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The year was 2016. “I read about Jeff Bezos’ minimisation regret framework [a decisionmaking concept],” recalls Kapil Chopra. “I said to myself, if I don’t build a global Indian hotel company, I will regret it. Even if I fail, at least I’ll have tried.” At the time, Chopra was president of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts and co-founder of the restaurant aggregator EazyDiner.
A decade later, with 12 hotels in India, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan, the founder and CEO of The Postcard Hotels appears to be succeeding. His luxury boutique hotel chain is set to open eight more in 2026, with 27 projects under construction. This momentum comes on the back of both critical acclaim—their outpost at Durrung Tea Estate in Assam was named hotel of the year in 2025 by the respected journal The Gallivanter’s Guide—and top consumer ratings on platforms such as Booking.com and Tripadvisor.
“It’s the fastest ramp-up of any global hotel company ever in the luxury space,” asserts Chopra. The key to his juggernaut, he insists, lies in creating a “product that challenges the norm”. “In an aspirational economy where people are becoming more affluent by the day, consumers will seek very distinctive hotel experiences. Brands which build exceptional products will be the ones to stand out significantly.” That’s why, he says, not only is he opening hotels in a mix of well-trodden and underserved locations such as south Goa, Leh, Tirupati, and Chitwan (Nepal), but he’s also offering services that leave the customer feeling more valued. “Anytime check-in and check-out. Anytime breakfast. A wine label, which we invested in creating five years ago, exclusive to our customers. Rooms that are 800 square feet and upwards—more than double the industry standard.”
Chopra’s seven-year plan? “Global expansion.” And travel clubs, adventure products coupled with good hospitality, and creative supper clubs. His advice for India’s future hospitality entrepreneurs? “[Jerry Seinfeld] once spoke about letting the work be the win,” he says, quoting the comedian. “Such a powerful thought.”
“Clean rooms, good food, a great night’s sleep— these are the basics of luxury,” says Manvendra Singh Shekhawat. “The future of luxury lies in what you can do, as a hotelier, to help a traveller design their time in truly meaningful and hopefully transformative ways.” In the last 16 years, the hotelier has opened and successfully run hospitality landmarks such as Jaisalmer’s Suryagarh and Bikaner’s Narendra Bhawan. He has excelled at turning his hotels into anchors from where to explore a destination. The Bikaner property, for example, has put that frontier city on every affluent traveller’s map and was awarded One Michelin Key in 2025.
“I’m attempting to change the framework of a hotel from being just a place to stay, to a culture district where hospitality is the foundational layer, so people can experience culture in all formats,” explains Shekhawat. He plans to do this by building exhibition and retail spaces, immersive museums, and performance venues—all anchored by a hotel. To that end, Shekhawat is now restoring historical sites in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, including Lucknow’s Chattar Manzil, an Indo-Italianate palace that’s a former home of the Nawabs of Awadh; and Chunar Fort, near Varanasi, which was once controlled by the 16th century emperor Sher Shah Suri. Shekhawat is also working on creating a tourism circuit combining little-known destinations such as Keoti and Rewa in Madhya Pradesh, which have rich histories of their own.
“Hospitality projects can be lighthouse projects that take the best from a region to the world and bring the most disruptive ideas and the most discerning people from the world to those regions,” Shekhawat says.
From a single hotel in Kochi back in 1954 to becoming a globally recognised eco-aware hospitality chain, CGH Earth has truly travelled the distance. With a strong presence across south India, its 28-strong portfolio of CGH Earth Experience hotels and CGH Earth Saha Experience villas includes the Spice Village in Thekkady, Kerala, Maison Perumal in Puducherry, and Visalam in Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu. Each has played a role in placing their respective destinations on the international tourism map, as have the chain’s cruises on Kerala’s Vembanad Lake.
