Clarks/ANK&Pride M&A noise faded.

Can you talk about the current scenario, how the city-wise impact or any benefit of lowering outbound? How is the scenario for the hospitality industry?

We are having business as usual. Dubai is down. Maldives is down. London is okay and domestic is very strong. The business was a bit sluggish. March was a difficult month. Beginning of April was difficult. Middle of April came the stability. Since then, we are seeing strong growth. We remain fairly confident that we will again deliver double-digit growth between 12%, let's say, and 14% in the FY '27 fiscal. Should everything subside in West Asian crisis, you could expect more of the figures in line with what we had in the last financial year.

When we see the subsidiary performance, consol minus stand-alone overall operating level, we have seen a subdued performance. Which geography has done better, say St. James or U.S., how is the performance in this quarter?

Q4 kind of reflective of the full year trends. There was definitely impact after the West Asia conflict in the global market. We did see some loss of revenues in some of our hotels internationally, including London. About INR40 crores to INR50 crores of revenue on the consol basis and almost close to INR100 crores on an enterprise basis, which got impacted because of cancellation and reschedulement of events. Domestic has been pretty resilient. Even in the month of April, domestic has actually done quite well. Overall, we think double-digit growth should be possible.

Looking at city-wise performance for FY '26, there's a big variation - 5% to 15% growth. Is there any market where you're looking that the trend will change, for instance Mumbai or Goa, that the base is favourable or there's something else happening where those cities can help you achieve your double-digit growth guidance?

Mumbai, the base is very high. So, it's difficult to get to 15% growth. But Goa, we have seen almost in the month of April north of 25% growth in all our hotels. Some have gone to 30% and beyond. Goa is definitely back since the last few months, March and April, and the trend is not changing. Kerala could improve and Chennai could also improve. But Delhi had a very good year last year. So, Delhi and Mumbai have a high base.

Why are you operating at 90% [occupancy in Mumbai]? Why don't we see that let's increase the rate by more and maybe operate at, let's say, 80%, 85%? Even at 90% occupancy, you have a lot of pricing power, isn't it?

I don't disagree with you, but we prefer to do both, increase the rate also and the occupancy also. If you go back 4, 5 years back or even 6, 7, if you look at the rates or the RevPAR together, it's more than doubled in our main hotels in Mumbai. In India, you make money on food and beverage. And more of the people staying in hotels eat in hotels. Given my experience, personal experience of the West, you look more at only rate and occupancy because F&B is not profit-making in most of the Western parts.

On your guidance - if you were able to target 12% in FY '27, how should one think about breaking that growth between RevPAR or ARR plus occupancy plus new asset contribution plus anything else? Is there a possibility to give a broad breakup?

If we take your example of 12%, it would be fair to say that 4% to 5% will come from new businesses and not-like-for-like growth because we'll be opening 60 hotels, and then we have Atmantan and all these new businesses we added. If only 7% is left to come from the rest, occupancies are at a very high level, so you could have most of the growth coming driven by rate only. Ankur added that on a sustained basis high single digits, anywhere starting from 7-ish going up 8%, 9%, is the kind of range for like-for-like. Ekta Nagar full year benefit should come through. Frankfurt is a bit delayed - we expect it to open in June now.

Is it fair to assume then that for 12% to 14% bridge, a lot will basically be ARR from 7% to 9% - that's where the needle will move? So we can work with the base case of 7%?

Yes, that's right. These are the tailwinds and also a little headwinds because of the West Asian conflict. Right now, the international hotels are a little bit subdued performance. We saw that in April. We have - fortunately, Dubai, we don't own hotels. But it's still painful to see what's happening there as well as the impact of both Indian travellers as well as transit hub, Dubai being a big transit hub impacting our hotels in London and some of the other markets.

On foreign tourist mix - have you seen any change in your foreign tourist mix in the past 2, 3 months? Also a related question on currency depreciation - are your rates on your portal rupee-denominated or dollar-denominated?

They are rupee-denominated. That's a decision we took a few years back. We do get the benefit of rupee depreciation in two ways. One is our international hotels translation happens at the average exchange rate for the period. The second is rupee depreciating in a way makes it more expensive for people to travel abroad. So domestic tourism, that's one of the trends we have seen both in March, April, and that I think will continue for the year. On percentage of tourists, it's not moved dramatically. It's close to 30% for stand-alone is what we call foreign tourists or people who are having foreign passports. That number is pretty much consistent for the year.

On domestic tourism, while it looks like leisure tourism is benefiting, have you seen any changes in corporate travel slowdown or in terms of the mix of corporate versus leisure, particularly for domestic?

Not meaningfully impacting the numbers, Prateek. We will see how it - we'll monitor in the sense, given what's been announced over the weekend, is there any impact. But as of now, nothing.

