The 442-room Grand Hyatt Gurgaon, located on Golf Course Extension Road, sits amidst a mixed-use development surrounded by office towers, upscale cafés like Parisian Café, and restaurants such as Remy's Pizzeria. The self-contained retail and commercial district allows visitors to effortlessly move from meetings to dining to their hotel rooms without leaving the 29-acre integrated complex.
Developers across India are increasingly betting on such clustered, mixed-use projects to maximise convenience and footfall, attracting business travellers and affluent residents with the promise of a seamless, integrated lifestyle, analysts and industry executives said. Hotels are no longer seen as standalone properties, but as self-sufficient mini-city blocks, a trend that began about five years ago and is now gaining momentum.
Luxury hotels are now increasingly appearing within mixed-use developments alongside offices and retail complexes. Projects like VR Bengaluru in Whitefield, which houses The Waverly Hotel & Residences, and Three Sixty West in Mumbai, which integrates the Four Seasons Hotel, are some of the prominent examples of this emerging mixed-use development trend.
The logic is clear: combine offices, retail and hospitality in one location, and demand follows.
“We are now seeing a sharper pick-up in such mixed-use developments across city locations, and are currently evaluating several such projects in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Gurugram and Bengaluru. This is because urban hotels built alongside commercial and retail assets help balance risk. Hotels offer an upside when business demand is strong, and the steady rental income from offices and retail helps cushion downturns during slower periods for hotels,” said Achin Khanna, managing partner, strategic advisory, at Hotelivate.
Indian cities are likely to see a surge in such project developments, analysts said.
“As real estate is being backed more and more by institutional capital, scale and size of the project has started to matter much more, for both the investors and customers,” Ashish Jakhanwala, founder, managing director, and chief executive officer (CEO) of SAMHI Hotels told Mint. “Mixed-use is very attractive as it consolidates demand,” he said, pointing to Phoenix Mills in Mumbai, and Delhi’s Aerocity as early examples of such projects.
SAMHI is currently working on one mixed-use project in Hyderabad, and operates a smaller one in Gurugram with a Holiday Inn Express hotel, which is located within the Good Earth City Centre Mall. "In places like Hyderabad’s financial district, too, projects have retail on lower floors and offices above. This creats its own ecosystem,” he added.
Risk diversification for developers
Such mixed-use developments are especially useful where land is expensive or scarce, and developers are able to build vertically and integrated hotels with other assets. "In places like Punjab, where real estate tends to be quite expensive, promoters often build and sell retail segments of the complex first, hedging their bets and spreading risk," said Ajay K. Bakaya, chairman, Sarovar Hotels, and director of Louvre Hotels India. "We operate many properties that are mixed-use developments in bigger cities. Sometimes, these are three to four floors of hotels stacked above retail or business hubs. We are present in Bengaluru, Delhi and Ghaziabad in these formats.”
“Mixed-use developments were increasingly emerging as a commercially viable model for hotel development in India, particularly in high-density urban markets where land costs were elevated and asset optimisation was critical,” said Mandeep S. Lamba, president and chief executive, south Asia, of hospitality consultancy HVS Anarock. Groups such as Prestige have launched dedicated platforms and sub-brands for premium mixed-use developments, with hospitality built in as a core component.
Bengaluru’s UB City combines hospitality, offices and retail in one integrated complex anchored by the JW Marriott. In Hyderabad, The Westin Hyderabad Mindspace operates within a large office catchment, feeding directly off the surrounding ecosystem.
A mix of corporate tenants, residents, and visitors creates a steady flow of guests, reducing reliance on transient travellers, while revenue from meetings, conferences, and food and beverage supports performance throughout the year. The presence of a hotel also lifts the wider development. Branded hospitality lifts a project’s visibility, driving footfall and infrastructure such as banquet halls and restaurants, while enhancing the appeal of surrounding offices, shops, and residences.
However, execution remains key, and such projects need the right scale to be commercially viable, Lamba of HVS Anarock added.
