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Across the country, people are extending their homes and hospitality to travellers

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Home, Suite Home
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Homestay FAQ

  • Why? For personal gestures, being close to local culture, home-cooked food, nice domestic touches
  • Where? Anywhere from staying with tribals at Shiyong village in Nagaland and a farming community in Spiti Valley, to a royal family at Fort Rampura, UP
  • How? Check out mahindrahomestays.com, homestaykerala.com, sikkimhomestay.com, incredibleindiaholidays.net among other sites.
  • How much? Anywhere from Rs 500-700 a night for really basic places to Rs 8,000 plus breakfast for heritage/luxurious homestays

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Last summer, Mumbai-dweller and art critic Gopal Mirchandani took it into his head to visit Shiyong village in Nagaland, home to the traditionally head-hunting Konyak tribe. With its idyllic hilltop location, amid tea plantations and rice fields, the place is as remote as it is beautiful, and a less intrepid traveller might have baulked at finding a bed here. But Mirchandani just went online, and quickly enough zeroed in on the charming home of Phejin Konyak, an NIFT graduate who prefers the peace of the hills to the buzz of city life. It was in this homestay, where concrete walls met bamboo stilts and wooden floors, that he spent his nights, using his days to trek from village to village, soaking in the local culture and feasting on traditional Naga yam and bamboo shoot pork curry. “At Phejin’s home,” he recalls gratefully, “I felt like a part of the household. Her brother even lent me his cellphone when mine wouldn’t work.”

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Small gestures like this one go a long way in the world of homestays. It is gestures, after all, that set homestays apart from hotels, as a growing number of Indian tourists are discovering. They are finding out, for example, that at Bhuvan Kumari’s heritage cottage in the gentle hills of Jeolikot, in Kumaon, hot water bottles are tucked into beds as dusk falls. That at Padmini and Keshavendra Singh’s Fort Rampura in UP, you go boating with your hosts, and that at a two-room homestay called Gramam near the Kerala backwaters, owner Jos Byju takes you fishing while his wife Lyma offers cooking lessons. Likewise, you don’t just stay with retired couple Bunny and Amu Puri at their sprawling farmhouse, The Homestead, near Corbett. You also get to know them over a fireplace drink.

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At the end of visits like this one, you might just find yourself writing in the guestbook that your hosts felt like “extended family”; and meaning it too.

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Amu and Bunny Puri's Homestead near Corbett (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

Indeed, many travellers do seem to be scribbling such compliments in guest books across the country, as homestay tourism—which, a decade ago, was mainly a Kerala phenomenon—finally comes of age in India. From cottages set in the harsh landscape of Spiti and farms in Punjab, to bungalows surrounded by coffee plantations in Coorg, beach villas in Maharashtra and havelis in Rajasthan, a variety of homes across the country are attracting travellers looking for offbeat, intimate holiday experiences that are also relatively easy on the pocket. A homestay experience can cost a modest Rs 1,500 a night for a family, with meals thrown in, but even at its most expensive—say, Rs 7,000 a night with breakfast at a luxury ‘heritage’ homestay—it is still a far cry from the rates, and the killer taxes, at plush hotels and resorts.

“At one time, homestays were only popular among foreigners, but in recent times, there has been a lot of interest among Indian travellers,” says Sabina Chopra, co-founder of the popular travel portal, yatra.com, that promotes homestays among its myriad offerings. “The burgeoning homestay market is clearly catering to the evolved Indian traveller, with a mindset that allows him to experiment with how he holidays,” explains Ram Badrinath, market analyst at PhoCusWright, a travel market research firm. Homestays, he points out, are filling the gap in a market where big hotel chains are becoming unaffordable for the middle class, and the cheaper hotels won’t do for them.

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Meet the Patwardhans, a family of five from Pune, who recently holidayed at Sumith Dutta’s cottage near Bhimtal, Emerald Trail, in Uttarakhand, and found there was something there for everybody at Rs 3,800-Rs 5,000 per room including meals. While eight-year-old Tanmay was content to goof around on Dutta’s organic farm and feed hens, his father and grandparents took off on bicycles for serious birdwatching. It wasn’t their first homestay experience—the family had previously holidayed in homes on the Konkan coast—and Tanmay’s father, Ashish, declares himself a fan of the concept. “It is a great option for families because we get home-cooked food, personalised service and flexibility,” he says. For Neerja Saini Sawhney, a jewellery designer from Delhi who recently holidayed at the 70-acre Darang Tea Estate, Palampur, run by Neeru and Naveen Bhandari, the domestic touches mattered: “They pampered us with different kinds of cuisines and endless cups of tea!” she says.

Under the Union tourism ministry’s Incredible India b&b guidelines, anyone with a room to spare can set up a homestay, with the proviso that they can let out no more than five rooms, that they must be “clean, airy, pest-free”, with “a comfortable bed with good quality linen”. The hosts must reside on the property, and run a hygienic kitchen, among other things. States also have their own schemes, especially Kerala, Rajasthan, Karnataka (scenic Coorg is the state’s homestay capital) and Sikkim. However, the number of officially registered homestays is small (Karnataka, for example, has only 259; Kerala, 350; and the Incredible India list of approved b&bs offers a northern region figure that stops at 359), giving a misleading picture of the size of the market. There is, in fact, an explosion of homestays across the country, some tied in with state schemes, others tied in with companies such as Mahindra Homestay, Bharat Homestay, Magic Rooms and Intech Hotel Solutions. Yet others operate on their own, through word of mouth and a presence on the internet. “On weekends, it’s impossible to get a room at homestays in popular tourist destinations such as Chikmagalur and Ooty,” says Niranjan Gupta, managing director, Magic Rooms.

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Kaapi Cats Viju Chengappa (extreme left) walks his guests through his coffee estate, Elephant Corridor, in scenic Coorg (Photograph by Nilotpal Baruah)

In this largely unregulated sector, how do you pick the right homestay, and steer clear of potential disasters? “The social media is where the real information is, in real time. A government licence will only tell you about how the place was two years ago, but an internet review will tell you what happened there two days ago,” says Badrinath. Some homestay regulars say they depend either on word of mouth, or organised sites like Mahindra Homestay, which features only those the company has inspected; others are more adventurous and will go with anything that has garnered a bunch of glowing reviews. It always helps, say travellers, to call the host and fill him in on what you expect. On the flip side, hosts also profile guests. “I take guests only after sensing what they are like over the phone,” explains Bhuvan Kumari, “and alarm bells go off in my head when someone becomes overfamiliar.”

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There are other challenges, too, for both hosts and guests. While the better homestays, keen to score over the impersonal hotel experience, will take a lot of trouble to make guests happy, overexpectation can prove tricky. Bhuvan Kumari recalls a guest who suddenly demanded malai kofta for dinner: “That’s not something you cook at home! I direct such people to the hotels of nearby Nainital,” she says. Recalls Dutta: “When some of my guests asked if I could serve them continental food, I just told them to bring their own ingredients and cook themselves. They arrived with a suitcase of baked beans, pasta and cheese and soon enough I was eating their food!”

For guests, meanwhile, it is important to avoid being overwhelmed. “At a homestay, you have to make it clear from the beginning that you’d like to be left alone a while,” says Neerja, while Ashish points out, “Hotels definitely give you more privacy, so I chose to have a mix: at Bhimtal we chose a homestay while at Corbett we stayed at a resort.” It’s about finding the perfect balance, many hosts concede, between “not making guests feel unwanted, yet giving them their space”. It’s an art they will have plenty of opportunity to perfect, with homestay tourism clearly here to stay.

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