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Readers of Travel + Leisure magazine just named an obscure (from a U.S. perspective) resort in India the 2015 Best Hotel in the World. But if you knew how good India’s homegrown luxury hotel brands were, you would hardly be surprised. The Forbes Travel Guide star rating system does not cover India, but if it did, the nation would be awash in 5-Star hotels and resorts, plus too many 4-stars to count. Unfortunately, just as the ratings skip over Indian hotels, so do many unaware American luxury travelers, who are missing out – and not just in India.
I’m just back from a trip through the country, a country full of surprises – good and bad. Travelers go to India for a lot of reasons, from the cuisine to yoga, wildlife safaris to world famous sights like the Taj Mahal. And of course, lots and lots of travelers go for business, especially in the technology and software industries. I’m very well-traveled, but I encountered a lot of things that were new to me, and my trip had a lot of highlights. But what really blew me away were the hotels. I’ve stayed in top luxury lodgings all over the world, hotels that have been ranked among the best in existence, and my takeaway was that India has a glut of properties that easily hold their own in this elite company.
Here’s the crazy thing: while there are a lot of great luxury hotel brands, and the sector has been booming around the globe for years with tons of glitzy new openings, the top companies have almost completely ignored India. In addition to being a major international business destination, one out of every six human beings lives here, with a population four times that of the U.S. and just slightly smaller than China’s. India has 46 cities of over a million people (the U.S. has ten), yet Four Seasons has less hotels (just one, in the finance capital of Mumbai) in the entire country then they have in Istanbul. Ritz-Carlton also has just one hotel, in the technology capital of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, a solidly business destination. St. Regis? Just one, in Mumbai – and it hasn’t even opened yet. Peninsula and Mandarin-Oriental, perhaps the two best known uber-luxe brands, are completely absent.
For the American luxury traveler familiar with all these top tier brands, India suddenly becomes a daunting proposition when it comes to choosing hotels – unless you consider the country’s trio of simply stupendous home grown chains. Taj, Oberoi and Leela have over one hundred properties throughout the country – and many more around the world. If you love to travel in high-style, these are important names to know even if you have no plans to visit India, as the deluxe brands are slowly but surely growing in all directions.
I was traveling with Micato Safaris on assignment for a print magazine.I’ve written in these pages before about why I (and just about every travel magazine and top travel agent) believes Micato is the world’s best luxury safari operator, and I feel even more strongly about that now. But while Micato has plenty of pre-planned scheduled itineraries in East and Southern Africa, their India operations are entirely bespoke (read my Forbes.com piece on the World’s Best Bespoke Tour Operators), and the company’s family owners trace their roots to India. Micato experts helped me choose between and pick every hotel I visited, and I stayed at one or more properties from each brand during my visit. I also toured additional ones where I ate or used facilities but did not overnight. To be fair, that’s hardly a comprehensive test, but every single one, big or small, urban or resort, was a stunner, more on par with Peninsula, probably my favorite brand and the most consistent of all the big hitters, than even Ritz and Four Seasons, which can have ups and downs.
It’s been my experience that hotels are better when they are the result of a singular passion, ideally by an individual whose vision and personal involvement is exceeded only by his or her willingness to spend money. These are hardly not for profit enterprises, but many of the very best resorts on earth reach their stature because an owner is willing to bypass corporate red tape and spend whatever it takes to make them right and achieve a vision. I’ve written at length about such billionaire and centi-millionaire playgrounds, and a short list would include places like Laucala Island, Mukul, Julian Robertson’s Cape Kidnappers and Kauri Cliffs, Dunton Hot Springs, Richard Branson’s Limited Edition hotels, The Breakers, The Broadmoor, and Jade Mountain, among many others.
Here’s an example: let’s say you live in a 300-year old royal fort that you spent more than a decade painstakingly renovating until you deemed it perfect. What do you do next? If you happen to own a luxury hotel company, you simply build a brand new resort with the main building, lobby and restaurants modeled on your fort, surrounded by freestanding “tented” rooms sprawling across 35 manicured acres meant to recreate the caravans royals once traveled in, luxurious tent cities set up in advance of their arrival. Except these “tents” are huge permanent enclosed villas with sunken marble oversized tubs and walk-in showers. That’s what the founder of Oberoi did in Jaipur.