In the PPT you have given 2% crew business. At such a high occupancy level, are you going to do strong revenue management and remove the low ARR business?

This is definitely an area for us to keep on improving. Within this also you could have different types - MICE is one segment, you could have corporate MICE versus individual MICE. Transient - we've also got some mixture of corporate transient versus noncorporate transient. Those are all levers which the commercial team actually does this for a living. On the right-hand side of the chart, how the distribution mix is also evolving with the website investment coming up, and we've seen a gain of almost 2 percentage points. All of these goes into getting the RevPAR's up where they are.

On Q1 trading - while you've guided for 12% growth in FY '27, how the Q1 looks like? Do you see impact in April, May going on from March? Or do you see the booking levels are holding up well?

Q1 has both headwinds and tailwinds. The headwind is, of course, the West Asia conflict. The good tailwind is that we have a good base to sort of work on. That's particularly true for second half of May and end of - till end of June. We should do okay overall. Between domestic and international, domestic market will, I think, do much better than international, and that's what we are sort of observing. We think we should be above 12% for the quarter.

Wanted to stress test that 12% to 14%. How did you arrive at that number? Did you just take the weakness in April and calibrate the rest of the year based on that? Or are you making some assumption about the extent or duration of this conflict?

We have key account management. We have some corporates. We know what rates we have locked in for the current financial year. We know what are the number of wedding dates, what is the business on the books. What is our not-like-for-like growth. We are expecting to open 60 new hotels, and we have certain income from them. The 26 plus 36 hotels which we opened in last year, they were also in their growth phase, so they have not stabilized. Last year we had 100 rooms less in Taj Ganges in Varanasi. This year we added that. Last year we had 2 floors less in Taj Palace. They're all renovated. They are back. Similarly, we had 2 company-owned hotels less in Ekta Nagar.

In terms of your fiscal '27 number of openings, did you reduce the number of rooms by 500 for this year?

It's pretty much what we had sort of mentioned, 5,000 keys on an average per annum. Puneet added that these are rounded figures and don't include any growth of existing properties. Some properties come in - last year Gateway Palolem in Goa or Gateway in Ahmedabad - they never hit the pipeline. Time they got signed and by the time they got opened was a few weeks' difference. Some of these may get delayed. Let's say instead of 5,000, maybe we open 4,500, but there could be 500, 700, 800 that may come in. On an ongoing basis we keep on having discussions for platform partnerships, which could easily get us 300, 400 keys.

Despite several one-off headwinds every quarter, you still managed 78% occupancy and 8% RevPAR growth for FY '26. Going into FY '27 with industry tailwinds and a favourable base - is the 7% or 8% RevPAR guidance like-for-like on the lower end because of geopolitical uncertainties? Or are we nearing the fag end of the cycle wherein growth will not be pricing-led but not-like-for-like driven?

On cycle, you see a chart on supply. We've looked at what's got announced, what's really got built. We feel reasonably certain that this is going to be a tight supply situation, at least for the reasonable future. Therefore RevPAR should continue to be inflation plus, giving it the ability to pass on costs. There is on top of this this sort of overhang of what's happening geopolitically, so there is some tempering of that outlook. That's the upside also. At the end of the day, this is not going to last forever. We lost out on certain amount of revenues which were actually quite visible on basis the pace we had February 28.

On data points on Roots and TajSATS, if you could give your full year revenue and EBITDA numbers?

TajSATS is there in the segment, if you see the segment slide on Slide 26. These are impacted by the levy impact, which we had called out at the beginning of the year that there will be this year some impact of levy, which was accounted in a different manner as per how the airports have now charged that to TajSATS and to every catering company. Adjusted for that, the margin actually expanded by a percentage, but the revenue growth would have been lower. It would have been more like 11%, 12% and not 16%. Roots Corporation does not own Ginger Mumbai Airport, so it makes sense now to look at Ginger consol rather than looking at Roots on a stand-alone legal entity. This has grown at about INR709 crores.

On operating leverage - the annual stand-alone portfolio revenue has grown high-single-digit, but we've still managed to expand margins at a decent rate in FY '26. FY '26 consol numbers on the margin front were relatively flattish, but we're still seeing good healthy like-for-like and non-like-for-like growth. So how do you see the margins going forward? Do we still have room for operating leverage to play out?

There is still scope for improvement. The reason is that most of these brands are in an infancy phase. They have not yet scaled up. On top of that, we had high costs of acquisitions. It's not just that you acquire something, you have high legal fees, you have high travel costs, cost of due diligence. We are very happy with the 35% margin as long as we did not put any upfront capital investment with the new brands. So we need to put enough horsepower behind them in terms of sales, marketing, talent, people to scale up that business. We have more than increased our portfolio by 400% in the last 8 years. At an enterprise level, we have almost increased our revenue by 300%.