Discover Motels is a startup hotel chain owned by the Silvex Group of Mumbai. The company is currently soft testing its 216 keys property at the foothills of Matheran in the picturesque town of Neral, Raigad District, Maharashtra. The hotel is a brand franchise of Best Western International, USA, which is the world’s largest hotel chain with more than 4,000 hotels in 80 countries. The project has been designed by SKM Consulting of Australia.
Discover Motels is a startup hotel chain owned by the Silvex Group of Mumbai. The company is currently soft testing its 216 keys property at the foothills of Matheran in the picturesque town of Neral, Raigad District, Maharashtra. The hotel is a brand franchise of Best Western International, USA, which is the world’s largest hotel chain with more than 4,000 hotels in 80 countries. The project has been designed by SKM Consulting of Australia.
Discover Motels is the pioneer of condotel space in India and is currently expanding the network to 3 properties in Sri Lanka and one each in Alibag, Coimbatore, Mangalore and Chickmangalure. Over 500 rooms are planned each year for the next 5 years. A condotel is a condominium hotel, a hotel operating unit that is sold to individual investors where each owner acquires a room, whilst the whole enterprise is managed as hotel operation under a single brand. The business model is based upon value added services on the bare product, an extension of condominiums where groups of properties each with individual owners has in-house shared services.
The new condotels include “Born Again”, a residential curative treatment centre aimed at addressing lifestyles diseases including diabetes, bone disease obesity, skin disorders, aging, digestive health etc. A curative treatment centre is one that is an ayurvedic naturopathic clinic that offers services with beds. It is for patients requiring diagnosis, treatment (whole range of ayurvedic and naturopathic treatments) or care for illness, injury, deformity or abnormality using the Indian/ holistic system of medicine run by trained medical professionals.
Discover Motels plans to develop this into a high-end brand and expand it using the franchise model. Additionally it seeks to launch an assisted living and timeshare product when the other properties go into operation.
The unique model is a mixture of hotel, holiday home, spa, medical tourism, assisted living and timeshare opportunities in a unique manner. The 500 hotel rooms based on modular building technology so can be transported from one location to another and used in Goa in the winter and Ooty in the summer.
Radhika Mandrekar of Discover Motels says, “We are about to innovate and transform the hotel industry.” Charly Varghese adds, “Our focus is to deliver a great service product at the lowest cost in the sector. We also wish to aggregate small players across the country under the Discover brand to offer the customers a diverse offering in the economy resort market segment. Our target is to offer rooms at the US $20 to 50 range.”
The reason for the soft launch of the new condotel is that it has so many different features from a traditional hotel that the product may have to be adjusted based on what works and what does not work. Combining hotels, medical tourism, franchising, timeshare and assisted living may be overly ambitious or a genius idea-time will tell.
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