India’s leading realty developer, Emaar MGF has made announcement about the opening of four luxury hotels by the next three years.

The Delhi-based property company would invest around $400 million (Rs 1,600 crore) on the plan that include three JW Marriott hotels each in Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata and one business hotel under the Courtyard brand in Amritsar.

In order to design, construct and equip luxury-branded JW Marriott Hotels, the company (Emaar MGF) has signed up a partnership deal with a leading international hospitality company, Marriott International Inc.

According to the deal, Emaar MGF will be the owner and developer of the proposed hotels, whereas Marriott International should offer up advisory and management services for the planning, design, construction and operations.

A company release said that the hotel projects are likely to be completed by 2010-end.

Shravan Gupta, vice-chairman and managing director, Emaar MGF said, “Our idea is to meet the acute shortage of hotel rooms in the country with landmark hotel properties. With today’s tie-up, we will build hotels of different brands and different price points across the country.”
 
Out of the total 912 rooms planned, JW Marriott Jasola of Delhi will have 300-rooms in two towers, the Hyderabad hotel 250 rooms, the Kolkota property will have 250 rooms and Courtyard by Marriott in Amritsar will have 112 rooms.
 
“We are exploring other cities and other brands of Marriott for our ventures,’’ Mr. Gupta told.
 
In order to build up 26.000 hotel rooms over the next 6-7 years, Emaar MGF has aligned approximately Rs 12,000 crore.

It has a 50:50 joint venture (JV) with Premier Inn, a unit of UK hotel major Whitbread. Emaar has decided to invest Rs 2,400 crore ($600 million) to construct Premier Inn hotels.

Emaar is making 100 budget hotels for Accor under the brand name ‘100 Formule 1’ at an investment of $300 million, which will be finished by 2016.

In India, US-based Marriott International has six hotels with a total of 1,528 rooms. It recently announced opening 18 new hotels by 2011, taking its total tally to 25 hotels with more than 4,500 rooms.
 
On its initial public offer (IPO) plans, Shravan Guptatold, “We believe that the IPO market will give us another chance in the next 12-18 months. For our current projects, we are well-funded with a large share capital and low debt-to-equity ratio. Third-party investments and debts from banks will not be a problem.”

Emaar postponed its IPO plans in February due to slump in the market.

 “We are a very low leveraged company and have a good capital base. We can always raise debt and look for private equity placements at the company level and project level,” Mr. Gupta added.