AMBIENCE RESORT – BANGALORE
The resort-like ambience of Bangalore’s luxury hotels is misleading. These green
getaways mean business
Sun-dappled verandas filled with flowers, balconies where leafy palms lean in to say a friendly hello; sparrows who companionably share your al fresco breakfast.. Bangalore’s hotels welcome their guests with gardening gloves.
If the Taj West End sprawls indolently over 22 acres of glossy gardens, the stylish Oberoi has been designed around a 75-year-old rain tree that royally dominates its landscape and design. Notwithstanding sculpted gardens of their own, three luxury hotels gaze onto the grassy expanses of a lovely golf course. If one hotel is called The Park, another calls itself Central Park, and a -compact bed and breakfast unit isnamed Terrace Gardens. Woodlands nestles at the edge of a flower-filled drive while Victoria squats like a colonial dowager amidst an old-fashioned garden full of large, shady trees. The garden leitmotif blooms everywhere: restaurants wear names like Le Jardin, Palms, Lotus, Bamboo Shoots, Coconut Grove, while onto boardrooms and terraces are grafted apellations like Hibiscus, Pinewood and Green House.
Yet the relaxed resort-like ambience that permeates Bangalore’s bouquet of hotels is downright misleading. These are no retreats for luxury-lapped leisure, no green getaways from a workaday world. On the contrary, Bangalore’s hotelsmean business. And “our guests are corporate” was the concerted refrain we heard describing properties up and down the scale. There are 54 hotels listed in a directory brought out by the Ministry of Tourism, Government of Karnataka. And almost all of them, we found, claim to cater to the business traveler.
“This is not a city frequented by tourists,” says Suresh Badlaney, general manager of Le Meridien. “As much as 95 percent of our business is corporate.”The 200-room hotel, formerly a Holiday Inn property, is in the midst of extensive renovations to meet the Meridien benchmarks of an “international businessman’s hotel.”
A thriving software industry, several on going and in-the-pipeline multinational projects, not to mention a strong presence of big names in Indian industry draw a broad spectrum of business visitors to the garden city. And, point out hotel managers, even before the comparatively recent influx, Bangalore has been home to public sector giants like ITI, HMT, BEML... The CEO who flies in to sign that mega contract, the middle-level executive who has to work out the details, the technical engineer who has to check on the plant installations... All of them roost in Bangalore’s varied hostelries.
