Tourism can help end India’s forex shortage: Anand Mahindra.

Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra Group, believes tourism industry alone can resolve India's foreign exchange problem if the government can help improve infrastructure for tourism and open up the country in a better way. In an interview with ET, he also talked about the recent rebranding of Club Mahindra, the flagship brand of timeshare company Mahindra Holidays &Resorts, and the Mahindra group's big bet on services industries. Edited excerpts:

How will the new brand identity help Club Mahindra connect better with people?

From now on, the communication task is no longer the one of pushing people to take holidays. You no longer have to convince people. People are now insisting that they be taken on holidays and young adults who are married clearly demarcate a particular time in the calendar for their holidays.

So the task of communication has changed. Now the task is to say that where you exercise your holidays should be with Club Mahindra.

What are the hurdles for growth in timeshare business?

When you are in a hotel business, you have to look for land, you have to go to places, wait for people to come, and you have to advertise that you exist. We don't have any such problems. We have got 1,60,000 members and the number is growing. The only constraint for Club Mahindra is how quickly we can find appropriate resorts to put our name on.

Where do you position hospitality in your business empire?

Let me put it this way. When economies grow, the service sector grows disproportionately. That was the reason why, when I came back to India, I said Mahindra Group was disproportionately growing in the manufacturing areas. My strategic goal was that we must get Mahindra Group to build competencies in services.

If we don't, then as the economy grows and service opportunity becomes bigger, then we as a group will lose opportunities for growth. So, any competency that we built in services is of extreme value to this group. When I came in 1991, we were only into four-wheel drive manufacturing and tractors.

Today, we have opportunities to grow in IT, real estate, hospitality and engineering services. Therefore, I am much more confident about where I stand today and as the service sector is growing in India, Mahindras will be there to grow with it. So, hospitality does enjoy a very strong position in our business.

What is the kind of growth you expect in the hospitality business?

I had ventured into hospitality back in 1988. I have always believed that hospitality and tourism is a booming area of India. In fact, tourism can solve our foreign exchange problems in the country that we always talk about. It's a neglected area.

It's an area of embarrassment because we get only some 7-8 million tourists a year, which is a shame. There are certain cities like Singapore, which get three times more tourists than us. So it is an embarrassment for the country.

Do you think the government can play a role in making India more open to tourism?

They have to play a role; there is no question about it. That would be the quickest change we can bring about to the foreign exchange inflows if we just open up this huge country in a better way and provide better infrastructure for tourism. It is a solution to the problem of foreign exchange in a much more enduring manner.

As a person active on social media, do you feel that Club Mahindra has to give special attention to it? Absolutely. I get enormous amount of feedback about Club Mahindra and all our businesses through them. I get to know if somebody has had a bad experience in our resort.

I don't need to have a computer system to tell me. As I have always said, Twitter is one of my strongest weapons. I use it as a sensor to get information about what experience is going good or bad in a particular resort. The moment I get a negative experience, I forward it to the people at Club Mahindra and they immediately take care of it.

So, Twitter provides an ability to deliver real time and immediate attention to customer complaints and problems. And, of course, it's a way of patting people on the back as well, as I get to know who is doing their job well. It works both ways.

In the next five years, how do you see your hospitality business growing?

I will be very disappointed if it doesn't grow rapidly.

They have added about 400 rooms since June 2012 and have a target to add 1,000 rooms by 2015. As I said, for us the constraint is not the demand, the constraint is building the properties and building rooms. I feel we will grow tremendously as there are no limits to growth in this business.

Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com