In this vein, all three top Indian luxury brands trace their creation story to an especially driven and very hands-on individual, and it shows. Oberoi’s namesake founder was a self-made man in the hospitality business who built the brand in his own image and marched to a different drummer. Oberoi operates its own hotel and culinary training program rather than relying on top schools, and this assures a level of consistency among managers and kitchens virtually unheard of in the luxury hotel world. Conde Nast Traveler readers ranked four different Oberoi properties among the 15 Best Hotels on earth – and the same ones as the four best hotels in all of Asia, which has the largest collection of top tier luxury hotels anywhere. That kind of domination goes beyond statistical anomaly or coincidence. As if to punctuate this point, it was the Oberoi Udaivilas that Travel + Leisure just named the world’s single best hotel. The family driven company is still going strong, run now by the founder’s son, the second generation Mr. Oberoi.
Taj was launched by the founder of Tata, now one of country’s biggest conglomerates, which among many other things is a major car, bus and truck manufacturer that also owns both Jaguar and Land Rover. Mr. Tata built the first hotel in 1903, and Taj is still a Tata Group subsidiary. Leela is the newest of the brands, since just 1987, founded by Captain Krishnan Nair, who named the chain after his wife. Captain Nair made his fortune in the textile and fashion industries, and this shows in the opulent décor and expensive fabrics found at every turn in its hotels.
All three brands offer a similar over the top service experience, and all three operate extremely well appointed luxury hotels and resorts. India has both a great service economy and plentiful low wage employment, allowing these hotels to take advantage of generous staffer to guest ratios. But what makes them shine is that the staffers are not just plentiful, but also very well trained, and they do a great job, hardly the case in all places with low wages.
As I said, the Forbes star ratings do not cover India, but I know quite a lot about the ratings and top rated hotels, and I would say that all the properties I stayed at would be comfortable among their 5-star brethren elsewhere – if not at the top of the class. Taj is the one only one of the three with U.S. hotels, three of them, all takeovers and not to the opulent former royal palace standards of their Indian counterparts, yet the trio still does very well with two 4-stars (Campton Place, San Francisco and Taj Boston) and one 5-star (Pierre, NYC).
Taj is by far the biggest of the three (80+ hotels and resorts in India alone), and as such has the most varied portfolio, including the Vivanta by Taj sub-brand, which is sort of their take on W, a hipper, younger, more design-driven lifestyle brand. It’s worth noting that while many hospitality companies include Hotels, or Hotel & Resorts in their full name, this one goes by Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, and the company began converting former royal palaces – there are tons of them in India – into luxury hotels more than four decades ago. Perhaps the most famous of all the Taj palace resorts is the all-marble Lake Palace in Udaipur, the “Venice of India,” on its own island. As iconic and photogenic as it is luxurious, this stunning property has been ranked the single most romantic hotel in the world.
I stayed at the Taj Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, and it was magnificent. My room was so large and lavish that there was half bathroom I didn’t even notice until the last day. Not only did my room include a gargantuan sunken circular whirlpool bath worthy of a Roman emperor and a huge outdoor patio that could have held fifty guests overlooking a garden teeming with peacocks, but every night at turndown service they made an elaborate “mural” on the floor in flower petals. Bathroom amenities included the total array usually found only in top hotels in places like Japan, complete with shave kits, dental kits, mouthwash and the works, as well as a twist I have never seen at any other luxury hotel: one day I left my sunglasses on the table, and when I returned, there was a boxed eyeglass cleaning cloth sitting next to them.
Leela is the smallest but in some ways the poshest of the three, with just eight hotels in India (plus four more under construction) and none outside. But these are spare no expense purpose-built flagship properties that take, rooms, lobbies, spas and dining to the highest level. Its gorgeous Delhi hotel uses a bit of a Las Vegas approach to the culinary scene, importing world famous eateries that otherwise do not exist in India, including sushi temple Megu and the only Le Cirque in Asia. One Leela signature touch is its Royal Club, a private club floor with cocktail, snack and concierge service, available across the brand. The Leela Delhi, where I stayed, is the choice of many visiting rich Middle Eastern royal families, and on par with any modern, urban 5-star in this country, yet it is a brand almost no one in the U.S. knows.
