Hospitality Design - March/April 2013 - 77

perspectives

interview

raymond
bickson
By Stacy Shoemaker Rauen
Photography courtesy of Taj Hotels and Palaces

1
2

1. The Taj Lake Palace
Udaipur, India, seems
to float, occupying one
of the islands of Lake
Pichola.

2+3. A dining room and
the regal exterior of the
Taj Falaknuma Palace
Hyderabad, India.

ALL EYES ON INDIA
Raymond Bickson expands the Taj portfolio

Raymond Bickson was destined to be in the
service industry. While growing up in the rental
car business (his father was one of the founders
of Budget Rent-a-Car) in Hawaii during the
’60s and ’70s, the flourishing tourism industry
inspired him to attend Cornell. After graduation,
he cut his teeth traveling the world working for
hotel visionaries Adrian Zecha, Robert Burns,
and Georg Rafael at Regent International
Hotels, and then moved to New York to run
the Mark Hotel. It was there he met a repeat
guest, Jamsetji Tata, founder of the Tata Group,
a diversified conglomerate and the largest
company in India. It is also the parent company
of Taj Hotels and Palaces, the largest hotel
collection in India (recently opening its 100th
hotel), and Tata wooed Bickson with a job.
Since taking over as Taj’s CEO and managing
director a decade ago, Bickson has helped turned

the venerable Indian hotel company into a world
player, growing it from 62 hotels and some 8,200
rooms to 118 hotels and 14,250 rooms. “We have
opened one hotel every eight weeks in the last ten
years,” he says.
The key: diversification. Realizing that a Taj
room for $75 in Agra shouldn’t be in the same
classification as a $500-a-night Taj palace room,
Bickson and his team decided to take a good
look at its brand architecture. The result is four
distinct offerings: besides the 5-Star namesake
brand—ranging from palace hotels to safaris—the
Taj umbrella now includes 4-Star brand Vivanta
by Taj; 3-Star hotel collection Gateway; and 1-Star
budget offering Ginger.
“India only opened up to internationalization
in the early nineties; prior to that it was controlled
by domestic brands and we had twenty-five
percent of the market,” he explains. “In 2003,
the entire Indian market had sixty-two thousand
rooms; Manhattan, for instance, has one hundred

and ten thousand rooms, China today has three
million, and the U.S. has five million rooms. All
the brands that grew in Asia realized China has
one billion people, India has one billion people,
and not enough hotel rooms—they were licking
their chops; India was the next China. Today
India has one hundred seventy-five thousand
rooms and the country is still running at sixtyfive to sixty-eight percent occupancy—it still
needs more. With all of these brands coming
into our market, we needed to revisit the
one hundred-and-ten-year-old brand to stay
competitive.”
And they have: Ginger is now the largest
budget brand in India. “The main growth is the
rising middle class,” Bickson notes. “That’s the
growth story for all the BRIC countries. In 2003,
the average income was thirty-six thousand
rupee; in 2012 it was something like fifty-eight
thousand rupee. Some four hundred and fifty
million people have more disposable income and

hospitalitydesign.com March/April 2013

077

http://www.hospitalitydesign.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - March/April 2013