Kodawari Notes: Ahmedabad Needs 22,000 More Hotel Rooms by 2030. Who Builds Them?

 Illustrated skyline of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the twin cities on the Sabarmati]

Four years to find 22,000 rooms that do not exist - that is the assignment one Indian city has just been handed.

A university in Gujarat has just published a piece of arithmetic that every hotel owner in India should read. Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the twin cities on the Sabarmati, have about 18,000 hotel rooms between them. To host the 2030 Commonwealth Games - and the World Police and Fire Games the year before - they will need about 40,000.

That is a gap of 22,000 rooms. In one metro. With four years to close it.

I have spent thirty years in hotels, and I have rarely seen a number this clean. The study, out of CEPT University, counts every segment. The twin cities hold about 3,700 five-star keys, 1,500 four-star keys, and a few hundred rooms in resorts and boutique houses. Even today, on an ordinary week with no Games anywhere in sight, the better hotels run at 60 to 68 percent occupancy. So understand this clearly: the shortage is not a Games-time spike. It is structural. The researchers put the demand-supply gap at 65 percent in luxury, 60 percent in budget, 70 percent near the airport - and 90 percent in meeting and exhibition space.

Ninety percent. The city wants to welcome the Commonwealth family and does not own the ballrooms.

Chart showing the twin cities holding about 18,000 hotel rooms against about 40,000 needed by 2030, a gap of 22,000 rooms across segments]

Can it be done? Others have done harder. Barcelona tripled its hotel capacity in the five years before the 1992 Olympics. Doha added seventy thousand beds in four years for the 2022 World Cup, much of it through public-private partnership. India builds fast when it decides to. The question is never concrete. The question is judgment.

Chart of event precedents: Barcelona tripled hotel capacity in five years before the 1992 Olympics and Doha added 70,000 beds in four years for the 2022 World Cup]

If you are an owner or an investor watching this, here is what I would tell you across a table.

1. This is not one shortage. It is four. Luxury, budget, airport, and meetings are four different markets with four different gaps. Rooms will get all the newspaper attention, but the loudest number in the study is that 90 percent gap in event space. The money may not be where everyone is looking.

2. New doors for money are opening. The study proposes a sports-hospitality investment trust on the Singapore model, land mechanisms like TDR-plus, and public-private partnership. When a government wants rooms this badly, the terms for the builder improve. Watch the policy announcements, not just the land prices.

3. Build for 2033, not 2030. The Games last twelve days. Your hotel lasts thirty years. Barcelona's rooms still earn because the city kept growing after the flame went out. Doha learned the harder lesson about building for an event alone. Design for the Tuesday after the closing ceremony - the business traveller, the medical visitor, the wedding season.

4. Read the ordinary week. Today the city fills 60 to 68 percent of its better rooms with no event at all. That quiet number is your real demand curve. Everything the Games adds on top of it is a bonus, not the business plan.

Now the caution, because I have watched event deadlines burn good money.

A university study, however careful, is a map and not a contract. Before you buy a plot, pay for your own demand study - this one is a fine place to start, and a poor place to stop. Big-event calendars in our country have slipped before, and a hotel timed for a date that moves is an expensive lesson. And remember that every developer in Gujarat is reading the same 22,000-room number this week. If everyone builds the same mid-market box on the same corridor, the shortage becomes a glut exactly where you are standing. The gap is real, but it will reward the specific, not the general.

This, in the end, is the work I do. If you are looking at land on the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar corridor, or wondering which segment of that gap belongs to you - the feasibility study, the segment choice, the brand question, the pre-opening plan - that is what HPSB Consulting is for. Far better to spend a few weeks on the arithmetic now than thirty years in the wrong building.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.