The bottom line is that it is entirely possible to travel the breadth and width of India, for business or leisure, without ever sacrificing the same ultra-high levels of luxury and service you’d expect to find in the best urban hotels of Hong Kong or London, or resorts akin to the best of Cabo or the South Pacific.
Frequent travelers – myself included – often fall into the easy trap of going with what they already know, and there are often good reasons to simply book a Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons wherever you go to expect a certain level of comfort and familiarity. But these are three world-class brands the frequent travelers should know, and if I was going to India again, I’d have no temptation to choose any other alternative. Now I’m curious to see how some of their hotels in other countries stack up.
Likewise, at an Oberoi resort, I found a microfiber screen cleaning cloth placed next to my laptop, and for only the second time I can recall, the cords to my iPhone/iPad charger were tied neatly with ribbons. At the more modern urban Oberoi in Delhi – which I’d favorably compare to the 5-star Peninsula Chicago, except with an even bigger staff, I dined alone and the waiter brought me a leather folder of English language magazines and newspapers. As a solo traveler, the overwhelmingly polite, helpful and friendly staff could not have made me feel any more welcome, while the attention to detail, from the ribbon tied cords to the plentiful universal electric outlets I found in every single hotel – five of them within reach of my bed at the Rambagh Palace – was staggering.
Besides the US and India, Taj has hotels from London to Bhutan to South Africa and elsewhere, so it is a brand American travelers should come to know. Oberoi is quite a bit smaller, with eleven properties in India, but is even more consistent in the sense that everyone appears to be a topnotch fantastic hotel. I routinely poll many of the nation’s top luxury travel agents for one of the magazines I write for, and when it comes to visiting the Taj Mahal – India’s single biggest tourist attraction – they overwhelmingly recommended the Oberoi Amarvilas, just 600-yards from the famed monument. I stayed at the Vanyavilas, a “tented” safari lodge adjacent to Ranthambore National Park, world famous for its Bengal tigers, and it was every bit the equal of the swankiest safari lodges of South Africa, which is really saying something because those are fantastic. While Oberoi has no U.S. hotels, it does have resorts in Bali, Mauritius, Egypt and the Middle East, and I would unequivocally stay at any of the company properties without reservation or hesitation, especially their outdoor activity focused Wildflower Hall high in the Himalayas. Oberoi has also moved into the floating luxury hotel business with two critically acclaimed river cruise vessels.
Forbes Life
What it's like to stay in the world's best hotel, where guests are treated like Indian royalty | Business Insider India
I’m just back from a trip through the country, a country full of surprises – good and bad. Travelers go to India for a lot of reasons, from the cuisine to yoga, wildlife safaris to world famous sights like the Taj Mahal. And of course, lots and lots of travelers go for business, especially in the technology and software industries. I’m very well-traveled, but I encountered a lot of things that were new to me, and my trip had a lot of highlights. But what really blew me away were the hotels. I’ve stayed in top luxury lodgings all over the world, hotels that have been ranked among the best in existence, and my takeaway was that India has a glut of properties that easily hold their own in this elite company.
Here’s the crazy thing: while there are a lot of great luxury hotel brands, and the sector has been booming around the globe for years with tons of glitzy new openings, the top companies have almost completely ignored India. In addition to being a major international business destination, one out of every six human beings lives here, with a population four times that of the U.S. and just slightly smaller than China’s. India has 46 cities of over a million people (the U.S. has ten), yet Four Seasons has less hotels (just one, in the finance capital of Mumbai) in the entire country then they have in Istanbul. Ritz-Carlton also has just one hotel, in the technology capital of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, a solidly business destination. St. Regis? Just one, in Mumbai – and it hasn’t even opened yet. Peninsula and Mandarin-Oriental, perhaps the two best known uber-luxe brands, are completely absent.
For the American luxury traveler familiar with all these top tier brands, India suddenly becomes a daunting proposition when it comes to choosing hotels – unless you consider the country’s trio of simply stupendous home grown chains. Taj, Oberoi and Leela have over one hundred properties throughout the country – and many more around the world. If you love to travel in high-style, these are important names to know even if you have no plans to visit India, as the deluxe brands are slowly but surely growing in all directions.
