IME Group, one of Nepal's most prominent business conglomerates, is moving to turn its homegrown hotel brand 'Ila' into a nationwide hospitality chain, with its hospitality arm, IME Hospitality, saying the expansion is designed to promote tourism and develop tourism infrastructure across the country. The brand currently operates three hotels: a 65-room Ila Resort in Gaindakot of Nawalpur, a 35-room Ila Comfort in Harkapur and a 30-room Ila in Baglung Bazar, giving it a combined inventory of 130 rooms. Alongside the geographical push, the group is making a pointed promise on price, saying it offers international-standard service at roughly half the fee charged by international chain hotels operating in Nepal.
International standards at half the price
The pricing claim sits at the centre of Ila's positioning. According to IME Hospitality, guests at its hotels receive service that meets international benchmarks while paying about 50 percent less than what the international chain hotels now operating in Nepal charge. In effect, the group is pitching Ila as a full-service alternative to the global brands that have come to define the upper tier of Nepal's hotel market, betting that a strong domestic identity and a sharply lower tariff will draw travellers who might otherwise assume that international-standard service is out of reach.
IME Group Chairman Chandra Dhakal has been the most visible champion of that message. Speaking on the group's hospitality ambitions, Dhakal said IME is providing international-standard hotel services under its own brand, a formulation that frames Ila not as a budget experiment but as a deliberate attempt to prove that Nepali companies can compete with foreign chains on quality as well as cost. His comments were carried by Nepal Press and Nagarik News.
The appeal of the model, at least on paper, is straightforward: if the group's arithmetic holds, a traveller can expect the same standard of accommodation and service at a significantly lower outlay, freeing up budget for the rest of the trip. For a country that has stated its ambition to promote tourism more widely, an affordably priced and reliably standardised hotel product is a potentially powerful tool in widening the base of both domestic and foreign visitors.
The Ila portfolio: three hotels, 130 rooms
The brand's current footprint is modest but deliberately varied, spanning three distinct formats:
- Ila Resort, Gaindakot (Nawalpur): With 65 rooms, this is the largest property in the line-up and the brand's flagship, carrying the full 'Ila Resort' title.
- Ila Comfort, Harkapur: A 35-room hotel that occupies the middle tier of the brand's naming structure.
- Ila, Baglung Bazar: The smallest of the three at 30 rooms, anchored in the Baglung Bazar area.
The naming convention, moving from Ila Resort to Ila Comfort to the core Ila identity, suggests a tiered brand architecture that the group can extend to new properties as it grows, slotting each future hotel into the format that best suits its market and location.
Notably, all three existing hotels sit outside the Kathmandu Valley, in Gaindakot, Harkapur and Baglung Bazar. That distribution tracks closely with the group's stated purpose of building tourism infrastructure across the country rather than concentrating it in the capital, and it gives Ila early operating experience in markets that look very different from Kathmandu's established hotel corridor.
Reaching all seven provinces
The ambition behind those early hotels becomes clearer in the group's stated plans. As RatoPati reports, IME Group is working to expand tourism infrastructure in all seven provinces of Nepal, a scope that takes in the Tarai, the hills and the mountains alike. IME Hospitality has tied the growth of the Ila brand directly to that goal, describing the chain's expansion as a vehicle for promoting tourism and developing the accommodation infrastructure that a broader tourism economy requires.
The strategy also reflects a wider calculation. Rather than hosting international brands under franchise or management agreements, IME has chosen to build and own a Nepali identity, keeping the brand equity at home while still promising the service standards that travellers associate with global chains. That approach carries the challenge that 'Ila' must earn its reputation property by property, but it also means any goodwill the brand generates accrues to the group itself rather than to a foreign licensor.
For now, the group's message is one of confidence. With three hotels already operating, a chairman publicly committed to international-standard service under a Nepali name, and an expansion plan that contemplates all seven provinces, IME Group has positioned Ila as one of the most ambitious homegrown hotel projects in the country. Whether the brand can hold its rates at roughly half of the international chains' while sustaining service quality across a national footprint will be the test to watch as the rollout proceeds.
