What 125 Indian hotel deals say about price per key

The numbers

The NOESIS study covers about 125 disclosed hotel transactions in India, with 37,847 keys and Rs 36,564 crore of disclosed value. That is an average of Rs 0.97 crore per key. (1)

Luxury is where the money is. Twenty-nine luxury deals carried Rs 22,033 crore, about Rs 1.68 crore a key. (1) That is 23% of the deals and 60% of the disclosed value (our arithmetic). Budget hotels sit at the other end: 48 deals covering 14,903 keys at about Rs 0.38 crore a key. (1, 2) Pan-India portfolios drew about US$1.6 billion across 10 deals and 17,259 rooms, and institutional investors accounted for US$2.31 billion of the acquisitions. (2)

Why price per key is only the start

NOESIS says plainly that price per key tells you little on its own. The same asset can mean different things to different buyers, and prices swing with location, category, brand, the capital expenditure a hotel needs and how the deal is structured. (1, 2) Its chief executive, Nandivardhan Jain, puts the logic in one line: "A hotel is not conventional real estate." (2)

The reason is simple. A residential or commercial building is priced on land, construction and rent. A hotel is priced on what the business inside it earns, and on how much of that reaches the owner as free cash flow. Two hotels with the same number of keys can be worth very different amounts.

The deal market around it

JLL reports that India recorded US$567 million of hotel transactions in 2025, up 67% year on year. In the first quarter of 2026 the figure was US$345 million, against US$98 million a year earlier, which put India fourth in Asia Pacific for the quarter and in the top five for the first time. (3) JLL had projected about US$0.5 billion for 2026 and now says the year could approach US$1 billion if the first-quarter pace holds. (3)

JLL's Gaurav Sharma says listed companies have joined private equity firms and family offices as buyers. (3) NOESIS adds that ownership has widened beyond hotel operators to developers, high-net-worth individuals and corporates, and that some buyers are going after insolvency-led deals, brownfield projects and land-linked developments. (2)

What these numbers cannot tell you

• NOESIS is a hotel advisory firm. The report draws on its own assignments and invites owners to ask for a private view of their asset. That does not make the numbers wrong, but treat it as an advisor's study, not an index.
• The sample is disclosed deals only. The materials we saw do not state the date range of the deals, so confirm it in the full report before quoting a year.
• JLL's US$ figures and NOESIS's rupee figures measure different things. We do not compare them.

What we would ask before pricing a hotel (our view)

The AIS Deal Score hotel module asks six questions: (4)

• Revenue performance: RevPAR, occupancy and average daily rate against a comparable set.
• Profitability: gross operating profit and EBITDA margin.
• Brand or operator strength and the terms of the contract.
• Asset quality and the capital expenditure it needs.
• Demand generators and seasonality.
• Licences: classification, liquor and fire.

A per-key price that survives all six is a price. One that does not is a guess.

Limits of this note

Deal data for hotels is thin and mostly self-reported. This is not investment advice. Disclosure: AIS advises on hotel transactions and may benefit from interest in this segment.