Blazing a no-carbon trail

With its strange economic policies, Kerala is generally perceived as having got the rest of India, which has to subsidise it, on the hop. But there is one way, at least, to get some of it back.

Look out for the break periods in the monsoon and turn up there. The off-season discounts are all in place — and the weather is holding off.

So you get light scudding clouds, cool wind, scattered sunshine and a nice view of the harbour from the Taj Vivanta, where the food and service are as usual outstanding. The Taj is anyway good at these things. No story there. The real story is Jose Dominic, Managing Director of the CGH Group, one of the key players in Kerala's tourism success story. The Dominics — who have plantations in the Central Travancore region — were early movers in the hospitality business and, luckily for them, had a knack of being in the right place at the right time.

The right ideas too, by the look of confidence that Dominic exudes. So successful is his idea of building resorts “one with earth and nature” that everyone is copying it now. “It's a bit of a worry,” he says. “We have to find something newer to do.”

That quest has led him to another unique idea: he has built a resort that has just three rooms. Yes, only three.

The building belongs to the former raja of Cochin and has been carefully restored by Dominic.

The restoration has been carried out with finest attention to the smallest interior detail. Indeed, this is true of all the resorts run by the CGH earth group — the pains taken to get it just right.

Called the Chittur Kottaram (palace), it is a 50-minute boat ride away from Willingdon Island; and when you get there, you find it is pushed further back, about half a kilometre inland, from the main waterway.

It accommodates a maximum of six people. You have to rent the rooms in blocks of two nights, at $1,000 per room.

The Bangaram Break

Dominic first shot to prominence with his venture on Bangaram Island in Lakshadweep. “Rajiv Gandhi had gone there for a vacation in 1987 and, perhaps because he didn't like the government-run facility, he asked for it to be privatised.”

All the big boys rushed in, but that did not deter him from bidding. “I got the contract by promising to have the place up and running in three months, in time for the airport to be inaugurated.”

So how did he do it? “It was simple,” he says with a grin. “I only had to dismantle the public sector thing and put in local stuff like thatched roofs. I removed the tiles and similar things.” Magically, the idea worked.

But then came the problem of marketing. And this is when he came up with what Baldric in the BBC comedy series The Black Adder would have called a ‘cunning plan'.

He turned the no-mod-con handicap into a virtue by advertising the resort as a place where you got away from the evils of modern civilisation — no air-conditioning, no phones and no TV. Happily, though, he did not apply the principle to modern flushing systems.

The ploy has worked so well that it has since become the template of all CGH resorts. “We used to be called the Casino Group of Hotels, but that confused many people. So we shortened it to CGH earth — clean, green, healthy.”

Of tiffin and meals

Like all early pioneers, the Dominics too met their share of naysayers when they were starting out in the 1950s. The Syrian Christian families around them were clearly sceptical.

The start was pretty modest — a tiny restaurant near the Ernakulam Island railway station. But early on, they had hit upon the biggest success factor in any retail or hospitality venture — location. Dock workers and travelling public couldn't have enough of their tiffins and meals. Business was brisk.

It became brisker in the early 1970s when the Kochi airport on the island took off. By then, the restaurant had blossomed into a hotel. Even before the commercial airport shut operations and shifted to Nedumbassery, Dominic had other, bigger plans.

As also an unerring eye for the right location.

Just chill, chill, chill

One of the resorts is called Coconut Lagoon in Kumarakom. It is spread over 20-odd acres, with an attached five-acre paddy field that feeds the needs of the resort.

The cottages are built like those converted barns or stables in England in which the entire ground floor, where the grain used to be stored (or horses stabled), is the living room and the bedroom upstairs covers only about a third of the space.

There is one problem, though, and a very British one: the washroom, which is completely modern, is downstairs, and in the open! If for nothing else, you should visit just for that singular experience. And should you be a smoker, this is pure bliss: your wife can't complain about the stale smell of cigarette in the loo. Anything is worth that luxury.

Brunton's benefactor

Then there is the piece de resistance in Kochi itself: Brunton Boatyard in the Fort area. It used to be a boatbuilding factory that fell on bad days.

Dominic bought and turned it into a 22-room colonial-style hotel. It reminds you of Raffles in Singapore and, indeed, until the end of the 1970s, there were many such hotels in central Kolkata (then Calcutta). They were smaller, but the colonial ambience was the same.

The only problem with Brunton is that, with the ferry point just 10 yards from your balcony, it can get very noisy. There was one especially nasty boat, obviously owned by the government. Its engine frequency was the same as that of the hotel windows, which shuddered each time it came and went. Otherwise the property is simply outstanding in conception, design and execution.

Northward bound

The South has been his major play, but now with 11 properties in the region, Dominic is eyeing the North. “We will be crossing the Vindhyas soon,” he says. The turnover has also been moving northwards — smartly rising from Rs 1 crore two decades ago to over Rs 100 crore today.

They are marching differently from the big boys in the field and getting there in their own inimitable style.

COMMENT NOW