Legacy of Dreams

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Koreans arriving in the 1970s specialized in apparel manufacturing for some of the same reasons Indian immigrants gravitated toward the hotel industry: those businesses let them use family members as staff, conduct transactions in cash and get by with minimal English or experience. The Patel family's entry into the hotel business is exceedingly typical, right down to their surname. Natu Patel, a banana farmer in the Gujarat region of India — where most of the U.S.'s Indian hoteliers have roots and the majority of residents are named Patel — arrived in San Francisco nearly three decades ago with his family and $10. He learned the business working for motels owned by wife Hansa's relatives and then sought out affordable properties in remote regions before settling on a small inn in Cleveland, Tenn., later adding motels in Waco, Texas, and Kennesaw, Ga.

Priti Patel, 33, hardly remembers another life. At 8, she was counting change and working the front desk. "I used to hate it," she says. "Everybody else gets to go home after school and get a snack. I had to help at the hotel. On weekends I had to cut grass." When friends drove by and saw her working, she would feel embarrassed. Still, the industry intrigued her enough to pursue a business degree at the University of Tennessee, and afterward she worked for the Small Business Administration. She returned to the family's HNP Enterprises to take over as manager of the Kennesaw motel in 1997.

Patel's management style differs from that of her parents. For one thing, she refuses to live on property, choosing instead to separate her work life from her family. Unlike her parents, who prefer to do the work themselves, she employs a housekeeping manager, a desk manager and a sales manager to oversee the property in her place. "I let go a lot more than my dad does," she says. Patel and her brother Hitesh, 25, plan to expand into restaurant franchises. Though their methods and goals may differ, says Patel, their father is proud of their achievements. "That's why he sent us to school."

Education is proving a key tool in grooming the second generation of Indian hoteliers. Unlike, say, the construction business, hospitality is an immigrant-heavy industry with a ready infrastructure of formal training. Over the past five years or so, as a new generation has come of age, students of Indian background have flooded hotel schools like the one at Cornell University. There they learn how to broker acquisitions, arrange complicated financing, set up room-booking technology and modernize marketing. Many take internships and first jobs in related fields like real estate or investment banking. The training helps "prepare them to take on an industry vastly more competitive and complex than when their parents entered it," says Cornell professor Chekitan Dev.

The new generation of Indian-American hotel owners is also learning, sometimes the hard way, how to play politics. After Sept. 11, ethnic-Indian proprietors suffered a wave of xenophobia, exhibited by signs outside competing hotels that claimed AMERICAN OWNED AND OPERATED. The bias cut into bookings, hurting business in an already devastating climate for travel. Yet while major hotel corporations lobbied for and received relief from Washington, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association had no presence or influence there to follow suit. "We learned from that," says Naresh (Nash) Patel, 38, current chairman of the association and a second-generation hotel owner. The group swiftly launched lobbying efforts and invited politicians like Newt Gingrich to speak at its gatherings. It set up a nationwide program to provide free hotel rooms for families of active military members on leave. Nash Patel called the owner of a Florida hotel with an offending sign. The owner took it down.