The hotel that placed CGH on the map, though, is a now-defunct property on Bangaram Island, Lakshadweep. “Back in the ’80s, it was one of the most expensive hotels in India,” says Dominic, referring to the project initiated by his eldest brother, the hospitality industry legend Jose Dominic. “But it wasn’t built luxury in the sense of having TVs and ACs or even room service. Luxury was in the experience of raw nature on this remote island, and that’s what international travellers were interested in back then.” It set the tone for what has evolved into the template of hospitality for this family-run company: respectful of the environment and reflective of each location in aesthetic and culture.
Back in the early 2000s, CGH Earth was arguably one of the first hotel groups that adopted practices tied to enhancing authenticity and sustainability long before they became buzzwords. In 2005, the group was among the first major Indian hotel companies to focus on wellness as a key brand extension when it opened Kalari Kovilakom, a NABH-certified Ayurvedic hospital, in Pallakad, Kerala. Since then, that segment of its portfolio has expanded to four properties. As the group steps outside of its south India domain to open CGH Earth Experience hotels in northern India—the first of three opens in Darjeeling, West Bengal, in August 2026—Dominic says he’s aiming to replicate the CGH Earth template in new geographies. “We learned early on that our employees have to be locals. They are the ones that bring the local culture to the property.”
“When I started managing the business in 1990, I never thought I would have almost 50 hotels by now,” says Priya Paul candidly of her boutique hotel chain—India’s first—that exists across price categories and geographies. It’s a storied roster, from the hotel’s oldest standardbearer, The Park Kolkata, to its newest headline act, Ran Baas The Palace—a part of the erstwhile Patiala royal family residence that’s been masterfully restored by eminent conservation architect Abha Narain Lamba. Then, there are the group’s most recent acquisitions, the Relais Châteaux-member Malabar House and the 14-key Purity on Lake Vembanad. Also in the news is the group’s foray into the branded residences segment in collaboration with the Ambuja Neotia Group. Pasha at The Park Chennai, Someplace Else at The Park Kolkata and i-Bar at The Park Bengaluru have, for years, been staples of those cities’ nightlife. Someplace Else, a resto-bar, has had a following strong enough for Paul to attempt its spin-off as a standalone business, with an outpost in Mumbai opening in 2022.
Having run the New Festival, a pan-India music and dance festival, till 2018, Paul has initiated food (Suvai) and art and architecture (Kalai) festivals in Chettinad. The future of staying relevant, she insists, lies in “personalisation without being intrusive”. “Using technology, AI perhaps, can I intuitively recognise what someone needs? Maybe someone’s stressed and needs cossetting. Or there’s an angry customer entering the hotel. How can my team be alerted so that they don’t further antagonise the person? That’s the key.”
You may not have heard of Ratan Kant Sharma, but you’ve certainly heard of the hotel brands he’s brought into India: Raffles, Fairmont, and, soon, the Waldorf Astoria. A civil engineer by training, Sharma learnt how to build hotels while on the job for his father, a real estate developer in Goa.
“Early on, I realised running a hotel is no piece of cake,” he says, recollecting why he decided not to operate the hotels he builds. The breakthrough came in the early 2000s when Sharma senior decided that Kukas, on the highway between Delhi and Jaipur near Amer Fort, would be a good location to open a hotel. Back then, it was a dead zone. “But that was a no-brainer for us,” says Sharma. “We realised all the international tourists visiting Jaipur would go to Amber Fort. So, it made sense to open a hotel there.” Sharma then convinced Starwood Hotels (now a part of Marriott) to operate the hotel they built under hotel brand Le Méridien. And the world followed. Today, the region is home to some of the biggest brands in hospitality.
“Luckily our gamble paid off, and the revenue guaranteed to us by year three was achieved in the first year itself,” reveals Sharma. “Through that experience, I realised that I’m building a hotel for guests from across the globe. So, I need to design something which people from every part of the world will come and appreciate,” says Sharma. Every hotel he’s built in the past decade (Fairmont Jaipur and Raffles in Udaipur and Jaipur), and is planning to build in the next one (he won’t say where, just that they’ll be in “exotic locations”), expands on the success of his previous openings.
“Hyper-personalisation will be the new luxury currency,” he predicts. “Frankly speaking, we already have preference mapping with respect to food, wellness, sleep etc. even before the guest arrives. Rather than just expecting them to check into a hotel just for the heck of it, we will need to create personalised, authentic, local experiences that will make stays more meaningful for guests.”
