Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the world’s largest hotel franchising company, aims to more than double its footprint in India to around 200 hotels by 2028 from 96 currently, as a surge in road construction and airport development in the country’s smaller towns boosts demand for travel and hospitality.
Wyndham, which reported global annual revenue of $1.24 billion in 2025, plans to expand in India through organic growth and strategic alliances, while evaluating, for the first time, opportunities in hotel management and potential acquisitions, the group’s president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Dimitris Manikis told Mint in an interview.
The US-based hospitality company expects to cross the 100-hotel mark before the end of 2026, he said.
“Five years ago when we started hotels in tier-II and III cities, which were far more remote here, quickly began to get new roads and airports and that has made all the difference to these cities and suddenly they have moved up from being tier III or IV to tier I cities. India has at least 30 new airports coming up. Europe for instance, has none. So this is where the future of hospitality lies,” Manikis said.
Manikis said the country is among its top ten global markets. He compared India with Turkey, where it operates 140 hotels across a population of 82 million. “In India, with 1.4 billion people, the sky is the limit, but the country has to do a lot more to attract more international travellers,” he said.
Wyndham, which operates brands such as Ramada, Days Inn, Microtel and Howard Johnson, currently has an occupancy rate of around 70% across its Indian hotel portfolio, with a focus on upscale and mid-market properties and demand driven by road travel and pilgrimage tourism. “We are focused on upscale hotels and won’t necessarily say we are positioned in the luxury category. The first hundred hotels took over a decade but the next hundred will come much faster. Globally, we have about 8,200 hotels,” he said.
Currently, its India portfolio has 30% upscale hotels and 70% mid-market hotels.
Midscale hotels are set to capture a larger share of India’s future supply, rising from 37% of existing branded rooms to 39% of the development pipeline. According to the ‘2025 Hotel Development Cost in India’ report, prepared by hospitality consultancy HVS Anarock and Gleeds Consulting, hotel companies signed agreements to develop about 60,220 rooms in 2025, making it the strongest calendar year for hotel signings.
The figure stood at 47,249 keys in 2024. Hotel fundamentals have strengthened, with average room rates and RevPAR (revenue per available room) growing roughly 5% annually since 2017 and occupancies stabilising in the low-60% range. Expansion is spreading beyond metros into tier-2 and tier-3 cities, where lower land costs and improving infrastructure offer developers a more viable growth equation.
The outbound opportunity
For Manikis, one of the biggest opportunities in global hospitality is outbound Indian travel. He said that Greece, with a population of nine million, attracts 35 million tourists a year, but India with more than 1.4 billion people draws only around 10 million, including business visitors. “Chinese outbound travel is slowing to the rest of the world with a majority of them travelling only within Southeast Asia and Americans are also travelling much less than before. Indian consumers, whose outbound travel is growing at roughly 10% annually, is a key growth engine for the hospitality industry. It is the golden decade for Indian hospitality companies,” he added.
Wyndham’s India business remains 100% franchised, meaning it owns the brands but does not typically own or operate the hotel properties, which has helped the company expand rapidly across tier-II and tier-III cities. Manikis said that the company is open to entering the managed-hotel segment for the first time. “Our first managed property could come before the end of the year,” he added.
Among its four new brands, the company has also signed its first ‘Vienna House Easy’ property, which will come up in Vrindavan in 2029. This follows the recent debut of the first Wyndham Grand in Udaipur in December 2025.
It expects its Vienna House Easy, a four-star brand known for its European design, to gain traction among Indian travellers. Of its 25 global brands, eight are operational in India and four, including Vienna House, will soon become available. The company is also bringing in Dolce by Wyndham, Registry Collection and Laquinta, across the upscale and lifestyle-positioned categories. Dolce will come up in Goa and Udaipur. This will extend the company's portfolio beyond mass-mid-market names such as Days Inn and Ramada towards the upper-mid segment.
Navneet Nagpal, co-founder of hotel consultancy Spectra Hospitality, said Wyndham has signed 11 properties in the first half of 2026 alone, and sees its geographic breadth as a key differentiator.
“Its footprint extends deep into tier-II and tier-III cities and emerging markets, from Jaipur and Kota to Chittorgarh, Guwahati and Khajuraho, beyond the metro-heavy strategies of rivals,” he said.
The company also draws on multiple demand engines, including highway and expressway drive-to travel, tier-II and III weddings and meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions (MICE) business, leisure markets such as Goa and the hills, and spiritual tourism, Nagpal said.