dwarka and Varanasi initially. “Though we are looking to build hotels from scratch, we are not averse to buying out existing properties and convert,” said Mr Debashis Ghosal, Managing Director and CEO of the company.

The company has tied up with the Kerala-based Marg Hotels and Resorts to run these properties.

To start with the company would invest around Rs 60 crore, while the rest will be met through debt.

Daiwik Hotel’s first property in Rameswaram is a 90-room hotel, built at an investment of close to Rs 30 crore. It has identified land parcels in Tirupati and Dwarka for its successive launches. Mr Ghosal said, the Tirupati hotel will have 140 rooms and will take Rs 50 crore to build. The proposed hotel in Dwarka will have around 100 rooms and the investment would be around Rs 25 crore.

Elaborating on how he got the idea of ‘pilgrim hotel’, he said there is a huge unmet demand for quality hotels in pilgrimage centres. And, at present, there are a few low-end hotels, which are largely unorganised, and guest houses owned by some temples and the respective State governments. Quoting some government statistics, he said the size of the tourism industry in the country is to the order of Rs 3.5 lakh crore. Of this, over 50 per cent is generated by pilgrimage tourism. “Even if we manage to tap a small portion of this pie, it could mean big business for us,” he said.

>rravikumar@thehindu.co.in

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