Blackstone-backed Ventive Hospitality Limited (VHL) is tapping new markets in Asia-Pacific region to tide over the impact of West Asia conflict on its international business.
The company owns 13 hotels in India and Maldives with over 2,000 keys. In Maldives it has three resorts under the Anantara, Conrad and Raaya by Atmosphere brands and these contribute to around 40 per cent of its consolidated revenue.
Overall tourist arrivals in Maldives have declined following the start of war in February end. VHL properties too have been impacted and the company is diversifying its customer base to keep occupancy intact.
“We are targeting new source markets like Singapore, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand to mitigate the impact of cancellations in Maldives,” said Milind Wadekar, company’s executive vice president (finance and investor relations).
“There is minimal impact on our hotels in Pune (which have around 750 keys) which are supported by IT and other manufacturing industries,” he added. Its other properties are situated in Bengaluru, Goa and Mumbai.
While the current business environment is challenging now, Ventive is expected to report growth in the fourth quarter FY 26 result.
“January-February were strong months for us. In March the first ten days were business as usual for our hotels in Maldives. Subsequently we have seen some cancellations. Yet despite the challenges we expect to report a double digit growth in consolidated revenue per available room (RevPAR) in Q4 on a year on year basis,” Wadekar said.
On the operations side VHL is taking cost saving steps like cutting down discrepancy spends. Hiring has been put on hold.
“Wherever possible we have also deferred routine repairs. We are also seeing impact of supply chain disruption and increase in logistics costs. In Maldives hotels and resorts use diesel for running power generation sets and it’s costs has increased. However, diesel availability is not an issue,” he added.