Real estate developer House of Abhinandan Lodha (HoABL) plans to build about 40 boutique resorts under its hospitality business Miros over the next five years as it looks to add smaller, experience-led properties to its existing developments as well as grow the business into independent properties in the coming years.
The company, which announced its Miros brands two years ago, currently operates two such resorts in Goa and is expected to have six properties by the end of the financial year, Ranvir Bhandari, president, Hospitality, Abhinandan Ventures, said, speaking to Mint. Most of the planned properties will have 18-20 rooms and fall into the luxury category, although the company is also evaluating larger hotels in destinations where demand can support them.
The real estate developer has also made a larger luxury play in hotels in destinations such as Ayodhya where work is on to build a hotel that will be run by The Leela Palaces, Hotels & Resorts.
Bhandari said the properties are not being positioned around conventional hotel star ratings but will definitely be luxury-led. Instead, it is targeting the segment occupied by small, high-end experiential resorts, where service, privacy and the location are a bigger part of the proposition than the physical specifications associated with a star classification. The business is expected to compete with independent high-end chains like The Postcard Hotels & Resorts.
The Postcard Hotels had 11 resorts in 2025, with plans to grow to 22 resorts by 2027-28.
“Rather than competing directly with conventional luxury hotels on room count, we expect to use smaller resorts to offer more personalised service, including private buyouts and stays for multigenerational families and small groups,” he said. Miros is being developed within and along the company’s plotted real estate projects, rather than as a standalone hotel portfolio for now. But that won’t always be the case.
At present, the company has residential developments across Ayodhya, Goa, and the Konkan region, including Alibaug, Dapoli, Anjarle, and Neral in Maharashtra. Two other operational resorts are in the foothills of Matheran and along the Konkan coast in Anjarle, Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, while properties in Ayodhya and Alibaug are expected to open by the end of the financial year, Bhandari said.
He said this business will be scaled in different ways including not just running their own properties but also by developing into a hotel management company after the initial 40 properties are set up,
“My reasoned estimate is that genuine experiential-luxury boutique inventory, with sub-30 keys and ₹20,000-plus average room rates, is only in the low thousands of keys nationally. Against organised branded luxury, which runs to tens of thousands of keys, it is a small segment, but one that is growing rapidly,” said Navneet Nagpal, founder, Spectra Hospitality.
Nagpal said demand isn't the constraint at ₹20,000-plus price points, given the shift among affluent Indian travellers toward experiences over possessions. The real challenge is finding 40 genuinely distinct locations and enough skilled staff to deliver consistent, high-touch service, not just filling rooms.
Going beyond clubhouses
The approach is also different from the usual clubhouse model in plotted developments, Bhandari said. “We plan to operate the hospitality facilities ourselves and eventually provide services to villas built by customers within its estates. Our integrated hospitality and lifestyle ecosystem will have one part as boutique resorts, which will have 15-odd rooms, a few villas, which our guests will build and we may service,” Bhandari said.
Gurugram’s Karma Lakelands follows a similar model. In a conventional plotted project, customers may buy land and leave it undeveloped for several years, while the developer moves on to their next project. He said HoABL sees hospitality as a way to remain involved in those estates after the sale. “Normally, what every real estate player does is give you a clubhouse run by some facility manager. We will go beyond that,” Bhandari said.
The company had told Mint in 2024 that it planned to invest ₹1,500-2,000 crore in five luxury hotels across spiritual, cultural and tourism-driven cities, including Varanasi, Vrindavan, Amritsar and Shimla. It also announced a ₹450 crore, 100-key luxury hotel in Ayodhya in partnership with Leela, which is scheduled to open by March 2028.
HoABL had also said it was developing a five-star hotel with 50-100 rooms at its ‘One Goa’ project in Bicholim.
The boutique properties will sit alongside those larger projects. Bhandari said some destinations may eventually warrant full-scale hotels, and the company intends to develop and operate those itself.
In the longer term, Bhandari said the business could operate larger hotels and manage properties for other owners, potentially moving towards an asset-light operating model. Miros expects room rates of about ₹15,000-25,000 on average, depending on the destination.
The company has not disclosed a separate investment corpus for the business, with hospitality spending being incorporated into individual estate developments. Larger hotels could require investment of around ₹3-3.5 crore per room, Bhandari said.
The developer’s existing customer base is expected to provide an initial source of demand. HoABL has a database of about 10,000 customers, Bhandari said, which is expected to double and eventually triple.
India’s leisure hotel supply has expanded nearly fourfold in 16 years, rising from 12,500 rooms in 2008 to 61,000 rooms in 2024, according to hospitality consultancy Horwath HTL.
Leisure hotels accounted for about 30.5% of India’s more than 200,000 branded and formalised hotel rooms in 2025. The segment is expected to grow further. If the current pipeline of 113,000 rooms is delivered as planned, leisure inventory could reach 106,000 rooms by 2029, representing about 35% of the projected 300,000 branded hotel rooms in the country, Horwath HTL said.
Key takeaways
- HoABL plans 40 boutique resorts under Miros brand within five years.
- There are two Goa resorts running now and six are expected by the end of this financial year.
- Resorts target experiential luxury travellers, not conventional hotel star-rating classifications.
- Spectra Hospitality’s Nagpal estimates India's genuine boutique-luxury inventory remains just a few thousand rooms.
- HoABL may shift toward managing hotels for others, an asset-light business model.