Jagan Lacsher speaks to us about running a hotel, which has a specific India-centric focus when it comes to its wedding and MICE business.

JAGAN LACSHER carries with him a world of contradictions.
While he is of Indian origin, Lacsher grew up in Australia, only getting to
know the Indian hospitality industry when he arrived to take over the Pullman
(now Meridien) at Gurgaon in 2009. An Accor (now AccorHotels) man through and
through (with two decades in the company, straight our of college), Lascher
spoke to BW Hotelier about working in Thailand and how his hotel focusses on
getting Indian outbound tourists to stay with him.

"I am expat who is an Indian. The first time I worked
in India was in 2009. I have a very wide diaspora of the sort of experience I
have. I am of Indian origin, I started my career in Australia. I worked there
for the first ten years, then moved to Thailand where I worked for a few years,
before arriving in India. Now I am back in Thailand," he began. The
interesting take for him was his sensibilities and understanding of Indian
culture from his Indian heritage was quite different to what India was when he first
arrived here.

"The initial challenge I had was that you were expected
to know a lot about India. I am Indian, so it was assumed I should know how
India operates. I found trying to understand the sensibilities of the local
culture, was a very interesting learning that I had," he said. The quality
of people you work with in India are extremely multi-skilled, he continued, its
a little different from SE Asian countries or anywhere else he had worked
before.

"People here are a lot more intelligent, a lot more
switched on, therefore the kind of trainings that for example to launch a
brand, like I have done in other countries, was absorbed much faster. The
settling period for a hotel, he felt, was much shorter in India. "It's
about giving direction and letting people follow through. You don't really have
to hold hands and take people through," he added.

Speaking about how he has used the experience he picked up
in India, Lascher says it's just one simple sentence to sum it all up, "If
you can open a hotel in India, you can open one anywhere else in the
world."

"There are lots of challenges and obstacles, however
from a learning and experiential point of view, the kind of things that you
learn doing a hotel property, whether its running it, or building it, I don't
think you can get that experience anywhere because of the level of
involvement," he said. In other countries, he went on to say, construction
is a different project altogether, and a hotel operator will go in and set up
the hotel and open it. In India, hotel operators get involved from the
infrastructure stage of the project itself.

"I think I became half an engineer, in the three years
that I spent learning how a building not only is built, but how every single
nuance of the building operates," he said, adding that he doubted whether
he would have got to know so much anywhere else.

After moving out of India, Lacsher joined the Bangkok Hotel
Lotus Sukhumvit, managed by AccorHotels. "We are one of the iconic oldest
properties in Bangkok city. It also happens to be the most successful, most
popular Indian-centric hotel in Bangkok," he explained.

"The hotel has been operating as an Accor hotel for the
last 23 years and has an Indian restaurants which is one of the most well known
brandnames in the business in Thailand. Any Thai Indian would know Coco's
Cafe," he said.

It was because of this that the hotel is also very involved
in doing outside catering under the name Lotus Catering, Lacsher said. One of
the key things he did once he took over as GM was rebranding Lotus Catering
into Coco’s Catering, a fully fledged outside catering business with an aim to
bring in business for destination weddings and MICE events.

"I personally feel that the reason I got put into my
current position was because I had India experience," Lascher told us. The
skills, connection and network which he picked up in India has greatly helped
the hotel to do what they are doing today.

"In Thailand, we are able to sit with confidence
amongst our clients and give them the expertise which comes from me and the
rest of the team to give an Indian experience," he added. The catering
company itself is the only one to operate out of a four star international
hotel.

"When I go as an AccorHotel general manager and speak
to a hotel in Hua Hin, for example, I get a little more seriousness and
involvement in the business, because they know where we are coming from,"
he said explaining why the AccorHotel stamp was an advantage.

For the Indian market the business has also adapted itself,
Lascher went on to say, "we had to modernise the hotel. Indians today are
far more savvy. It's not just about butter chicken and tandoori roti anymore.
There is modern Indian fusion, there is other contemporary cuisines that the
Indian market is keen on. One of the things which we did was revamp the entire
menus, adding innovative, new ways of presenting food."

He gave the example of the special Indian Chinese menu which
the hotel offers. "When we do weddings, about a quarter of the food is
Indian Chinese. We do something very popular called the Maggi butter chicken
which is an absolute rage," he said.

"We actually call ourselves South Asian caterers. It's
not only the Indian market, we have gone into the Nepalese and Burmese markets
as well," Lacsher added.

The catering company run by the hotel is also doing reverse
catering, bringing Thai food to India, he added.

Looking to future travellers and tourists from India, Lacsher
went in for a more modern outlook to the food and presentation of the hotel.
"Service is a little more casual and the rooms have been upgraded, modern
and contemporary," he said. One of the main reasons for the hotel's
success though, is the Indian food, which is very important, especially with
inbound tours from the country.

The people who stay in the hotel are predominantly Japanese
corporate clientele, Lascher added, with a mix of Chinese and Indian tourists
making up the rest.

The 223 room hotel has an interesting legacy, he explained,
more than half the rooms are taken up by Japanese corporate clients, which the
F&B and MICE business is dominated by Indians.

It's a case of the weekends being dominated by India and the
rest of the week getting a large contingent of Japan. The balance has to be
right because the Indian rates are lower than our corporate ones, he added.

The hotel, with Indian owners and a large Indian client
though, is central to the Indian business for AccorHotels in Bangkok, Lacsher
said. "We have done a lot of synergies within the group itself, with our
chefs going to even Sofitel and picked up nuances of presentation quality
standards, while Sofitel picked up the Indianness from our cuisine to blend and
infuse in their menus," he said in conclusion.

NOTE: This story which appeared in the print edition erroniously spelled Jagan Lacsher's surname as Lascher. The error is regretted.

This article was published in BW hotelier issue dated '' with cover story titled 'Renovations Issue '