There's nothing that quite conjures the spirit of new India as scything along the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway. Completed in 2008, this four-lane stretch of state-of-the art blacktop is part of the Golden Quadrilateral project, an intercity highway that's central to India's scramble to get its infrastructure up-to-speed for its foretold economic miracle.
Taking the D-G Expressway headed south, as I have done a number of times in recent years, always feels like discovering a rising India made real. Especially when you reach Gurgaon, a satellite city 30 km south of Delhi, where brand-new office blocks jostle with car showrooms, clinging-on small-hold farmers and gleaming state-of-the art business hotels. "We can do this rising India thing," Gurgaon seems to whisper. "Forget the corruption. Forget the slide back to six percent growth… We can do this rising India thing… WE CAN DO IT!"
King amongst Gurgaon's new-generation business hotels is The Oberoi, Gurgaon. In many ways The Oberoi, Gurgaon is typical of the approach of five-star hotels that are mushrooming across South and East Asia; cherry picking, as it does, from a globalized market in luxury trappings. There's 24-hour beauty salon (Delhi's first), an Italian hairdresser doing the hair (Hair Spa by Rossano Feretti) and a French pedicurist the feet (PEDI:MANI:CURE Studio by Bastion Gonzales). Servicing Indian luxury habits, there's a Patisserie and Delicatessen groaning with ornamental cakes. And a Cuban Cigar Lounge, strictly stocking Habanos, with humidor vaults available for purchase or rental.
The Oberoi Gurgaon: green shoots for hospitality
The Oberoi, Gurgaon's architecture is as strident as you'd expect from a country on-the-up. Designed by Singapore-based architects RSP Architects Planner and Engineers Pte. Ltd (and shortlisted for Best Hotel Design at the 2012 World Architecture Festival in Singapore), the exterior's formed of shining conjoined boxes of tessellated glass, with a low-rise wing clad – as is de rigueur for 2010s hotel builds – in a living façade of oxygenating plant-growth.
But The Oberoi, Gurgaon's real design revolution is in the design features that are, at first sight, less apparent. The hotel's brilliant white foyer: wrapped in full-drop glass windows, with mirrored columns and accessorized by splashes of blood-red in the floral displays and soft-furnishings appears to have been designed chiefly with form in mind. Its function, however, betrays the reality of five-star hospitality in a post-9-11; post 7/7; post Mumbai; now, sadly, post-Boston bombings world.
"The Oberoi, Gurgaon has been designed, foremost, with security in mind," an Oberoi representative tells me, as we stand in this dazzling foyer space. "There's a small single access point, you'll note, to this foyer on ground level. So all visitors enter, via this monitored and fully surveillable space, to the food and beverage facilities via an elevator down; and to the hotel rooms via another open and surveillable walkway."
All white: The Oberoi Gurgaon foyer
"That was the problem with the 2008 Attacks is Mumbai. There were security guards there, but there were too many hidden entrances. The old heritage hotels were porous to terrorists, as they found out, to their cost."
It all changed for Indian five-star hospitality, indeed the global hospitality industry, in November 2008. Over a fateful three days, 50 cocaine and steroid-drugged terrorists rampaged through Mumbai, armed with incendiary bombs and AK-47 rifles. The terrorists gained land at Mumbai in inflatable speedboats, having sailed from Karachi and hijacked an Indian trawler en route. There were 166 fatalities from the three-day killing spree, which Indian authorities now attribute to Pakistani terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba. The terrorists' key focus for attack were the city's five-star hotels, including the landmark Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and Tower and The Oberoi Trident, in the business district at Mumbai's Nariman.
"What you're looking at is the post-lapsarian world for Indian security," says Vikas Sharma, of Indian security firm Topsgrup, who are a key player in a burgeoning security-industries sector. "India's tourism ministry is requiring hotels with three or more stars to install specific equipment for securing their premises, they will lose their stars if they don't comply. Entrepreneurs are rushing into the field. It's a boom industry."
Sunshine and snipers: Serena Kabul
In the wake of the bombings, the Indian hospitality's industry body, The Hotel Association of India, came up with a complete list of security measures required of its member hotels, including limiting access through a three-tier security ring, erecting hydraulically-operated road barriers or retractable bollards, installing CCTVs in public areas and at the entrances, and scanning not just the guest baggage but also all hotel supplies (fresh and otherwise). And the expertise of ‘zoning' is also booming (consulting as to the organization of facilities so that, in the case of an attack, areas can be sealed off).
If all of this sounds a little Orwellian, consider the fact that, since 9-11, there has been a doubling of tourist attacks on hotels, and that these hotel attacks have become more deadly. In a 2009 report, private intelligence firm STRATFOR looked at the number of hotel attacks eight years before 9-11 and the number eight years after. It found that the targeting of foreign hotels catering to Westerners has grown significantly. (Since 9-11, there have been 62 attacks against hotels in 20 different countries as opposed to 30 attacks in 15 different countries in the 8 years prior to it).
The future will be bright for hotel brands who understand the high-security market. With a headstart are brands such as the Serena chain, who created the blueprint high security hotel in their hilltop fortress hotel the Serena in Islamabad, and followed with their sniper-patrolled Kabul, Afghanistan, outpost. They now have 36 hotels worldwide. Also ahead of the game is Four Seasons, who are pushing into the BRICs with new hotels in Russia and China, are proofing all of their new-builds for Head Of State visits; again allowing rapid isolation of zoned hotel areas.
And, in many ways, the new reality of hospitality security is driving innovation. Mass spectrometry room scanners, developed by the US Department of at the Oak Ridge Lab, can analyse up to 1,000 room access cards per hour and can detect even a billionth of a gram of explosive on the card (in case the person using the card has handled explosives). Then there's Snifex, a small hand-held device with an aerial that can hone in on hidden explosives. And you have the security drive to thank for the fact that, in the new room-access keycard systems, you no longer have to suffer the annoyance of card desensitization. New glass laminates have been developed for glazing with minimal to zero ‘splinter effect' in case of a bomb attack.
Above all, says London-based architect Alex Rodgers, who's worked on a number of recent hotel builds in the same city, it's a time for innovation. "It all changed post 9/11; post 7/7," he says. "Those megalith 19th century hotels with their terrible sight-lines? They're not going to work for the 21st century. We have to look, first, to client safety. But this doesn't preclude sexy architecture. Far from it."
Source: Forbes
