The Dark Night That Made £3B Hotel Giant Surinder Arora

Surinder Arora remembers clearly the night in 2008 when he thought he had lost everything. 

“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.

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. 

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.

And it still does. 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 £3B with 8,500 rooms operational or under construction, mainly around Heathrow and Gatwick airports but increasingly in central London, too. 

It 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. 

And having made his fortune after spotting the opportunity to build and own hotels around airports like Heathrow, he is planning one last, crowning job: building a £25B extension to Heathrow itself. 

Arora 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. He does the same today, learning hotel staff by name, and he said people want to work for him because of that attitude.  

To drive down costs, he would drive around the country visiting suppliers of doors or bathroom units, haggling down the price until he had materials to make a superior building within budget constraints. 

“My contractor at EC Harris used to say to me, ‘Why don't you just go away? Come back in two years' time, and we'll give you a hotel,’” he said. “But I was determined.”

His said this attitude is even more important amid today’s rampant construction cost inflation. After originally using external construction companies, Arora Group achieved the scale to create its own construction arm, Grove Developments. 

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 £50K 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 £900M 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. But now, his portfolio also includes properties like the Fairmont in Windsor, and he is converting the Luton Hoo, north of London, into a Fairmont hotel. He is building a golf course there that he hopes will attract the Ryder Cup.

He once bought a hotel in Manchester, but it was too far away for him to get to know the staff and regularly check that the skirting boards had been dusted, so he sold it, he said. 

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.

And 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, later adding the next-door office building for a yet-to-be determined project. 

Arora’s son Sanjay, now CEO of Arora Group as his father stepped into the chairman role, had stressed the need for a central London flagship, and in December, the company paid £245M for the offices of the Ministry of Justice on Petty France in the West End, overlooking St James’s Park. 

The Ministry has a lease on the building running until 2028, after which the company will convert it to a scheme with 500 hotel rooms plus apartments, Arora said. 

But it is at Heathrow where Arora is plotting the “one final project in [his] tank.”

He has been highly critical of the way the airport is run, arguing that it charges high fees to airlines, which are passed on to passengers, but not offering equivalent high-quality services. 

Arora put forward his own £25B development plan for the third runway and extension of the airport being planned by its owners, a consortium including private equity firm Ardian and sovereign and pension funds from Qatar, China, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

He is proposing that different terminals are allowed to compete with each other on pricing to create a market that drives down costs for airlines and passengers, as is the case at U.S. airports like JFK. 

Originally called Heathrow West and expanded into a project called Heathrow Reimagined, Arora’s proposal has the support of major airlines including British Airways and Virgin Atlantic. His firm also owns some of the land on which the extension would need to be built, putting him in a strong position to have an involvement in the plan.

The expansion proposed by the airport’s owners was selected by the government as its preferred option last year, but earlier this year, courts ruled that a competitive process for the right to undertake the expansion must be run. 

Arora has drafted in U.S. engineering giant Bechtel to oversee the project and said he is spending £1M a month on consultancy fees. 

And he said he is not planning to combine his proposal with that of Heathrow. 

“I've been very clear with the government that we're here to work with them, work with Heathrow,” he said. “Heathrow would rather we just jump into their camp, and I said, ‘In that case, I achieve nothing.’”

Building an extension to an airport where he once worked as a clerk and a waiter would be a meaningful final act. 

Arora said he tries to think of his life and career as a stepladder — you have to look back at where you come from while you keep going forward, one step at a time. 

And his toughest times have forged him, he said.

“I look at the valleys and hills, and a lot of people might think that they are winners when they're on top of the hill,” he said. “For me, the real winners in life are down in the valleys, pushing themselves up, because if you can do that once, you'll always be a winner.”