Run by a group of friends, how this luxury hotel survived both waves of the pandemic

When the nation went into lockdown in March 2020, the owners of Meerut-based Hotel Harmony Inn had to shut the business and send their staff home almost overnight.

Five friends - Amit Chandana, Naveen Arora, Rajesh Miglani, Rajesh Juneja, and Ashok Taneja - had taken over the hotel in 2018 as its new owners. But they never envisioned a day when they’d close the hotel and have zero visibility on when the shutters would go up again.

“At Hotel Harmony Inn, we have facilities such as restaurants, rooms, banquets, party halls, conference rooms, etc. When the lockdown was announced, our cash flows from all these streams were stopped suddenly. We realised we needed to take some difficult and harsh calls in order to stay afloat,” says Amit, the director at the hotel.

While some staff of the 120-member workforce decided to leave for their hometowns, others stayed back, and the owners allowed some of them to reside in the hotel rooms. The first few months under lockdown then became a waiting game.

Venturing into online food delivery

As the owners waited and watched for signs of unlocking, they realised food delivery to customers’ homes could help the hotel survive in the meantime.

Mayank Miglani, a second generation entrepreneur and the son of co-owner Rajesh Miglani, says:

“Our rooms and banquet business were bringing in zero revenues. So I looked at Zomato and Swiggy and took notes regarding how other hotels were being listed. I got a photoshoot done for our restaurants’ menu items, and enlisted ourselves on these apps. We also set up a couple of cloud kitchens for affordable biryani and Chinese cuisine.”

These efforts brought in close to Rs 12 lakh in revenue, Mayank claims. Although a far cry from the hotel’s pre-COVID annual turnover of Rs 9 crore, revenue from online deliveries helped keep the hotel ticking till lockdown restrictions were eased and the owners could once again focus on their core business.

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But for a hotel in the midst of a financial crisis, running its core operations was easier said than done.

“We could not bring ourselves to lay people off without pay. The only way to survive was to reduce salaries. So we told our staff to come into work on a 50-50 basis. This meant a group of staff would work for 15 days in a month, and the rest would work for the remaining 15 days, and they’d get paid accordingly,” Mayank explains.

As Meerut reopened in June 2020, the hotel finally rolled up its shutters and reopened its banquet halls for groups of 30 people - the initial permissible limit for a gathering.

As the limits were increased, the hotel began serving more customers and recorded Rs 4.5 crore turnover in FY21, and appeared to be on the road to recovery.

Surviving the second wave

However, the owners were in for a surprise. In April 2021, the second wave of COVID-19 enveloped the country. Restaurants, banquets, and halls largely went without bookings, and those still functional served customers in a limited capacity.

As the hospitality sector and several other businesses in the sector were plunged into another financial crisis, stories of shutdowns, furloughs, and layoffs once again made headlines.

The Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) said the country’s hotel industry took a hit of over Rs 1.3 lakh crore in revenue for FY21 due to the pandemic.

Hotel Harmony Inn, unlike many other businesses, was more prepared this time. Co-owner Naveen Arora says:

“Initially, it was difficult to answer all the questions we got about the impact on our business, possible layoffs, etc. But we made a continued effort to inform and guide people of the COVID protocols we put in place. Further, our staff was not as scared as they were during the first wave. Not many of them went back home, and a lot of them stayed back.”

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Mayank adds that another reason the hotel had more staff at hand during the second wave was that the new coronavirus strain had reached the hometowns of migrant workers, and thus the workers preferred to stay in Meerut.

And with an operating model already in place for online deliveries, the hotel managed to replicate its survival strategies from the first wave and stay in business during the second wave.

Now, for the owners, keeping Hotel Harmony Inn running is all about preserving their dream of running a hotel business together.

“We were thinking of reaching Rs 9 crore revenue again, but because of the second wave, I don’t think it's possible. Nevertheless, we are confident of clocking at least Rs 5 crore revenue even if there is a third wave. In two years, as the impact of the pandemic recedes, we hope to reach Rs 12 crore,” says Mayank.