Indian Hotels Company Limited


The Indian Hotels Company Limited is an Indian hospitality company that manages a portfolio of hotels, resorts, jungle safaris, palaces, spas and in-flight catering services. It is a subsidiary of the Tata Group conglomerate.
IHCL was founded in 1899 by Jamsetji Tata and is headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra. It has more than 160 hotels in 80 locations and 17 countries, with over 20,000 rooms and 25,000 employees.

History

Jamsetji Tata, an Indian industrialist who founded the Tata Group, incorporated IHCL in 1899 and opened its first hotel—The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India—in 1903. In the 1970s, IHCL expanded its operations by opening a Tower Wing to The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, the Taj Fort Aguada, Goa and palaces such as Taj Lake Palace, Udaipur and Rambagh Palace, Jaipur. It also expanded outside India by launching Taj Pamodzi, Lusaka in Zambia.
In 2004, IHCL launched its midscale hospitality brand, Ginger Hotels, followed by The Gateway Hotels and Resorts in 2007 and Vivanta Hotels in 2010.
IHCL also operates TajSATS Air Catering Ltd, in a joint venture with SATS.
In May 2017, IHCL announced it was moving all of its hotels under a unique brand, Taj Hotels Palaces Resorts Safaris. The brands Vivanta by Taj and Gateway were merged into a single business unit. During the summer of 2017, Cyrus Mistry stated that some of the group's latest costly acquisitions "destroyed the economic value of the company". The unique brand decision was reversed in 2018.
In April 2018, the group opened its first location in Saudi Arabia through a partnership with the Umm al-Qura construction company. In April 2019, IHCL launched the hotel brand SeleQtions with 12 location openings. In May 2019, IHCL signed a strategic partnership with GIC Private Limited to acquire 600 million dollars' worth of hotel assets over three years.

Brands