ProfileThe Indian Hotels Company and its subsidiaries are collectively known as Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, recognised as one of Asia's largest and finest hotel company. Incorporated by the founder of the Tata Group, Jamsetji N Tata, the company opened its first property, The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Bombay, in 1903. The Taj, a symbol of Indian hospitality, completed its centenary year in 2003. Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces comprises 59 hotels at 40 locations across India with an additional 17 international hotels in the Maldives, Mauritius, Malaysia, United Kingdom, United States of America, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Africa, the Middle East and Australia.
The company has had a long-standing commitment to the continued development of the Indian tourism and hospitality industry. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the Taj played an important role in launching several of India's key tourist destinations. Working in tandem with the Indian government, the Taj developed resorts and retreats while the government developed roads and railways to India's hidden treasures.
Areas of businessTaj Hotels Resorts and Palaces is grouped into Luxury, Leisure and Business categories to provide consistency across the different hotels and standardise products and services.
As early as 1974, the Taj opened India's first international beach resort — Fort Aguada Beach Resort — in Goa. Today, Goa is one of South Asia's most popular beach resort destinations.
The presence of Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces internationally has been developed through a network of Taj regional sales and PR offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and the USA.
During the past year Taj Hotels strengthened its presence in the Indian Ocean rim. Taj Exotica Resort & Spa, Mauritius, opened its doors to guests. End-2005 saw the unveiling of the entirely renovated and upgraded Taj Exotica Resort & Spa, Maldives.
Taj Hotels further expanded its global footprint by securing management contracts at Palm Island, Jumeirah in Dubai, Langkawi in Malaysia and Thimpu in Bhutan. The most significant addition to the portfolio has been The Pierre, the iconic landmark hotel on New York's Fifth Avenue.
It operates Taj Air, a luxury private jet operation with state-of-the-art Falcon 2000 aircrafts designed by Dassault Aviation, France; and Taj Yachts, two 3-bedroom luxury yachts which can be used by guests in Mumbai and Kochi, in Kerala.
It also operates Taj Sats Air Catering, the largest airline catering service in South Asia, as a joint venture with Singapore Airport Terminal Services, a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines.
Taj Wellington Mews Luxury Residences is a complex of 80 luxurious serviced apartments in South Mumbai. This is a new foray in the service apartments category.
Additionally, Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces established the Indian Institute of Hotel Management, Aurangabad in 1993. The institute offers a three-year diploma, designed with the help of international faculty and has affiliations with several American and European programmes.
Associate companies and joint venturesThe Indian Hotels Company is the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces' parent company, owning around a third of the group's inventory of rooms. The balance of room inventory is with associate companies and joint ventures.
Corporate social responsibilityThe key theme of corporate social responsibility at the company is to build livelihoods with a clear focus on women, craftsmen and artisans; and the education of children. Employees of all hotels and the corporate offices contribute and actively participate in numerous on-going events and projects. The core competencies of the hospitality business have been utilised to make these themes truly relevant and meaningful.
ContactTaj Hotels Resorts and PalacesOxford House15 / 17 N. F. StreetApollo BunderMumbai 400 001India
The Tata Business Leadership Award
The Tata Business Leadership Award (TBLA), initiated in 2004, is an annual business school event organised by the Tata Group. It offers students from select business schools a unique opportunity to compete with the brightest and display their business acumen.
The award underlines the commitment of the Tata Group towards promoting and encouraging future leaders. It is also an endeavour to create awareness among management students of the Tata brand. The students (in teams of three to four) are given a strategic problem or situation relevant to the Group.
They have to make a presentation to senior managers in the Group and defend their case study. The defence is evaluated on parameters such as creativity, clarity, relevance and business value.Preliminary rounds are held on campus and chaired by a panel consisting of a cross section of senior Tata managers.
The final defence presentation, held at the Tata Management Training Centre in Pune, is seen by Tata leaders and othersThe winning team gets the coveted TBLA rolling trophy and a host of other prizes.
TBLA 2008National winners: IIM Calcutta (Amit Mehta, Puneet Gandhi, Puneet Jain, Ritesh Saxena)
First runner-up: SP Jain Mumbai (Ashish Upadhyay, Raghava Attinuru, Swagata Basak, Sunrita Bhowmik Saha)
Second runner-up: IIM Bangalore (Amlan Chaudhuri, Neetu Chitkara, Parvej Kumar Ravesh, Rahul Arya)
TBLA 2008 in-house winnersNational winners: Tata Chemicals (Amitabh Tapadar, Anand Sinha, Madhur Vaghela, Mohammed Altaf S)
First runner-up: HVTL (Heavy Vehicles Transmission Ltd), Jamshedpur (P. Sant Prasad, Sabas Fernando, Sanjay Kumar Singh, Soumik Chatterjee)
Second runner-up: TCS, USA (Prabhat Kumar Asthana, Vikrant Neogi, Devendra Kumar Singh)
TBLA 2007National winners: IIM, Lucknow (Alok Bhagaria, Sidharth Bansal, Pratik Shukla, Rahul Khaparde)
First runner-up: IIM, Bangalore
Second runner-up: FMS, Delhi
TBLA 2006National winners: FMS, Delhi (Abhijit Shetty, Manuj Ahri, Vidisha Mehta, Aditya SV)First runner-up: IIM, Bangalore (Sameer Shetty, Vaibhav Jambhekar, Apurv Parashar, Hemang Mehta)Second runner- up: SP Jain, Mumbai (Rajeev Singh, Nikesh Samaiya, Gopalakrishnan K, Kapil Lodha)TBLA 2005National winners: IIM Lucknow (Tarandeep Singh Ghai, Kunal Arya Shreshta, Ashutosh Bhandari, Saurabh Khandelwal)First runner-up: FMS, Delhi (Abhijeet Shetty, Mohit Ralhan, Amit Gupta, Curie Balgir) Second runner-up: IIM Calcutta (H. V. Vinayak, Madhusudan Sharma, Kunal Kumar, Ashish Verma) TBLA 2004National winner: SP Jain Mumbai (Ravi Kumar, Anahita Ichaporia, Nilesh Kumar, Asif Shamim)First runner-up: IIM Ahmedabad (Anish Saraf, Ashish Keyal, R. N. Gautam, Rahul Verma)Second runner-up: XLRI, Jamshedpur (Diwakar Loshali, Purnima Kumar, Surabhi Loshali, Ritesh Bhardwaj
