Hilton had tied up with Embassy Group to add two more hotels in Bengaluru – a Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Hilton Garden Inn in the same complex at the tech park near Marathahalli. Scheduled for opening in October 2021, the opening may now push to 2022, but Navjit Ahluwalia, says that right now they are trying to at least opt for a partial opening, if not the opening of the whole complex. “Currently, we have 1400 people working day and night on the site. We have not slowed that down, but because we lost a few months this year, that opening may slide into 2022. But right now, we are definitely trying to make a partial opening possible.”

While Hilton may have been very cautious in its opening, the brand had intended to double its presence in India in the next four to five years. Asked which are the places that they would like to expand to, Ahluwalia says, they would go wherever their guests want to go. “Like any other international management company, our ability to be stronger relied on our ability to distribute more hotels, which basically means that if you have a stronger system that will act to the strength of the system. We want to be wherever our guests want to travel. And if our guests want to travel to a particular location, and we don’t have a hotel that suits their type of travel, or the category of travel, then obviously they’re

going to go and see and try somebody else, and we don’t want that. We want to grow wherever there’s travel.”