I was traveling with Micato Safaris on assignment for a print magazine.I’ve written in these pages before about why I (and just about every travel magazine and top travel agent) believes Micato is the world’s best luxury safari operator, and I feel even more strongly about that now. But while Micato has plenty of pre-planned scheduled itineraries in East and Southern Africa, their India operations are entirely bespoke (read my Forbes.com piece on the World’s Best Bespoke Tour Operators), and the company’s family owners trace their roots to India. Micato experts helped me choose between and pick every hotel I visited, and I stayed at one or more properties from each brand during my visit. I also toured additional ones where I ate or used facilities but did not overnight. To be fair, that’s hardly a comprehensive test, but every single one, big or small, urban or resort, was a stunner, more on par with Peninsula, probably my favorite brand and the most consistent of all the big hitters, than even Ritz and Four Seasons, which can have ups and downs.
It’s been my experience that hotels are better when they are the result of a singular passion, ideally by an individual whose vision and personal involvement is exceeded only by his or her willingness to spend money. These are hardly not for profit enterprises, but many of the very best resorts on earth reach their stature because an owner is willing to bypass corporate red tape and spend whatever it takes to make them right and achieve a vision. I’ve written at length about such billionaire and centi-millionaire playgrounds, and a short list would include places like Laucala Island, Mukul, Julian Robertson’s Cape Kidnappers and Kauri Cliffs, Dunton Hot Springs, Richard Branson’s Limited Edition hotels, The Breakers, The Broadmoor, and Jade Mountain, among many others.
Here’s an example: let’s say you live in a 300-year old royal fort that you spent more than a decade painstakingly renovating until you deemed it perfect. What do you do next? If you happen to own a luxury hotel company, you simply build a brand new resort with the main building, lobby and restaurants modeled on your fort, surrounded by freestanding “tented” rooms sprawling across 35 manicured acres meant to recreate the caravans royals once traveled in, luxurious tent cities set up in advance of their arrival. Except these “tents” are huge permanent enclosed villas with sunken marble oversized tubs and walk-in showers. That’s what the founder of Oberoi did in Jaipur.
In this vein, all three top Indian luxury brands trace their creation story to an especially driven and very hands-on individual, and it shows. Oberoi’s namesake founder was a self-made man in the hospitality business who built the brand in his own image and marched to a different drummer. Oberoi operates its own hotel and culinary training program rather than relying on top schools, and this assures a level of consistency among managers and kitchens virtually unheard of in the luxury hotel world. Conde Nast Traveler readers ranked four different Oberoi properties among the 15 Best Hotels on earth – and the same ones as the four best hotels in all of Asia, which has the largest collection of top tier luxury hotels anywhere. That kind of domination goes beyond statistical anomaly or coincidence. As if to punctuate this point, it was the Oberoi Udaivilas that Travel + Leisure just named the world’s single best hotel. The family driven company is still going strong, run now by the founder’s son, the second generation Mr. Oberoi.
Taj was launched by the founder of Tata, now one of country’s biggest conglomerates, which among many other things is a major car, bus and truck manufacturer that also owns both Jaguar and Land Rover. Mr. Tata built the first hotel in 1903, and Taj is still a Tata Group subsidiary. Leela is the newest of the brands, since just 1987, founded by Captain Krishnan Nair, who named the chain after his wife. Captain Nair made his fortune in the textile and fashion industries, and this shows in the opulent décor and expensive fabrics found at every turn in its hotels.
All three brands offer a similar over the top service experience, and all three operate extremely well appointed luxury hotels and resorts. India has both a great service economy and plentiful low wage employment, allowing these hotels to take advantage of generous staffer to guest ratios. But what makes them shine is that the staffers are not just plentiful, but also very well trained, and they do a great job, hardly the case in all places with low wages.
As I said, the Forbes star ratings do not cover India, but I know quite a lot about the ratings and top rated hotels, and I would say that all the properties I stayed at would be comfortable among their 5-star brethren elsewhere – if not at the top of the class. Taj is the one only one of the three with U.S. hotels, three of them, all takeovers and not to the opulent former royal palace standards of their Indian counterparts, yet the trio still does very well with two 4-stars (Campton Place, San Francisco and Taj Boston) and one 5-star (Pierre, NYC).
