Can India’s Leela Hotel Brand Be the Same Under Asset Manager Brookfield?
Skift Take
The name Leela is held in the same esteem as India's other legacy hotel brands such as Taj and Oberoi. Will it ever be the same again under Canada's Brookfield, an asset manager rather than a brand manager?
One of India’s storied hotel brands, Leela, is going to the house of Canadian company Brookfield Asset Management, along with four of five Leela hotels owned by insolvent Hotel Leelaventure.
The deal was disclosed by Hotel Leelaventure in a stock exchange filing earlier this week. A Brookfield-sponsored private real estate fund will pay $576.4 million for the four Leela hotels in Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, and Udaipur, as well as another Hotel Leelaventure property in Agra, and for the brand. All hotel management contracts currently in operation and contracts for hotels under development are also part of the deal.
Known in full as The Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts, the brand has nine hotels in operation and four forthcoming launches in Jaipur, Agra, Bengaluru, and Kerala.
The sale has been in the making since last year. As Skift reported, the Mumbai-based company has been struggling with debt for nearly a decade, a period when the luxury hotel sector in India was battlin
