Lifestyle - Would you pay Rs 35 lakh for a hotel suite?

At Rs 2 lakh per night, not counting taxes, the Darbar Mahal suite in Jaipur is not the most expensive — yet. Next month, when the Maharaja’s Pavilion, four floors of it, becomes operational, at Rs 6.5 lakh it will be the most expensive set of rooms in India.
And when the Shahi Mahal, 150 years in the making, becomes functional two years from now, at Rs 35 lakh for a two-night occupancy it will be the most expensive accommodation on offer anywhere in the world. Clearly, The Raj Palace is no bed-and-breakfast operation. Especially since the tariff does not include the cost of breakfast.
Arun Puri, shades masking his face, a mauve shirt draping his lean frame, is an unlikely peddler of such luxury. Yet, this marble trader has emerged in slightly over a decade as one of the most prominent names on the international hoteliering circuit. In all likelihood, he may never be a Hilton — he says he doesn’t even want to occupy that space — but when, chairing a meeting two years ago, he told his staff he wanted to be the best hotel in the world, no one in that room laughed.
A year-and-a half later, when the property, largely unknown in India, walked off as the World Travel Award’s World’s Leading Heritage Hotel, and this year took home the trophy for Asia’s Leading Suite, Puri must have cocked a cynical snook at the competition.
Not that he has stopped gloating about it. In Jaipur’s — and Rajasthan’s — feudal set-up, he is the outsider who married into instant lineage. The fiefdom of Chomu, one of the aristocratic homes linked with the fortunes of the Jaipur royal family, had gone into decline, selling off the family fort on the outskirts of the city in the seventies when death duties dealt it a crippling blow. The fabulous Chomu Haveli (since renamed The Raj Palace) was given on lease to an exporter who turned this into a warehouse-cum-workshop for made-as-old furniture. The building and gardens suffered considerable damage as a result.
Curiously, Chomu Haveli had been run as a hotel by the last Thakur, Raj Singh, for four years, so the decision to turn it into a heritage hotel was hardly novel. But for Jeyandra Kumari and her husband, Arun Puri, when they started restoration in 1995 and opened in 1997, the aspiration to be among the best in the world has since led to five rounds of renovation.
“When it was built 280 years ago by Thakur Mohan Singh,” Puri says over lunch served in silver thaalis, “he had just returned victorious and very wealthy from the battle of Kandahar. The construction of the new city of Jaipur [when the royal family shifted its capital from Amber] began with Chomu Haveli.”
Nearly three centuries later, Puri’s dilemma was whether to merely renovate or restore. “What would the Thakurs have done if they had been around?” he asks. “I wanted the restoration not to stop at some time in history, but to include the technical innovations of our era, to make this the most luxurious palace of our times.”
From a presentation he has made, in slightly laboured English, Puri reads out some of what that included. Besides hiring “the best designers in the world” and the “best restoration architects in the world” and the “best HR consultants in the world” — organizations and people he prefers to leave nameless — he took up the restoration of 1,10,000 sq ft of covered area for a total of 7 million man hours, and continuing. It included 50,000 sq ft of stucco restoration, 50,000 sq ft of hand painting on wall surfaces, 8,000 sq ft of gold foiling, and any amount of silver foiling.
In what will be the Maharaja’s Pavilion, that work is continuing. Artisans are painstakingly laying the gold foil on pillars and arches, and as meticulously pasting what is probably glass — Puri insists it is semi-precious gemstones — onto relief designs. “The public areas were redone in marble,” he says. Furniture from Mariner in Spain was shipped in for the dining areas. In the rooms — and he is vehement about this — the furniture is all from the haveli.
Some of it, it is true, bears the family coat of arms and looks impressive, but far too much of it is too tacky to actually have belonged to the family. Certainly, too few artworks are deserving of their prominent placement, and many of the wonderful old black and white photographs have nothing whatsoever to do with the Chomu family. Is Arun Puri writing a somewhat dubious history for the sake of selling the hotel?
Travel agents in India believe so. “The Raj Palace is a nice property,” says a vice president of a prominent travel agency based in New Delhi, “and Arun Puri claims to have put in some of the most expensive, internationally renowned materials. But you must let your property speak for itself, not be conceited about being the most expensive product in the market.” Puri, it is true, does do a hardsell.
