The Postcard Hotels and Resorts eyes cities with luxury offerings

The urban hotel expansion will target greenfield hotels in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai, among others. The first such property is already under construction in Tirupati, the temple town of Andhra Pradesh, Kapil Chopra, the company’s founder and former president of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts, told Mint.

Record domestic travel and rising demand for space, privacy and consistency among urban luxury travellers has triggered the shift. “City hotels today are becoming increasingly standardized, often losing any sense of local character,” said Chopra, the founder of Untitled Hotels & Resorts Pvt. Ltd, which owns and operates The Postcard. 

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“Many of them could be located anywhere in the world, devoid of any meaningful connection to India. That’s why we are getting into this space,” he added.

The new city hotels will be built under the same brand and will follow the same operating model of either managed or leased properties. Despite the high cost of urban real estate, they will feature 800 sq. ft suites and offer amenities, including anytime breakfast and flexible check-ins. “True luxury in India begins with space,” Chopra said.

On average, building a luxury resort room costs between ₹1.5-2 crore, he said.

The average room size at its resorts is around 1,200 sq. ft, and its average daily rate (ADR) for 2024-25 stands at ₹33,000—a premium over most luxury chains. ADR is a key hospitality metric that tracks the average revenue earned per sold room in a day.

The hotel chain, which began operations in 2018, currently operates 11 properties and is expanding aggressively. In 2025 alone, it has launched or is in the process of launching seven new hotels across locations such as Tirupati, Kanha Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Goa’s Chicalim and Mandovi River, Chitwan in Nepal, Jawai in Rajasthan and Nainital in Uttarakhand. 

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It aims to open about 22 new hotels by 2027-28, with properties under development in Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh, Carmona and Nerul in Goa, and the Pench National Park in Madhya Pradesh. It recently opened a resort in Assam and plans to open an over 75-room luxury resort in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer. 

He said these additions would be part of a strategy of launching one exceptional property per location—with Goa as an exception—aimed at drawing more long-stay international travellers.

“In the past six months, we’ve signed six new hotels, effectively adding one new luxury property every month,” he said. “We’re also building travel circuits in regions where no other luxury operator has gone before.”

The chain also claims to have significantly reduced its project timelines, with most properties going live within 18 to 30 months. It can take 5-7 years to build a city-based property from scratch and around five years to build a resort.

Travel and tourism boom

The expansion coincides with strong growth in India’s travel and tourism sector, which added ₹21 trillion, or 6.6%, to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024 and supported 46.5 million jobs, according to the industry forum World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). 

While spending by foreign tourists hit an all-time high of ₹3.1 trillion, domestic travel drove total spending to ₹15.5 trillion in 2024, up 22% from 2019, it added.

The hotelier intends to attract international travellers using Goa as a gateway to southern India. “Our ambition is to shape distinctive travel circuits both in the South and the North-East,” he said. “We want to introduce luxury to regions where no other hotel chain has ventured—capturing India’s beauty and diversity in a way that hasn’t been done before. Leh is one such location.”

India’s leisure hotel supply has surged 388% over the past 16 years, from 12,500 rooms in 2008 to 61,000 in 2024, according to hospitality consultancy Horwath HTL.

With the country’s total branded or formalized hotel room inventory crossing 200,000 in 2025, including city hotels, leisure now accounts for roughly 30.5% of the overall supply.

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The growth shows no signs of slowing: If the current pipeline of 113,000 rooms is executed as planned, the leisure segment alone could reach 106,000 rooms by 2029, commanding a 35% share of the total expected branded inventory of 300,000 rooms, according to Horwath HTL.

Chopra expects the Postcard to become a unicorn in the coming years. “We’ve been consistently profitable, not just on an Ebitda-adjusted basis, but at the bottom line,” he said. Ebitda is short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

While he did not share the company’s revenue, he said it currently manages assets worth ₹4,500 crore.

The company follows two business models: building or leasing and operating hotels and managing properties for individual owners. Chopra remains the largest shareholder, with about 30-35% held by early investors who joined in 2017-18.