Overview
India's Strongest Brand.
Built on the platform I helped architect.
IHCL (Indian Hotels Company Limited) is one of Asia's largest hospitality conglomerates — operating 150+ hotels globally across 4 continents, 12 countries, and 80+ locations. The brand portfolio spans everything from ultra-luxury palaces and city hotels to private villa stays and aviation. Taj Hotels has been recognised as India's Strongest Brand for five consecutive years (Brand Finance, India 100 2026).
I joined as Technical Lead for tajhotels.com — leading the migration to a modern React/Next.js stack. As the platform expanded, I took on the role of Frontend Architect across all other IHCL sub-brand websites, designing and building a shared digital platform that now powers 10+ live sites spanning wildly different brand segments — from luxury palaces to countryside villas to private jets.
"Not just a hotel website. A digital ecosystem for India's most iconic hospitality group — across luxury, mid-scale, adventure stays, aviation, and beyond."
5×
India's strongest brand
Brand Portfolio
One platform.
Many worlds.
The IHCL portfolio is far more than luxury hotels. It spans palaces, budget-smart stays, private villas in the hills, aviation, and spiritual destinations. Each brand has a completely distinct audience, tone, booking flow, and content strategy — yet all share the same underlying React component system, CMS, and authentication layer.
Taj Hotels
tajhotels.com
Ultra-luxury · Palaces · City hotels · Resorts · Global — India's Strongest Brand 5 years running
Technical Lead
Vivanta
vivantahotels.com
Upper upscale · Contemporary · Business & leisure travellers
Frontend Architect
SeleQtions
seleqtionshotels.com
Curated heritage & character properties with unique stories
Frontend Architect
The Gateway Hotel
gateway-hotels.com
Upper midscale · Business-friendly · Across Indian cities & destinations
Frontend Architect
Ginger
gingerhotels.com
Smart basics · Lean luxe · Value-for-money urban hotels
Frontend Architect
amã Stays & Trails
amastaysandtrails.com
Luxury private villas, bungalows & cottages — heritage homes to mountain retreats across India
Frontend Architect
Claridges Collection
claridges.com
Heritage luxury — The Claridges New Delhi, an iconic landmark property
Frontend Architect
Benares Hotels
benareshotels.com
Spiritual travel · Heritage stays in Varanasi — cultural immersion destination
Frontend Architect
Taj Air · Aero
tajair-tata.aero
Private aviation · Luxury charter flights — entirely different product category
Frontend Architect
IHCL Tata
ihcltata.com
Corporate group platform — investor relations, press, careers, brand overview
Frontend Architect
The breadth here matters — building a shared component system that works equally well for a Taj Palace booking flow and an amã Stays villa listing and a Taj Air charter enquiry is a fundamentally different challenge than building for a single brand.
My Journey
Technical Lead on Taj.
Architect across everything else.
Phase 1 · Mar 2023 — Technical Lead, tajhotels.com
Migration & platform foundations
Joined to lead the frontend migration of tajhotels.com to a modern React + Next.js stack. As Technical Lead I owned component architecture, Sanity CMS integration, booking and loyalty flows, SSO implementation, and the initial shared component system. I also led the team — running sprints, reviews, and mentoring engineers. The successful launch of tajhotels.com delivered measurable revenue uplift and a significant performance improvement that set the benchmark for all subsequent brands.
Phase 2 · Late 2023 — Frontend Architect, sub-brand expansion
Scaling the platform to a portfolio
Following tajhotels.com's success, I was given architectural ownership of the multi-brand platform. I designed the codebase structure that would allow each brand team to build independently while pulling from shared foundations. I led the builds of Vivanta, SeleQtions, Gateway Hotels, Ginger, amã Stays & Trails — each requiring different approaches to content, booking, and UX given their wildly different market positions. The team across brands grew to 20+ engineers.
Phase 3 · 2024–Present — Architect across full IHCL portfolio
Aviation, corporate, heritage & beyond
Extended the platform to Claridges Collection, Benares Hotels, Taj Air (tajair-tata.aero), and ihcltata.com — the corporate group platform. Each presented unique frontend challenges: Taj Air is a completely different product (charter aviation); Benares Hotels requires spiritual travel content flows; IHCL Tata is a corporate information site. I drove platform-wide performance improvements (30%+), led the integration of all three loyalty programmes, and managed production quality to achieve a 40% reduction in bugs across the platform.
Platform Architecture
Shared foundations.
Independent brand expression.
The architecture is built on a federated codebase model — multiple repos, each kept in sync with a main source of truth, sharing common packages across all brands. This gave brand teams autonomy while ensuring performance standards, component quality, and authentication were consistent everywhere. No repo or package names are disclosed publicly.
IHCL Digital Platform — Architecture Overview
tajhotels.com
vivantahotels.com
gateway-hotels.com
gingerhotels.com
amastaysandtrails.com
+ 5 more
Shared React Component Library · Design Token System
Shared Booking & Auth Utilities
Sanity CMS
NestJS SSO Layer
Loyalty APIs
Kotlin Services
IHCL Custom Backend
Payment Gateway
Property Mgmt System
A key detail: the backend is IHCL's own custom-built system — not an off-the-shelf platform. This meant deep, bespoke API integration work for every booking flow, loyalty redemption, and content delivery. The NestJS SSO layer I built abstracts this complexity from the frontend, presenting a unified authentication interface across all brands.
