Hotels approach FM for help

The Hotel Association of India (HAI) reached out to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stating that the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) is not helping the travel and hospitality sector. The scheme was recently extended to cover the hospitality, travel, and tourism sector.

The industry body for hotels opined that ECLGS needs to consider the fact that being highly capital intensive, hotels have a high percentage of fixed costs of operations that have become unsustainable due to nil or negligible revenues. It maintained that the recovery of hotels will also be long drawn as borders will be reopened with extreme caution and traveler confidence will return over an extended period of time.

“Inclusion of State Financial Corporations, Asset Reconstructions Companies (ARCs) and Debt Funds, extension of the moratorium, capping of interest rate at 8 percent, increasing of the delinquency period are some of the suggested customisations,” HAI recommended.