Surinder Arora remembers clearly the night in 2008 when he thought he had lost everything. Having borrowed heavily to expand in the run-up to the financial crisis, Arora's business was under extreme pressure. One of his debt providers, struggling Irish lender Allied Irish Bank, had sold his loans to a hedge fund, which wanted its money back, and he was facing defaults.
"It was 2, 3 a.m. in the morning. You can't sleep. I must have cried so much that you could squeeze water out of the pillow," recounted Arora, a hotel and property entrepreneur who founded Arora Group. As his wife slept, he feared that he would lose not just the business but his house and his family's assets. "That night, all the things going through my head, I can now see why people jump under trains, jump in a lake, jump off a bridge. All those things are going through your horrible head," he said.
In the morning, he decided he was going to fight. He would find a way to support not just his family but also the 1,800 people he employed across a business that owned more airport hotels than anyone else in the UK. After nearly losing everything, Arora pulled the business back from the brink, and today, Arora Group is bigger than ever, with a portfolio valued at more than £3 billion with 8,500 rooms operational or under construction, mainly around Heathrow and Gatwick airports but increasingly in central London, too.
The company now employs more than 3,000 people across three divisions: property ownership, construction and hotel operations. This rebound is just one chapter in one of the UK's most remarkable entrepreneurial stories, told to an audience of more than 200 at Bisnow's UK Hotel Real Estate Summit, held at one of Arora Group's most recent purchases, the Novotel London West.
Arora arrived in Southall, west London, from the Punjab region of India at 13 speaking no English. After leaving school with no formal qualifications, he worked as a junior clerk at British Airways and at the same time took an evening job waiting tables at what became the Renaissance London Heathrow, a hotel he now owns. He started his journey into hotel ownership and management running a small bed-and-breakfast near Heathrow, but he wanted to target what was then an untapped market: hotels near airports for airline staff and crew members, and now travellers as well.
He persuaded AIB to lend him the money to build a 300-room hotel, even though the bank thought it would be easier to make a profit just selling the land he owned. But he wanted the challenge, and in 1999, he opened the Arora International Heathrow. "I'm very hands-on," he said of his attitude to building and running hotels. "I know nothing, but I want to find out everything." He would wander around the site of early projects, talking to bricklayers and electricians, finding out exactly how they did their job and how it could be made easier.
Arora described himself as "an opportunist rather than a strategist," rarely looking very far ahead in his plans. He relies on his instincts, such as the time he came up with a business plan for a new hotel development project in 20 minutes on the back of a napkin. A consultant took two months to create a detailed forecast, and the two estimates were within £50,000 on a cost and revenue plan running into the tens of millions of pounds.
Arora has learned some lessons along the way. Between 2006 and 2008, Arora Group spent about £900 million on new assets, a big part of which came through borrowing. Now, the company primarily uses cash for new acquisitions, and its overall leverage ratio has gone from 70-80% to around 30%. The company now has 20 hotels in its portfolio, 15 owned and five leased, the vast majority clustered around Heathrow and Gatwick.
Flagship hotels include the 605-room Sofitel London Heathrow, the only hotel that connects directly to Heathrow Terminal 5, and the 821-room Hilton London Gatwick Airport, which connects directly to Gatwick's South Terminal. The company has gradually been making more of a mark in central London. In 2016, it built the 493-room InterContinental-The O2, and in 2025, it bought the 630-room Novotel in Hammersmith. Arora is also converting the Luton Hoo, north of London, into a Fairmont hotel and building a golf course there that he hopes will attract the Ryder Cup.