Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces

Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), branded as Taj Group, is a chain of hotels and resorts headquartered at Oxford House in Mumbai, which was incorporated by the founder of the Tata group, Jamsetji Tata, in the year 1903. This company is a part of the Tata group, one of India's largest business conglomerates. As of 2015, Taj Group operates 108 hotels across India and 17 hotels in the UK, USA, Africa, Maldives, Malaysia, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Middle East, and employed over 13000 people in the year 2010. Taj Group also owns a few private islands.

History

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, founder of the Tata Group, opened the Taj Mahal Palace, a hotel in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay) overlooking the Arabian Sea, on 16 December 1903. It was the first Taj property and the first Taj hotel. There are several anecdotal stories about why Tata opened the Taj hotel. According to a story he decided to open the hotel after an incident involving racial discrimination at the Watson's Hotel in Mumbai, where he was refused entry as the hotel permitted only Europeans. Hotels which accepted only European guests were very common across British India then but it seems far too petty a reason to fire a man of the calibre of Jamsetji Tata. According to another story he opened the hotel when one of his friends expressed his disgust about the hotels which were present in Bombay then. But a more plausible reason was advanced by Lovat Fraser, a close friend of the Tata and one of the early directors of the IHCL group, that the idea had long been in his mind and that he had made a study on the subject. He did not have any desire to own a hotel but he wanted to attract people to India and to improve Bombay. It is said that Jamsetji Tata had travelled to places like London, Paris, Berlin and Düsseldorf to arrange for materials and pieces of art, furniture and interior artefacts for his hotel. The Taj group has since then developed and flourished, under the Tata Group.