Indian American Hotels Scale Up

Gautam and his partners own 64 hotels with 5,400 rooms across the United States, including such properties as the Sheraton in Orlando and Hilton in Atlantic City, N.J. His company also offers to consult and manages luxury properties for third parties in the United States and South America.

Gautam, who came to the United States with $6 in his pockets and built his conglomerate on his own, doesn’t view himself as a first-generation Indian American hotelier: “I would call myself the in-between generation of hotel owners. As I started in the 1990s, unlike the earliest motel owners, who began back in the 1960s.”

Gautam is a veteran among the new generation of Indian American hoteliers who are turning their once modest businesses into luxury empires.