“Sosei is not simply another hotel brand; it is conceived as hospitality reborn,” says founder of Soneva, Sonu Shivdasani, speaking of his next innings. The “philosophical grounding” of this new wellness-forward brand will be “shaped by Japanese values” of hospitality. Shivdasani uses words such as kodawari, which is associated with attributes such as perfectionism and attention to detail, and ichigo ichie, which he interprets as never-before-never-again life experiences.
At Sosei, luxury is redefined not by hardware alone, but by the invisible architecture of care: intuitive service, stillness, emotional resonance, and transformative experiences that help guests return to themselves,” explains the hospitality legend. Shivdasani founded and led two highlyacclaimed hospitality offerings, Six Senses Resorts & Spas, which he sold to Pegasus Capital in 2012 and Soneva, where he reduced his share to a minority stake in 2025, handing over operational control to KSL Capital Partners.
“Beautiful design matters, but what guests remember most deeply is how they were made to feel,” says Shivdasani. “Across my earlier brands, many of the most successful ideas were those that created both emotional value for the guest and strong returns for partners, whether in wellness, family experiences, food and beverage, or rare destination-led moments. At Sosei, we are applying that same discipline: creating concepts that are distinctive, commercially intelligent, and deeply aligned with the guest’s evolving desires.
The future of luxury hospitality, he predicts, will be in creating destinations that “offer not simply escape, but renewal”. “Wellness will become more integrated, not isolated in the spa. I believe longevity and diagnostics-based wellness will become a defining force in the sector. Guests increasingly want realistic, medically grounded ways to live better, not just longer. The opportunity is in bringing these advances into hospitality in a way that still feels serene, intuitive, and deeply personal.” Ask him where he sees Sosei in five years and he presents a sunny view of the future. “The goal of our company is to make the hospitality industry kinder, more compassionate, more spiritual, more sustainable and healthier. Sosei intends to break boundaries around health and wellness and bring many health modalities not offered by the medical industry to those who need them.”
“I’m throwing you the gauntlet,” said Yeshwant Holkar to representatives of the automobile company BMW, in the middle of a conversation on subjects of heritage, legacy craft and reinvention, at the India Art Fair opener hosted by Robb Report India earlier this year. “I invite you to Maheshwar where you can sit with our artisans and design Maheshwari textiles to use as upholstery in your vehicles,” said Holkar. “That will be a true interpretation of traditional Indian luxury meeting modern technology.”
That moment amply displayed Holkar’s commitment to using his platform to causes close to his heart, including championing a weaving craft that’s over two centuries old—established as an industry by Holkar’s ancestor, the illustrious Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar. Other than platforming of the artisans of Rehwa Society and WomenWeave, the socially-minded textile agencies that his parents Richard and Sally started in the 1970s and 2000s respectively, Holkar is also the public face of the many philanthropic activities that his family has been involved in for centuries. And he manages two hotels: The Ahilya Fort Heritage Hotel Maheshwar and Ahilya by the Sea, Goa. The latter, once the home of renowned Goan painter António Xavier Trindade, offers refuge to the discerning traveller on the chaotic shores of north Goa. The former, housed within an 18th-century fort high above the river Narmada, in Madhya Pradesh, is a study in the adaptive restoration of heritage structures. “While you preserve its built authenticity, we are trying to reimagine the use of space in a way that it’s selfsustaining,” Holkar said.
To further the cause of conservation, Holkar has also established the Holkar Cultural Centre to research and document Maratha history in Central India. Through The Devi Ahilya Bai Holkar Charitable Memorial Trust, he also hosts the annual The Sacred River Festival on the banks of the Narmada. “Taking that legacy of Maa Saheb Ahilyabai Holkar forward has been the cornerstone for the work of my parents, and my aunt [Maharani Usha Devi Holkar of Indore]. And now, I’ve taken it on,” says Holkar who recently was anointed to succeed his aunt as Maharaja of Indore.