If you are thinking of going back to Nepal, hopping over to India and getting into the hotel business there might be something to think about :) More on the subject from the International Herald Tribune The atrium of the 355-room Hotel Le Méridien in New Delhi. India has about 110,000 rooms, about as many as are available in the metropolitan New York region. ( Mustafa Quraishi/The Associated Press ) In gold-rush India, hotel rooms are scarce and expensive Hotels are expanding at breakneck pace By Anand Giridharadas Published: December 18, 2006 MUMBAI: With its ultrachic restaurant and sweeping views of a 16th-century tomb, the Oberoi in New Delhi is a hotel of choice for the pinstriped deal makers pouring into India. But unless you planned your trip months ago, do not even think about getting in. Its 279 rooms and suites are fully booked almost every night until April at prices that start at $345 a night, breakfast not included. Demand for hotel rooms is soaring in India as its economy blossoms. Foreigners are flooding in to cut deals, attend conferences or just discover the caves of Ajanta and the sands of Rajasthan. The rise of low-fare airlines is also bringing domestic air travel within reach for more Indians, who, until recently, had little chance of ever boarding a jet. Yet for all those travelers, India offers only 110,000 hotel rooms. China has 10 times more, and the United States 40 times more. The New York metropolitan region alone has about as many rooms as all of India. The shortage is pushing peak season rates for basic rooms into the stratosphere, by Indian standards, and attracting some of the world's best- known names in hotels — Accor, Hilton, Wyndham, Pan Pacific — to invest heavily in India. "There's enormous potential here," said Dennis Oldfield, the general manager for the Indian branch of Accor, a French group with 4,100 hotels worldwide, and with plans for up to 200 hotels in India within a decade. In the meantime, business travelers are trying to cope. Two female Indian employees of a top management consultancy based in New York were recently forced to share a bed in a company apartment because there were no hotels available in the city they were visiting, according to one of their colleagues, who did not wish to be identified. Microsoft is using its own Live Meeting videoconferencing technology to cut down on business trips, said Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft India. In Bangalore, rooms are so costly that traveling salespeople and other professionals often commute from as far away as Mumbai, 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, away. "They are making you fly to Bangalore every day in the morning and fly back every night because it's cheaper than paying the hotel bill," said Saurabh Gupta, an industry analyst in the Indian office of HVS International, a hospitality industry consulting firm. Infosys, an Indian software giant with 66,000 employees worldwide, has built a 500-room, in-house hotel next to its headquarters in Bangalore. By June, it expects to have 15,000 company- owned rooms across India — an eighth of all the rooms in the country and more than any Indian hotel chain. One night for an employee staying at its Bangalore campus costs Infosys $15, three-star treatment that would normally cost $150. "It's much more efficient in India to do it yourself," said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys. The high prices are all the more striking in a country like India: At a $500 rack rate for the five-star rooms favored by business travelers, it would take a hotel employee earning minimum wage here about a year to buy one night in one of these hotels, versus two weeks' work for an American earning minimum wage. And even though the Chinese earn twice as much as Indians on average, India has the more expensive rooms, according to a recent edition of Travel Business Analyst, an industry newsletter. Comparing rooms of similar quality, a room in Delhi cost $187 on average this year, versus $122 in Beijing; a room in Mumbai was $178, versus $150 in Shanghai. High prices turn away leisure visitors with a wide choice of destinations, industry experts say, and the shortage, along with other infrastructure woes, offers one clue as to why a country with the petal-covered lakes of Kashmir and the palm-lined shores of Kerala lags behind in tourism. Compare India, a country of 1.1 billion people, to New York, a city of eight million: New York attracted 6.8 million foreign tourists in 2005; India attracted 3.9 million. Visitors to New York pumped $22.8 billion into the local economy, or about $2,850 per New York resident; visitors to India pumped in $6.7 billion, or about $6 per Indian resident. Recognizing that hotels employ 180 people for every 100 rooms, by some industry estimates, the Indian government is now scrambling to expand supply. It recently paid for half-page advertisements in Delhi newspapers that urged families to convert their homes into bed-and-breakfast operations, which can charge about $35 a night. The government's goal is to approve enough homes turned hostels to offer another 10,000 rooms in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Article continued here...