Nagpur NRHA sets ceiling on commission by hotels to rope in customers

Nagpur Residential Hotels Association (NRHA) held special general body meeting at Hotel Darshan Towers recently to discuss various issues pertaining to hotel industry. 
The meeting was chaired by its president Prakash Trivedi. 
Vice president of NRHA Govind K Mudliar , treasurer, Santosh Gupta, joint secretaries Deepak Pandey and Vinod Joshi were also present on the dais.
Secretary of NRHA Tejinder Singh Renu, informed that in this meeting it was unanimously decided that from now onwards maximum limit of rickshaw tip will be ` 100 per room which means any member who wishes to pay less than ` 100- or doesn"t pay at all, is free to do so.
Renu said, NRHA further resolved that to regulate these two serious issues threatening hotel business, a five members committee has been constituted. The meeting will be headed by Kishore Rai of Hotel Rahul Group. 
Other members of this Committee are Deepak Khurana (Hotel Woodlands), Tarun Motwani (Hotel Dwarka), Swapnil Warambhe (Hotel Sukhkarta) and Gautam Gundecha (Hotel Rangoli). 
Tejinder Singh Renu said, the growing trend of paying rickshaw tip / commission originated from tourist stations and gradually the system was adopted by hotels in business cities to attract new customers. 
Likewise Nagpur adopted this pattern in 1980s, when commission of ` 10 and ` 5 was paid on double and single room respectively. However gradually number of rooms overtook requirements. 
This caused competition and resulted into unprecedented hike in rickshaw tip by many new hoteliers, which now reached alarming figures of ` 800 - 900. 
Similarly another worrisome situation arose as many hotels in the name of guest house, service apartments or similar have mushroomed in residential areas of the city in past 4-5 years and started giving facilities at par with any good hotel and majority of them are doing business without obtaining police licenses, NMC licence, likewise evading luxury tax, service tax, entertainment tax and other similar indirect taxes, thus saving almost 25 per cent cost as compared to licensed hotels causing major business damage and in return also causing major leakage to the government exchequer. 
Among others present in the meeting were Rajan Mulani, Mahesh Trivedi, C K Chaurasia, Vijay Sawarkar, Nitin Trivedi, Subhash Jaiswal, Rishi Tuli, Murtuza Fidvi, Sudhir Jaiswal, Rajesh Dharmik, Anil Walokar, Suddu Vaidya, Girish Motwani, Dhiru Mehta, Gaurishankar Mishra, Rajendra Huda, Pralhad Ramrakhiyani and others.