Loyalty Programmes
Three programmes.
Unified frontend experience.
A defining complexity of the IHCL platform is its multi-tier loyalty ecosystem. I led the frontend integration of all three programmes — each with its own business rules, redemption mechanics, and member benefits — unified under a single authentication and account experience across all brands.
Epicure
Premium dining & lifestyle membershipMember-only savings on dining, spa, and stays across Taj properties. Exclusive vouchers, priority reservations, and lifestyle benefits. Frontend required programme-aware booking flows and real-time benefit display per property.
Chambers
Ultra-exclusive by-invitation clubIHCL's most premium tier — personalised concierge, dedicated club spaces, and bespoke experiences for the most frequent Taj guests. Frontend required invitation-gated content and member-exclusive booking paths.
NeuPass
Tata ecosystem cross-brand loyaltyLinks hotel stays to NeuCoins earned across the Tata Digital ecosystem. Members earn and redeem across airlines, retail, and hospitality. Required SSO bridging between IHCL and Tata Digital identity systems — technically the most complex of the three integrations.
Challenges & Solutions
What made this hard.
How I solved it.
Real Challenges
- 10+ brand identities (luxury palaces to budget hotels to villas to aviation) from one shared component system
- Deep integration with IHCL's fully custom backend — no standard API contracts
- Three loyalty programmes each with different business logic and member tiers
- Coordinating 20+ engineers across brand teams with different velocities
- Performance at scale — high booking traffic spikes during peak seasons
- Zero-downtime deployments across 10+ live production sites simultaneously
- amã Stays requires villa-listing UX; Taj Air requires charter enquiry flows — entirely different product types, same platform
How I Approached Them
- Design token system per brand — components stay identical, only tokens override. Brand identity lives in config, not code
- Built a typed API adapter layer between frontend and IHCL backend — insulates UI from backend changes
- Single loyalty context provider with programme-aware hooks — each brand consumes what's relevant
- Clear ownership model with defined interfaces between shared packages and brand layers
- ISR, image optimisation, code splitting, CDN tuning — Lighthouse-driven 30%+ improvements
- Automated cross-repo sync with shared CI pipeline and feature flag-based releases
- Product-specific page templates for different booking types — shared logic, different UX shells
Technology
Stack & tooling
React.js
Next.js
NestJS
Sanity CMS
TypeScript
Kotlin
MobX
Styled Components
REST APIs
GraphQL
Jest / RTL
CI/CD Pipelines
Webpack / Vite
Lighthouse
Chrome DevTools
Outcomes
Results that speak
↑ Rev
Revenue uplift across all migrated brand sitesPost-migration, each brand site recorded an increase in direct bookings and revenue — a result of faster load times, smoother booking flows, improved mobile experience, and real-time offer and pricing integration that the legacy platforms couldn't deliver.
30%+
Platform-wide performance improvementSystematic Lighthouse-driven optimisation across all 10+ sites — ISR, image lazy loading, code splitting, bundle reduction, and CDN configuration. Core Web Vitals improvements directly correlated with improved search rankings and reduced bounce rates.
40%
Reduction in production bugsAchieved through TypeScript enforcement, shared component standards, rigorous code review culture, automated testing, and systematic post-mortems that fed learning back into the development process across all brand teams.
↑ Traffic
Significant organic traffic growth post-launchImproved SEO structure, performance scores, and content delivery drove measurable organic traffic growth across the portfolio — with tajhotels.com seeing the strongest uplift following its migration and becoming India's Strongest Brand for five consecutive years.
10+
Live websites from shared foundationsFrom a luxury palace booking platform to a private villa listing site to a corporate aviation charter enquiry flow — all maintained from a shared codebase and delivered by coordinating 20+ engineers across brand teams.
Reflection
What this engagement taught me
The IHCL platform is the most complex product work I've done — not because of the technology, but because of the breadth of what "one platform" had to mean. A shared component that works for a Taj Palace suite booking, an amã Stays mountain villa listing, and a Taj Air charter enquiry is not the same component. Getting the abstraction layer right — flexible enough for 10 different product types, consistent enough to maintain — required constant iteration and a lot of honest conversations about where shared ended and bespoke began.
Leading as Technical Lead on tajhotels.com while simultaneously being the architect others relied on for all other brands meant I was always operating at two levels at once: deep in the code on one hand, setting direction for the broader platform on the other. That duality — staying technical while thinking systemically — is the skill I'm most proud of developing here.
The loyalty programme integrations also sharpened my appreciation for business logic complexity in the frontend. NeuPass bridging two separate identity systems (IHCL and Tata Digital), Chambers' invitation-gated flows, Epicure's property-specific benefit display — each required the same care as any backend service, just expressed in React.