Newstrack

Akkayya Consultancy Services looks to build convention centre

Gayatri Vijaykumar - Bangalore

Akkayya Consultancy Services, promoter of E-Inn - a no-alcohol, no-smoke and no-meat business hotel - located in Electronic city, Bangalore, has announced plans to build a convention centre near the current E-Inn.

Still under negotiations, it is in the process of looking out for land adjacent to the hotel. General manager of E-Inn, Nitin R Phadnis, explains, "One of our next ventures will be a convention centre that will seat around 2,000-5,000 guests. The location of the hotel is a USP. Most multinational companies are located at Electronic City and a convention centre there would be perfect."

Earlier, Akkayya Consultancy Services had announced plans of launching 108 more E-Inns throughout the country with an investment of more than Rs 5,000 crore by 2015. "We have plans of expanding to tier II cities and will be applying the same concept of no-smoke, no-alcohol and no-meat in all our forthcoming properties," Phadnis said.

According to him, the fact that Akkaya Consultancy has branches in most cities would make this plan easy. "We follow a very different philosophy; ours is not to make money, our philosophy is about providing healthy and personalised services to all our guests. Here, we know we might get a beating in terms of revenue but we still want to go ahead with this concept, keeping quality service in mind. We feel that service should not get diluted for reasons of revenue," added Phadnis.

Built with an investment of more than Rs 100 crore, the 252-room E-Inn has received mixed response. "A hard-core non-vegetarian will not be convinced by the idea of pure vegetarian food with no alcohol. However, we try to compensate the non-availability of non-vegetarian food by providing a wider spread consisting of 18 dishes," said Phadnis.