The hotel operator Puneet Chhatwal runs today couldn’t be more different from the one he joined in November 2017.

Its storied legacy notwithstanding—Indian Hotels Company was set up by Jamsetji Tata in 1902—the company had its back to the wall then. Frustrated by expensive acquisitionsNew Indian ExpressIHCL faced 'near-death experience' due to acquisitions: Cyrus Mistry office, mounting debt, and years of losses, investors had turned indifferent. In the eight years before Chhatwal’s term as chief executive began, shares of Indian Hotels had risen merely by a third. Since then, though, the company’s market value has soared 7X to over Rs 1 lakh crore ($11.7 billion), making it the tenth most-valuable Tata company. From its Covid lows, the stock is up 11X, even though its performance this year has been lacklustre. 

Indian Hotels—which runs the Taj, Vivanta, Gateway, and Ginger chains, among others—has certainly benefitted from the post-pandemic surge in travel. But the company, whose revenue in FY25 was close to Rs 8,350 crore, has also outgrown most rivals in the past five years, despite being the largest by a mile. On return on capital employed, a reflection of its ability to turn a profit on its investments, it bests all but one.

Indian Hotels has a network of over 270 operational hotels, with another 320 in the pipeline.

Chhatwal sat down for a freewheeling conversation with The Ken in a conference room at Indian Hotels’ headquarters on Mumbai’s Marine Drive, overlooking rival EIH-owned Trident Hotel and the expanse of the Arabian Sea. Sipping his double espresso and reflexively running his fingers over his Oura smart ring, Chhatwal laid bare the complexities of Indian Hotels’ decades-long operations; his bet on managing more hotels than owning them; and how the change in budget brand Ginger’s fortunes has been accompanied by a change in the way his own executives think about the chain.

Indian Hotels even had a “culture meet” for its management at a Ginger hotel in Mumbai. “This had never happened in our history,” Chhatwal said.

Edited excerpts:

An interesting, and also puzzling, thing I found in a 2023 Harvard Business School case study on Indian Hotels was that you didn’t have records of all your assets when you joined.