India’s hotel expansion turns skills into the sector’s biggest hiring question
India's largest hotel groups are adding hundreds of properties and employers expect to keep hiring. Skilling programmes from IHCL and the government are growing, but placement figures show the gap still to close.
Sasha Brown
3 min read
India hospitality hiring is being driven by one of the fastest hotel expansions anywhere. Groups including IHCL, ITC Hotels and Lemon Tree are signing properties at pace, and every opening needs trained front office, food and beverage and housekeeping teams.
The pipeline behind India hospitality hiring
IHCL reported 20 signings and 11 openings in the first quarter of FY27, taking its portfolio to 645 hotels, 382 operating and 263 in the pipeline, with more than 66,000 keys. Its Accelerate 2030 plan targets 700 hotels. ITC Hotels is aiming for 220 operating hotels and more than 20,000 rooms by 2030, while Lemon Tree ended FY26 with 269 hotels, 131 operating and 138 in the pipeline, after 56 signings.
Employers expect to keep recruiting. The TeamLease Employment Outlook forecasts a 5.1% net employment change for travel and hospitality in the first half of FY2026-27, with 63% of employers planning to grow headcount and salaries projected to rise 9.2%, Asian Hospitality reported. Indore, Kochi and Lucknow show the strongest expansion plans. Balasubramanian A, Senior Vice President at TeamLease Services, described the period as “a phase of stabilization within a structurally expanding sector”.
A Booking.com and Statista survey of 285 Indian hoteliers found properties plan to hire an average of 9.9 new staff over 12 months, with managerial roles the hardest to fill and 41% planning to spend more on training.
Skilling programmes scale up
IHCL’s Paathya programme had trained 42,000 young people across 83 skilling centres by May 2026, against a target of 100,000 by 2030, and by July the company put the total at more than 49,000. “At IHCL, we believe that skilling is a powerful catalyst for employment generation and social transformation,” said Gaurav Pokhariyal, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, in an IHCL release. Read our earlier report on Paathya reaching 42,000 youth.
The Ministry of Tourism’s main scheme, Capacity Building for Service Providers, trained 89,801 people in 2024-25, of whom 25,158 were placed, according to a parliamentary reply in March 2026. Provisional figures for 2025-26 to the end of February showed just 570 trained and 17 placed. Across FY21 to FY25, more than 1.68 lakh people were trained and more than 36,000 placed.
Mind the placement gap
Those figures point to the central challenge: training numbers are large, but conversion into jobs is much lower, and the sector lacks a reliable industry-wide attrition measure. The demand is not going away. The WTTC forecasts Indian travel and tourism employment rising from 46.3 million in 2024 to 63.9 million by 2035.
Seasonal peaks add pressure. Adecco India expects hospitality hiring for the 2026 festive season to grow 25%, and Indeed found interest in hotel manager roles rose 52% during the last wedding season. Our report on seasonal hiring for festive 2026 covers the wider picture.
What recruiters can do
For hotel groups, the practical answers sit close to home: linking skilling centres directly to opening pipelines, offering structured progression for front-line recruits so managerial gaps are filled internally, recruiting in the Tier II and III cities where many new hotels are opening, as with Ginger’s Hyderabad debut, and tracking placement and retention as closely as training volumes.