The chandelier in the main dining room “is the largest in India to be made of crystal”. The bathroom amenities by Lady Primrose “are available in only 21 top hotels in the world”. He will not disclose travel agents they work with other than to say they are “the top agents in the world”. He refuses to share details of his foreign exchange earnings which formed the basis for the recent National Tourism Award for Best Heritage Hotel.
Puri is distrustful of agents because, he says, they club The Raj Palace along with other heritage properties. “There is a difference between us and heritage hotels,” he’s off and running, “we are the only 280-year-old palace hotel in the world, we are the first palace hotel to be centrally airconditioned…” Some of those boasts, however, have borne fruit, and the property is now a member of Small Luxury Hotels, or SLH, which includes the uber Vilas properties of the Oberoi group from India as the only other entrants to that list. Mystery guests regularly check the property for its upkeep of standards.
The success of The Raj Palace — no matter how gaudy you consider some of the restorations — is in its quality. The anti-bacterial mattresses, the contoured pillows, the imported linen, the memory-based temperature shower settings (though one guest complained they don’t always work), the quality of staff and service (excellent) is a far cry from many other palace and heritage hotels where ambience, more than service and quality, is what matters.
“We have hired,” says Ankur Rara, general manager of the hotel, “Peter S McAlpine of HR Consulting to train our staff.” The training, it appears, is based on concepts of “love, care and warmth, everything else follows”. Rara herself is an anomaly, a student of management who was hired for sales and marketing before taking over the running of the hotel. “I’ve stayed at the best luxury hotels, the Ritz in Paris and London, the Peninsula in Hong Kong and Bangkok,” she says, “to experience and bring back the best international standards.” In summer this year, she attended a two-month workshop (“which took me a half year to get into”) for general managers from the Cornell School.
True, The Raj Palace has history on its side, and for a 29-room hotel, its facilities and amenities are very, very luxe. The thaalis and tableware is silver (and a gold service is available on request), and though the meal this reporter had was satisfying rather than a culinary feast, the choice on offer (there is caviar, salmon is flown in from Delhi, and the waiter did a good enough job of discussing and offering a dry chardonnay as accompaniment) — three restaurants, a bar, swimming pool, “the world’s only 24-carat gold spa” and so on — more than does it justice.
Is this what attracts “the second-richest man in China” or, as a tent-peg in the coffee shop suggests, “the third richest man in France” to the hotel? Certainly, where language skills are concerned, “famouse oprater” and bathroom “itms” that you can purchase rather than pinch — Puri laughs uproariously that his Indian guests are only interested in freebies, and “even those who are among the tenth richest in the country will send someone to negotiate rates three or four times” — don’t cut the ice. But Puri could argue that it is service, not English, that many of his international guests don’t even speak to begin with, that keeps them coming.
But does anyone actually pay those prices, or is it a branding myth created by Puri and his team? “They sell only to Europeans, who aren’t the most discerning travellers,” says an agent who brings high-paying American tourists to India. “Our fastest growing revenue markets are from the US and the Middle East,” Puri counters, “and others from China and Russia.” Only incentive groups — and incentives pay top dollar — are from Europe. “He must do special rates,” says another, whose business with The Raj Palace is “event-based, on a need basis”. Certainly, when it comes to showcasing grandeur and hospitality, it is the hotel of choice. “We have a zero discount policy,” says Puri. “And in the off-season, we discount only up to 20 per cent to travel agents, and no more than 10 per cent directly to guests,” says Rara.
On those prices? “The palace cannot be valued in terms of money,” says Puri, “it is not a commercial venture. The only competition we have is with ourselves.” “Our bathroom amenities cost us Rs 11,000-12,000 per room, per night,” points out Rara. If I gasp at the impossibility, Rara suggests, perhaps impatiently, “We have a bath menu with a bath butler, who offers you a choice of fragrances and amenities. For the suites under restoration, we’re considering amenities from Bvlgari and Hermes.”
No wonder The Raj Palace is chary of discounts.
No wonder luxury holidays at Rajvilas or Rambagh Palace seem better value for money.