New Delhi, Sept. 13: New hotels built or refurbished by partly reassembling architectural material from dismantled old mansions have often left tourists disappointed with their sham antiquity and poor services while selling themselves as "heritage" hotels.

The tourism ministry now plans to address the problem by fixing criteria to determine which of these hotels deserve the official "heritage" tag.

Those that pass the test will be designated either "renaissance" or "adapted" heritage hotels, a new category to be added to the existing brackets of "basic", "grand" and "classic" heritage hotels.

Two kinds of heritage properties will be considered for inclusion under the new genre: those "translocated" from another place and those with higher levels of modern construction than existing heritage properties.

Many properties, mainly in Kerala, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, have been restored or recreated using architectural material from heritage mansions, cottages and palaces, at times in new locations, ministry officials said

"Parts of these properties have been shifted (reassembled at another place) because they were crumbling or were located in places where not many tourists go," a joint secretary told The Telegraph.

"We will declare a new category for such hotels, with their own set of norms, within the next few weeks."

Apart from fixing the service norms, these yardsticks are likely to say:

♦ The façades and architectural features of these (existing or proposed) hotels should bear the distinctive tradition of the place where they have been translocated;

♦ The extensions, renovations and alterations can't exceed 50 per cent of the original design.

"The new category will allow heritage buildings to be heavily modified while keeping their old-world charm intact," a director-level official in the ministry who helps regulate hotels said.

Hotels are now classified into 10 categories, including star hotels, bread-and-breakfasts, guesthouses and heritage hotels. The last group covers hotels running in palaces, castles, forts, havelis, hunting lodges or mansions of any size built before 1950.

Randhir Vikram Singh, general secretary of the Indian Heritage Hotel Association, acknowledged there had been "issues" relating to the standards of services in "reconstructed" heritage properties.

"The government tells us what facilities to provide at basic, classic or grand heritage hotels but there are no such guidelines for adapted heritage properties. Therefore, many guests who choose them for a unique experience feel cheated," he said.

He cited the example of an old mansion in Rajasthan that was translocated from Fatehabad to Bhilwara and converted into a hotel but, he alleged, did not offer services of "heritage" standard.

"Not all such hotels are fleecing guests, though. Several heritage cottages that were moved from the interior villages of Kerala to the beaches around Travancore, for instance, have been a success," Singh said.

Amitabh Devendra, general secretary of the Federation of the Hotels and Restaurants Association of India, said the government needed to find ways of promoting new kinds of hotels to tackle the estimated shortage of 1.92 lakh hotel rooms in the country.