Trident Gurgaon Revs Up F&B Revenue by Turning Parking Lot into Luxury Wedding Venue

THE food and beverage revenue of the Trident Gurgaon had been growing at Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 2 crore year on year. This fiscal, it’s a steeper line out there on the growth graph ’ the jump has been of Rs 3 crore, and there are still three months left of FY2014-15.

The reason? A smart move by the 11-year-old hotel’s general manager, Nitesh Gandhi, who has worked his way up since his green years at Cilantro, the 24-hour restaurant, when the luxury hotel had just opened its doors in 2004.

It all started with an inquiry from a major international client a year ago for an al fresco upper crust party for 700 people. Till then, the hotel, which celebrated its tenth anniversary with a big bash last year, wasn’t able to entertain such inquiries because it had limited banqueting space to offer. But the client was too important for the Trident to be asked to look for another venue.

Gandhi therefore undertook a recce of the property and discovered that it had a vast under-utilised parking lot that could, on occasions, be turned into an al fresco banqueting venue. The parking lot, in fact, has two little tree-shaded green islands ’ one ideal for a bar and the other, for a marriage mandap. Significantly, the approach to this parking lot is past the water body at the hotel’s main square, which presents a spectacular sight in the evening when it is lit up by flaming torches.

The corporate party was a huge success and it paved the way for the hotel to sell the space for what Gandhi calls ’uber luxury weddings’. Typically, a wedding reception in this league is for 500 to 700 people and the hotel charges Rs 7,000 per guest. Unsurprisingly, F&B revenues today contribute 55-60 per cent of the hotel’s earnings.

The hotel’s two restaurants ’ Cilantro and the Indian fine-dining destination, Saffron ’ have also given Gandhi an additional reason to look happier. Their earnings, year to date, are up by 20 per cent, which means they have bucked what is known locally as the Cyber Hub effect. In other words, unlike other Gurgaon and South-West Delhi restaurants, they’ve shown a revenue growth despite the phenomenal success of the Cyber City ’restaurant mall’.

’Food is one of the top three reasons why corporate travelers choose to stay at a particular hotel,’ says Gandhi, offering a rationale for his F&B focus. The hotel, he says, has earned Rs 850 crore in the past 11 years and earned a gross operating profit of Rs 450 crore. ’Each room at the Trident has been sold 3,300 times in these 11 years,’ Gandhi adds with an air of self-satisfaction.

Food therefore is the new goal post for the Trident. Few people understand food as well as Gandhi, who’s been primarily an F&B ops person, and his target, set by The Oberoi Group’s President, Kapil Chopra, is to ’bring luxury back to Indian cuisine’.

As a first move, Gandhi got Izzat Hussain, a brilliant chef, unani doctor and descendant of Awadh’s last royal family, to showcase his cuisine at Saffron. Throughout 2015, Hussain will be coming back to the Trident to share his secrets with Saffron’s chefs. With such inputs, Saffron will definitely find a place at the top of the must-visit restaurants of Delhi-NCR. For Gandhi, it means the cash registers ringing a bit louder than usual.