Taj is by far the biggest of the three (80+ hotels and resorts in India alone), and as such has the most varied portfolio, including the Vivanta by Taj sub-brand, which is sort of their take on W, a hipper, younger, more design-driven lifestyle brand. It’s worth noting that while many hospitality companies include Hotels, or Hotel & Resorts in their full name, this one goes by Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, and the company began converting former royal palaces – there are tons of them in India – into luxury hotels more than four decades ago. Perhaps the most famous of all the Taj palace resorts is the all-marble Lake Palace in Udaipur, the “Venice of India,” on its own island. As iconic and photogenic as it is luxurious, this stunning property has been ranked the single most romantic hotel in the world.
I stayed at the Taj Rambagh Palace in Jaipur, and it was magnificent. My room was so large and lavish that there was half bathroom I didn’t even notice until the last day. Not only did my room include a gargantuan sunken circular whirlpool bath worthy of a Roman emperor and a huge outdoor patio that could have held fifty guests overlooking a garden teeming with peacocks, but every night at turndown service they made an elaborate “mural” on the floor in flower petals. Bathroom amenities included the total array usually found only in top hotels in places like Japan, complete with shave kits, dental kits, mouthwash and the works, as well as a twist I have never seen at any other luxury hotel: one day I left my sunglasses on the table, and when I returned, there was a boxed eyeglass cleaning cloth sitting next to them.
Leela is the smallest but in some ways the poshest of the three, with just eight hotels in India (plus four more under construction) and none outside. But these are spare no expense purpose-built flagship properties that take, rooms, lobbies, spas and dining to the highest level. Its gorgeous Delhi hotel uses a bit of a Las Vegas approach to the culinary scene, importing world famous eateries that otherwise do not exist in India, including sushi temple Megu and the only Le Cirque in Asia. One Leela signature touch is its Royal Club, a private club floor with cocktail, snack and concierge service, available across the brand. The Leela Delhi, where I stayed, is the choice of many visiting rich Middle Eastern royal families, and on par with any modern, urban 5-star in this country, yet it is a brand almost no one in the U.S. knows.
The bottom line is that it is entirely possible to travel the breadth and width of India, for business or leisure, without ever sacrificing the same ultra-high levels of luxury and service you’d expect to find in the best urban hotels of Hong Kong or London, or resorts akin to the best of Cabo or the South Pacific.
Frequent travelers – myself included – often fall into the easy trap of going with what they already know, and there are often good reasons to simply book a Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons wherever you go to expect a certain level of comfort and familiarity. But these are three world-class brands the frequent travelers should know, and if I was going to India again, I’d have no temptation to choose any other alternative. Now I’m curious to see how some of their hotels in other countries stack up.
Likewise, at an Oberoi resort, I found a microfiber screen cleaning cloth placed next to my laptop, and for only the second time I can recall, the cords to my iPhone/iPad charger were tied neatly with ribbons. At the more modern urban Oberoi in Delhi – which I’d favorably compare to the 5-star Peninsula Chicago, except with an even bigger staff, I dined alone and the waiter brought me a leather folder of English language magazines and newspapers. As a solo traveler, the overwhelmingly polite, helpful and friendly staff could not have made me feel any more welcome, while the attention to detail, from the ribbon tied cords to the plentiful universal electric outlets I found in every single hotel – five of them within reach of my bed at the Rambagh Palace – was staggering.
Besides the US and India, Taj has hotels from London to Bhutan to South Africa and elsewhere, so it is a brand American travelers should come to know. Oberoi is quite a bit smaller, with eleven properties in India, but is even more consistent in the sense that everyone appears to be a topnotch fantastic hotel. I routinely poll many of the nation’s top luxury travel agents for one of the magazines I write for, and when it comes to visiting the Taj Mahal – India’s single biggest tourist attraction – they overwhelmingly recommended the Oberoi Amarvilas, just 600-yards from the famed monument. I stayed at the Vanyavilas, a “tented” safari lodge adjacent to Ranthambore National Park, world famous for its Bengal tigers, and it was every bit the equal of the swankiest safari lodges of South Africa, which is really saying something because those are fantastic. While Oberoi has no U.S. hotels, it does have resorts in Bali, Mauritius, Egypt and the Middle East, and I would unequivocally stay at any of the company properties without reservation or hesitation, especially their outdoor activity focused Wildflower Hall high in the Himalayas. Oberoi has also moved into the floating luxury hotel business with two critically acclaimed river cruise vessels.
Forbes Life
What it's like to stay in the world's best hotel, where guests are treated like Indian royalty | Business Insider India
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