In a bid to perform a structured talent evaluation in an industry, which is typically not used to search, Executive Access has decided to step into this realm with its cutting edge search practices. With rising stakes for hotels and peaking competition, added to the tourist and travel boom in India witnessed last year, things are looking up for Executive Search in this sector.

Executive Access is set to redefine leadership hiring in the industry and we have an able team from the industry itself with years of rich experience that brings the much needed domain expertise to the table.

Trends and future of the hospitality, tourism, travel sectors
Salaries Going Through The Roof - just like Room Rates

While salaries remained flat overall in most regions of the world for 2004, including North America and Europe, certain markets are seeing such strong increases that they are throwing the surveys out of balance. Such markets include Dubai, which continues to outperform, and Hong Kong, which is leading the way in China - the market driving all of Asia. Hong Kong is seeing figures we haven't seen in 20 years.

Speaking of shortages, formally educated sales and marketing executives continue to be in short supply worldwide, as do revenue managers. The reason is that people with these skills sets are finding they are able to apply those skills to more financially lucrative fields outside the hotel business. Their experience and training are transferable so they're going into other forms of tourism and private industries. We're losing a lot of young people to airlines and IT - where they can afford to pay them a higher salary.


Hotel Groups in India

The hotel industry in India has been rewriting the system, processes, approaches, functional orientation and methodologies the past few years to match the Indian campaign. A new need for proving global excellence has dominated the recent aligning behaviors.

An individual hotel or chain of hotels can represent itself in one of 3 ways:

• As a Private label chain, with its own identity: To market a hotel as a Private Label brand is the    most expensive and requires a hotel to develop, build, and market an individual identity.

• As part of a marketing brand: A marketing brand allows a hotel to maintain its own identity, but    has to market itself as part of a brand, which may involve adopting the brand logo and collateral    materials.

• As an individual Hotel under a collective group of representation hotels: A representation can allow    the hotel to maintain its own identity, but be represented as a large group of similar properties in    the distribution channels.

The traditional patterns of individually owned hotels are changing in recent years and the industry is being increasingly associated with hotel groups.


Advantages of groups:

The hotel industry is benefited with accruing advantages like large-scale economy, risk spreading, financial, marketing and economic ease of management. Of course the hotel groups shares many problems especially of communication, controlling of costs, accountability of unit hotels, complex controlling mechanisms and geographical dispersal of hotels.

The nature of the hotel business and the limits of many hotel markets provide the main explanations for the growth of hotel companies through groups.
• Financial economies
• Marketing economies
• Economies of buying
• Managerial economies
• Economies of risk- spreading.

The 'Incredible India ' Campaign 2004-05 and the tourism boom

Consider the facts:

• In the past 18 months, India has focused on promoting tourism
• It launched an effective international advertising campaign
• India was spared the SARS outbreak, which hurt many Southeast Asian destinations
• Tourist arrivals are up in record numbers

Indian Government has enthusiastically put in a lot of interest and funds to improve tourism revenues. It has appointed professionals on the job to leverage on the Indian heritage and diverse cultural treasures. In 2003, India's tourist inflow rose 15.3% and foreign-exchange earnings through tourist arrivals rose as much as 20% over 2002's figure. In fact, tourism in 2003 exceeded pre-September 11, 2001 levels The Pacific Asia Travel Association, a trade grouping, in January-September 2003 quotes that the tourism declined over the previous year by 28.5% in Malaysia, by 12.7% in Thailand and 23.5% in China; Singapore saw a decline of 23.4 % in January-October 2003.

In 2003, India's travel-and-tourism industry is expected to have generated 529.4 billion rupees ($10.5 billion), or 2% of the country's GDP, according to a World Travel and Tourism Council report. It adds that the broader travel-and-tourism economy--that includes the railways, domestic air travel, tourism infrastructure building, and the like - is expected to total $24.3 billion, which is 4.8% of GDP. If things stay on course, tourism is set to flourish. The WTTC report says that over the next 10 years, India's travel-and-tourism industry is expected to achieve annualized real growth of 7.9% to bring in $28.4 billion in 2013. By then the travel-and-tourism economy overall is expected to hit an annual $68.3 billion.


Scope of the Practice

Hospitality & Services Practice answers the needs of top level executives in the following industry sectors:
• Hospitality - Hotels, Resorts
• Supermarkets, Wholesalers (Delivery and Cash & Carry), Department Stores
• Travel
• Tourism
• Leisure - Multiplexes, Amusement Centres
• Foods & Beverages, Cleaning and Non Food
• Restaurants
• Airlines
• Retail, Apparel & Luxury Goods
• Sports Business
• Export Houses