Aspects and Opportunities in Hotel Industry by Mr George Bennet Kuruvilla

To develop a fair understanding about the hotel industry and to learn about the growing opportunities available to MBA postgrads in the field, a session by Mr George Bennet Kuruvilla, General Manager, Radisson Blu Atria was organised for 1 st Semester MBA, 2019- 21 batch on December 20, 2019.
Mr George Bennet Kuruvilla, General Manager of Radisson Blu Atria, Bengaluru was
the distinguished guest speaker for our 4 th industry interaction session. Radisson Hotel Group (RHG) is 75-year-old and is one of the world’s largest hotel groups with 8 distinctive hotel brands, more than 1,400 hotels in operation and under development around the world.

Mr Bennet has a degree in Hotel Management from Institute of Hotel Management,
Mumbai and is a postgraduate of alma mater – ‘The Oberoi Centre for Learning and
Development, Delhi.’ In a career span of 25 years he held General Manager Positions at the Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra and the Oberoi Grand, Kolkata. He recently moved to Bengaluru from Spain where he was Regional General Manager of MGM Muthu Hotels in charge of its hotel in Spain. He has won several awards including being amongst the Top 5 General Managers in the Luxury Divisions in 2013 and contributes as advisor to Hotel Management Institutes and State Tourism Departments.

The agenda of the session was to help students with looking out for a new slant of
how the hotel industry operates on ground. What takes hotels to reach where it desires to be? To briefly illuminate the challenges generally tackled, tactics to be dealing with guests/customers, what probable swelling opportunities could students anticipate from the industry in the coming 2 years? Et al.

The speaker validated his approach by painting few remarkable graphical trends
showing current surge and slump industry set-ups inclined by market and the economy. A comparative analysis of world and Indian model of the market was drawn and a correlation between how the flow of air passenger traffic could be acting as an impetus to the business was carefully echoed. The speaker also spoke about aspects like pricing, role of active website, booking engines, online travel advisers, perception of guests etc. and reiterated why it should matter for the enduring prosperity of a hotel business; he made his line much clear
by citing a few startling examples.

Mr George very discreetly determined his talk by sharing situational examples of
what his team focused as practical implementation strategies in rewarding its employees, attracting and building its customer base in order to position themselves distinctively in the ever changing, competitive field of play.

The session ended by taking questions and answering such questions which came
from the audience!

Grand Takeaways:

• Revealing operating trends in hotel industry, drawing context from domestic and international market.
• Flow of air passenger traffic, a leading determinant in hotel business.
• Indispensable role of pricing, active website, booking engines, travel advisers, process improvement teams (PITs), customer perception, gratification and the overall efficacious service delivery system in glorifying business possibilities.
• Dissemination of growing career prospects for MBA students in the arena of sales,marketing, finance, HR and other area specific opportunities.