Manbeer Choudhary, President of Hotel & Restaurant Association of Haryana (HRAH) has been appointed Member of the newly constituted “Tourism Development Council” of Haryana.

Ravi Deol
Ravi Deol has joined India Hospitality Corp (IHC) as a member of its board of directors. He will be responsible for IHC hotels and food services division. Ravi Deol founded Barista, India’s first coffee chain and then moved on with Sunil Mittal’s Bharti group to bring WalMart to India. IHC came into existence one year ago through the acquisition of Gordon House Hotels, Mars Restaurants, SkyGourmet Catering and Tendulkar’s. Deol will also run Hospitality Opportunity Fund, a newly launched venture fund that would focus on the hospitality sector in India.

ITC Hotels
ITC Hotels division has appointed Dipak Haksar as COO, ITC Hotels division (Luxury and WelcomHotels) and D Kavarana as general manager, ITC Maurya. Dipak Haksar was V-P Operations, ITC Hotels division. D Kavarana was GM at ITC Grand Maratha, Mumbai.

Harmit Singh
Global Hyatt has appointed Harmit Singh as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Before joining Hyatt Harmit was with Yum! (company holding global brands such as KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell), as senior vice-president and chief financial officer – International. He will be now responsible for Global Hyatt’s finance, accounting, treasury, tax and strategic financial planning function worldwide, reporting to President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian. An alumnus of Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi, Harmit has over 25 years of global financial experience including 14 years with Yum!

The Union Urban Development Ministry has approved the proposal to increase the Floor Areas Ratio (FAR) of all the existing as well as upcoming hotels in Delhi from 150 to 225. This will not be applicable for the areas falling under Lutyen’s Bungalow Zone (LBZ) and heritage hotels. It will only be applicable to independent hotel plots. All hotels to be benefited by the new policy will have to complete their construction by June 2010. The increased FAR would help generate approximately 3,000 additional rooms in both the star and budget categories at present. The policy will be notified soon and objections and suggestions would be invited from the general public before necessary amendments are made in the Master Plan. The entire process would take over a month. Rajendra Kumar, president, Hotel and restaurant Association of Northern India said, “We want the policy to be notified soon. We are already way behind schedule to add the required number of rooms. A delay in notification would only aggravate the problem.” The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) had sent the proposal to increase the FAR to UD Ministry in March. An acute shortage of hotel rooms in the Capital and failing to sell its hotel plots forced the agency to give in to the demand of the hotel industry to increase the FAR of all the existing as well as upcoming hotels in the city. The agency has in the last two year put 46 plots for auction for setting up star hotels but it could sell only 21 plots.