International Hotel Management: Industry Expert Session (Mr. Shashank Pundir)

INLEAD facilitated an Industry Expert session for MBA (L) April’13 and July’13 1^st and MBA (L) international hotel management batches on 1^st August 2013. The session was conducted by Mr. Shashank Pundir- Operations Leader – Yum Restaurants International (Master Franchisor of KFC, Pizza Hut & Taco Bell).

The session began with a brief introduction about the speaker sharing his work and the profile that currently he is handling. The concept of Yum Foods, a brief history about the company was shared with the students. It’s the world’s largest restaurant company in the world with 42,000 outlets in the world and around 500 outlets in India.

The session was to focus and help in the students understanding why there was a need for the economic sized hotels to take the center stage and why all hotel business operations are focusing on the same today.

Tourism today decides the need for new hotels to emerge or increase the room inventory. The biggest contributors to the tourism in India are Korea and USA.

The session gave the students an overview of the F&B retail concept prevailing in India and also what is fuelling the growth of Economy/Budget sized hotels. The students were told about the top budget operating hotels in India, the cost per key for a luxury, mid-scale, budget, and economy hotel rooms and what are the components of the same amount. The reason why the economy hotel rose where the: high prices of commodity, land cost, development cost and the cumbersome process of obtaining licenses and permits. This resulted in hotels shifting their development plans to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The speaker also did mention to the students on the industry expectation from a prospective employee.

According to Ms Tania Gupta, International Hotel Management April’13 MBA (L): a different topic that was taken as a point of discussion today. Enjoyed the session thoroughly with the rich experience shared by Mr. Shashank. Also, it was the first lecture that was focusing towards the growth of retail concept in India and the scope of Budget hotels.