Krishna Shantakumar, Co-Founder, Adevo Academy (95hm Learning Solutions Pvt Ltd)
Somewhere in Coorg, a heritage bungalow with hand-carved teak doors and a century-old coffee estate is hosting its first batch of weekend guests. The property is stunning. The host is warm. The breakfast — made with estate-grown coffee and homemade banana jam — is extraordinary.
But when the guest asks for a late checkout, nobody knows the procedure. When the bathroom runs out of towels, there is no system to ensure replenishment. When the host’s nephew fills in for a day, the experience collapses entirely. By Monday morning, a four-star property has received a three-star review — not for what it offered, but for what it didn’t know how to deliver consistently.
This is not a story about one property in Coorg. It is the story of 200,000-plus homestays and boutique stays across India that are sitting on extraordinary potential — and quietly losing revenue, ratings, and repeat guests to a problem that has nothing to do with their product.
The problem is training. And nobody is building it for them.
The Sector Nobody Trained For
India’s homestay economy is no longer a rounding error. In FY 2024-25, the sector generated an estimated ₹8,200 crore in revenue, growing at 22% year-on-year. The India homestay market, valued at ₹4,722 crore in 2024, is projected to reach nearly ₹32,000 crore by 2033 — a CAGR of over 14%. NITI Aayog, recognising the scale of the opportunity, released its landmark report Rethinking Homestays: Navigating Policy Pathways in August 2025, mapping the sector’s policy gaps and growth roadmap. Domestic tourism is booming: a 2024 Booking.com survey found that 73% of Indian travelers prefer accommodations offering genuine connection to the local community.
The supply side has responded. Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan — every major tourism state has seen a surge in new homestay registrations. States are linking homestays to tourism circuits, building online booking infrastructure, and incentivising hosts to come on-platform. Airbnb has deepened its India presence, launching its Entrepreneurship Academy specifically for Indian hosts.
Yet underneath all of this momentum lies a gap so structural and so overlooked that it risks undermining the entire sector’s quality trajectory.
Only 1% of India’s hospitality workforce holds formal training credentials. For the broader hotel sector, this statistic is alarming. For the homestay sector — where the host IS the brand, the staff, the SOP, and the guest relations team, often simultaneously — it is existential.
The Three-Way Mismatch
Here is what makes the homestay training gap genuinely distinct — and why it cannot be solved by simply redirecting hotel training programmes downward.
The guest expectation has upgraded. The host preparation has not. The modern domestic traveler booking a Munnar heritage bungalow or a Spiti Valley mud-brick home is not an adventurous backpacker willing to overlook service inconsistency. They are, increasingly, a dual-income urban professional who has stayed at a Taj property and is paying ₹6,000 to ₹15,000 a night for what they believe is a premium, curated experience. They carry expectations shaped by luxury travel — and arrive at a property run by someone who has never been trained to meet them.
The host profile is unlike any traditional hospitality operator. Most homestay and boutique stay owners are not career hoteliers. They are retired IAS officers, Bengaluru IT professionals converting inherited family properties, hill-district families generating supplementary income, or first-generation tourism entrepreneurs. They are intelligent, motivated, and deeply invested in their guests’ experience. But they have never been taught what “guest experience” means as an operational system — not as a feeling, but as a repeatable process with standards, measurement, and recovery protocols.
The existing training architecture has no place for them. Institute of Hotel Management programmes are designed for career entrants seeking full-time hotel employment. The Ministry of Tourism’s Capacity Building for Service Providers scheme introduced a 150-hour homestay course — a step in the right direction, but one that scratches the surface of what operational readiness actually demands. Corporate training companies build programmes for hotel chains with HR departments and L&D budgets. Nobody is building for the Coorg bungalow owner with two caretakers and a WhatsApp group for guest bookings.
This is the missing middle. A sector too large to ignore and too different to absorb into existing training infrastructure.
What the Sector Actually Needs
The conversation about homestay training typically defaults to digital literacy and booking platform navigation. Important — but insufficient. What boutique stay owners genuinely need is a training framework built around four specific realities.
Guest journey design for non-standard environments. A hotel’s guest journey is defined and scripted. A homestay’s is improvised by necessity — and that improvisation must be guided. From the first inquiry message to checkout communication, every touchpoint needs a considered approach that reflects the property’s identity while meeting baseline service expectations.
Exception handling without a front desk. In a hotel, the front desk absorbs exceptions — late checkouts, missing amenities, complaint management, medical emergencies. In a homestay, the host handles all of this alone, often without training, at 11 PM on a Saturday. Teaching structured exception handling — what to say, how to compensate, when to escalate — is not a luxury. It is operational survival.
Staff training for rotating, informal, local teams. Most boutique stays rely on one or two local helpers who shift between caretaking, cooking, and housekeeping without defined roles. Training these individuals to a consistent standard — across grooming, communication, room readiness, and meal service — requires a format that is practical, vernacular-ready, and short-cycle. Not a 150-hour certification. A modular, floor-level programme they can absorb and repeat.
SOP documentation tailored to the property’s character. Every boutique stay has a personality. The training and operational systems must preserve that personality while building consistency underneath it. A heritage haveli in Jodhpur and a glass-walled treehouse in Wayanad are not running the same operation. Their SOPs should not look the same either.
Why This Matters Beyond the Property Level
At Adevo Academy, we have built our training and consulting practice for the hospitality industry — hotels, restaurant chains, airport operators, and facility management companies. But the conversations we are increasingly having — with boutique resort operators in the Nilgiris, with homestay clusters in Rajasthan piloted by state tourism boards, with platforms trying to improve the quality of their listed inventory — point to a single conclusion.
India’s homestay economy is building a pipeline of extraordinary experiences. But without a dedicated training architecture, it is also building a pipeline of extraordinary disappointments. The one-star review that kills a property’s algorithm ranking. The guest who doesn’t return. The hospitality moment that almost happened.
The sector has figured out how to bring guests in. It has not figured out how to ensure they consistently leave satisfied. That gap — between arrival and a review worth sharing — lives entirely in training.
A ₹32,000 crore industry by 2033 deserves more than a 150-hour government certificate. It deserves a training category of its own.
Krishna Shantakumar is Co-Founder of Adevo Academy (95hm Learning Solutions Pvt Ltd), a Bengaluru-based hospitality training and consulting firm. Adevo designs structured training programmes and SOP frameworks for hotels, F&B groups, airports, and emerging hospitality formats across India. www.adevo.in
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