Five Years Later, India's Taj Mahal Beats Terrorism
Five years after a four-day rampage claimed the lives of 164 people in Mumbai, the center-piece of the city’s luxury hotels is finally seeing a turnaround. The Taj Mahal Palace, not to be mistaken for the glowing white Taj Mahal near the Ganges River thousands of miles away, was bombed out by terrorists on Nov. 26, 31 people died in the attack that ultimately led to a shoot out between the Indian military and militants inside the property.
The lobby now has a walled-in waterfall with the names of the fallen. It cascades down in silence behind a glass as homage to the victims.
Outside, the Mumbai scene is as frenetic as ever. Soldiers carrying MP5 submachine guns stretch out in a white van under a rooty bodhi tree. Auto-rickshaws grind their way through traffic, including pedestrians; like hundreds of pedestrians. Car horns play a bad sidewalk symphony. A pre-monsoon sun bakes down.
The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. The corner floor of the property was bombed in 2008 by a Pakistani-based terrorist group. Since then, the hotel has rebuilt and recovered. (Photo by Jackie O. Cruz)
A line of people stand outside the Gateway of India in the Apollo Bunder area of South Mumbai. The red tiled dome of the Taj Mahal Palace is the tallest thing within eye-shot. It’s all Hindu women in saris or Muslim women in hijabs; the men on either side of the religious spectrum are dressed like Westerners as if creating a comfortable balance between Hindu colors and Muslim black. They’re snapping pictures of the Gateway, built by India’s ex-colonial masters serving King George V, or waiting for a ferry boat to Elephanta Island where giant statues of the Hindu diety Shiva were once used as target practice by Portuguese soldiers.
But inside the air conditioned palace, constructed in the 1890s by Indian industrialist Jamsetji N. Tata and later opened to the public in 1901, it’s all peace and love and prosperity. What would you expect from the first hotel in India to have a bar license? India’s liquor license 001 hangs in the hotel’s Harbour Bar. They should have called it Bar 001.
“That’s a much cooler name,” admits Raymond Bickson, the laid-back Hawaiian and chief executive of Indian Hotels Company Ltd.
The Taj is currently living its Lego moment, where “everything is awesome” and “everything is cool” as the movie theme suggests.
That peace comes with a new sense of gratitude. Having it stripped away at gunpoint makes safe shelter akin to health as the most important human need.
The Taj was the scene of a fire fight between India’s military and Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani based Islamic militant organization on the American terrorist watch list. While most Hindus and Muslims live side by side (is there any other way to live in India?), the Pakistan-India divide often has seismic shifts. The Brits left the Indians with capitalist democracy, but they also left them with that ole “scourge of the Earth” divide and conquer policy that drilled a religious wedge between Pakistan and India. It’s the main source of foreign stress in the country. And it blew a gaping hole in the right side of the five story palace five years back. It’s become the Indian travel industry’s “never forget” moment. Crowds and distance are one thing to tend with, but no right-minded foreigner wants to travel to a country where terrorism in public places is plausible.
Prior to the terrorist attacks in 2008 the hotel occupancy rate during high season was averaging around 65%, right around the national average today. But this year’s high season saw a 2% to 5% growth in occupancy, according to the hotel. This was in spite of increased inventory of new luxury hotels in Mumbai and with a host of new extended stay properties opening up in the city for business travelers on long term assignments.
Surviving India’s Hospitality Biz
To survive in India’s hospitality business, major hotel operators from Starwood to Taj Hotels have to build hotels from low end to high end. This is still one of the world’s poorest countries, after all. Walking Mumbai at night is bound to include at least two women asking for food or money, or both.
On the upper end of the scale, surviving means having a spa. And having a spa means having spa products you can brand and sell.
“People go to Thailand and Bali and it’s all about yoga and their expensive ayurveda treatments,” says Bickson. “All this stuff is from India! So you want to go to Thailand, have a third eye painted on your forehead and find the answer to life? No, we want you to do that here. We want India to be the luxury ashram,” he says. The Indian Hotels Company, collectively known as Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, has their Jiva Spa at its five star properties worldwide. They own the iconic Pierre in Manhattan. Jiva’s there.
CEO of Indian Hotels Company Ltd, Raymond Bickson, says India remains a growth market…but still has lots of improvements to make in young tourist industry.
Poolside, at sunrise, a dozen or so women, few of them Indian, stretch out on yoga mats. A gray chested, good luck, house crow sings to them from a window sill.
When Tom Cruise stayed here recently in one of the 5,000 square foot $20,000 a night too-big for most-of-humanity suites, he didn’t want yoga, he wanted a gym. So they built one for him. In his suite. This is Palace life, after all. You get what you pay for, even when it comes much smaller in the $250 a night rooms. Jiva, the pool, the Palace Lounge, the restaurants, are for everyone. Even the riff-raff 99 percenters.
On the sixth floor, the Sea Lounge plays match maker to Indians meeting for arranged marriages. “It’s a tradition that’s been going on here now for 65 years,” says Nikhila Palat, a hotel guide dressed in an orange and red sari. She says she’s the child of an arranged marriage…and 20 years later, they’re still together. “We have three to four arranged marriage meetings here every week. They meet right in that corner table there,” she points to two orange love seats ensconced in soft light.
In a way, the Sea Lounge is a place for new beginnings. India, complete with a new government, is hoping headline violence in places like Mumbai and – most recently – Chennai’s train bombing that killed one person on May 1 – will not keep the foreigners away.
India’s tourism industry accounts for just 6.6% of the country’s GDP. It’s 9.3% on average worldwide.
It’s not the yoga and the temples or the spas that keep tourists away. It’s a combination of violent outbursts that make global headlines, really bad infrastructure and – if Bickson is right – lackluster marketing that keeps India off-radar.
Around 23 million people go to Mexico each year. Over 46 million foreigners visit Italy and 80 million head to France. The U.S. brings in around 70 million foreign tourists, according to U.N. and U.S. data. India brings in just six million.
The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel exists in a country that always seems to be starting from zero. “If we just got up to the global average in terms of travel and tourism as part of GDP, we’d bring in another $45 billion to this economy,” Bickson says, looking over a balcony at the Arabian Sea. Colorful ferry boats dock for the night. The crowds disperse. There is even less noise down below from the Palace tower.
“The U.S. is our largest source of foreign tourists. Our government says it wants to have 18 million tourists by 2016. How?” he asks, a big smile on his face as if he knows the answer. From where he stands, he’s in the best piece of five star real estate in Mumbai. But few travel to a foreign country for the hotel. They travel for India’s sake. Taj Mahal Palace, following one crappy 2008, has opened the palace gates but needs India tourism to stand on its own.
“You know, when foreigners go to Los Angeles they want to see Hollywood. Any concierge in the city can make that happen for them. But when you come to Mumbai and want to see Bollywood, there’s not a lot of options. How can that be? We’re sitting next door to the largest studio film industry in the world and you’d be hard pressed to find a Bollywood tour,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s going to change.”
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