Lemon Tree Hotels Targets 300 Hotels With 24,000-Room Pipeline

By Daniel Okafor

Lemon Tree Hotels plans to expand from 138 hotels to 300 within four or five years, managing director Neelendra Singh said, with 24,000 rooms already included in the company’s development pipeline.

A retail operator takes over

Appointed last year, Singh arrived after roughly two decades at Adidas, where his career was in retail rather than hospitality. Founder Patanjali “Patu” Keswani, now Lemon Tree Hotels Limited’s non-executive chairman, had begun considering succession a couple of years earlier and wanted a non-hotelier rather than another hotel operator.

Singh said: “When Patu (Keswani) started looking at his succession a couple of years ago, his thesis and vision was that he was looking for a non-hotelier, and hence they found me.”

Singh said he studied the hotel product and hospitality before concluding that Lemon Tree offered an opportunity to take the founder’s work into its next phase. He now believes the board’s outside-industry thesis was right after completing one year in the role.

The capabilities he identified as missing at scale were specific: sales and marketing, pricing management, stronger distribution, management of scale and ownership management. His argument was not that hotels needed less hospitality expertise, but that those commercial systems had often reached greater scale outside it.

Ten hotels and 4,000 keys

The Omaxe–Lemon Tree Hotels deal for 10 hotels and 4,000 keys adds a concrete block to that expansion. Singh said the hotels would be divided between properties in townships developed by builders and locations at bus stands in cities, with the developments being pursued through a public–private partnership program.

Singh did not disclose the operating or ownership split for the Omaxe properties in the interview.

What changes for guests and owners?

Singh’s answer is a network model rather than the conventional flagship model, in which one destination becomes the center of gravity and draws consumers. Lemon Tree, he said, should go where consumers already travel; each incremental property must add value to the entire network and carry the same brand promise into a new market.

That proposition follows one customer across purposes. A traveler could use Lemon Tree in Pune for business, at Jim Corbett for leisure and at Tirupati for pilgrimage, Singh said, with recognition and service extending across those stays.

The immediate operating task is distribution. The chain has leaned more toward corporate customers and online travel agencies, and Singh wants a better mix of direct and OTA business. His retail experience, he said, points to a stronger direct website, a stronger call center and more deliberate management of the overall booking portfolio.

MakeMyTrip offers a strong domestic angle, while Expedia and Booking.com have stronger international and inbound reach. Singh described managing that portfolio as a core retail discipline, intended to improve the experience and pricing proposition customers see without abandoning the OTAs that serve distinct demand pools.

One network, sharper brands

Lemon Tree built a strong name with almost no marketing spend, Singh said, attributing that recognition to choosing locations well, getting the proposition right and delivering a consistent promise. Meetings with loyalty members, in his view, showed that consumers associate the network with the experience they received at a previous Lemon Tree stay.

Most of the business will remain under the Lemon Tree and Lemon Tree Premier brands. The company is also adding to Aurika, its luxury brand, with locations in Naldera in Himachal Pradesh, Shillong and Varanasi.

Singh expects his appointment to sharpen the distinction among those brands while extending network thinking across them. “I don’t overpromise here, but you will see more sharpness in the brand, clearly, so that we are able to distinguish the brands. We will see stronger network thinking and, therefore, better loyalty capitalisation and monetisation of loyalty across the network.”

He also expects stronger leaders to emerge through the transition and said the company will invest more in the cultural ethos of its hotels. His stated aim is to build for the future rather than simply extend the present.

The next test is conversion: whether the 24,000-room pipeline becomes operating hotels, whether the expanded website, call-center and OTA mix gives consumers better pricing propositions, and whether one guest’s experience produces another stay elsewhere in the network. Those outcomes will shape whether Lemon Tree can reach 300 hotels without diluting the promise that Singh says built the brand.