prasad1
Active member
The rise of Indian Americans in the U.S. motel industry. About half the country’s motels are now owned by Indian Americans. A majority of these owners are from Gujarat state’s industrious Patel community, leading them to be jokingly referred to as the Patel Motel Cartel. Growing up in motels run by their immigrant parents, many second- and third-generation Gujaratis in the United States imbibed an entrepreneurial spirit and ethic of hard work, which they are applying to modernizing the businesses they inherited and launching new businesses of their own.
The first Gujarati hotelier in the United States was a man named Kanji Manchhu Desai, who joined two Gujarati farmworkers in California in 1942 to take over a 32-room hotel in Sacramento, California, after the property’s Japanese-American owner was forced to report to a World War II internment camp. According to Mahendra Doshi, a California-based historian who is working on a book about early Gujarati hoteliers in the United States, Desai moved in 1947 to the Hotel Goldfield in San Francisco, whose doors were always open to new immigrants from Gujarat. He encouraged them to enter the hospitality business: “If you are a Patel, lease a hotel.”
Many followed his advice. “They would give each other handshake loans—no collateral, no payment schedule, just pay when you can,” Doshi explains. Once a family purchased a motel, they would live there, and the family members would do all the tasks needed to run it, from cleaning rooms to checking in guests. That helped keep costs down, and profits went toward acquiring new motels. By the 1980s Gujaratis had come to dominate the industry.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/09/south-asia-america-motels-immigration/
I am not a Patel, but I too followed that advice.
The first Gujarati hotelier in the United States was a man named Kanji Manchhu Desai, who joined two Gujarati farmworkers in California in 1942 to take over a 32-room hotel in Sacramento, California, after the property’s Japanese-American owner was forced to report to a World War II internment camp. According to Mahendra Doshi, a California-based historian who is working on a book about early Gujarati hoteliers in the United States, Desai moved in 1947 to the Hotel Goldfield in San Francisco, whose doors were always open to new immigrants from Gujarat. He encouraged them to enter the hospitality business: “If you are a Patel, lease a hotel.”
Many followed his advice. “They would give each other handshake loans—no collateral, no payment schedule, just pay when you can,” Doshi explains. Once a family purchased a motel, they would live there, and the family members would do all the tasks needed to run it, from cleaning rooms to checking in guests. That helped keep costs down, and profits went toward acquiring new motels. By the 1980s Gujaratis had come to dominate the industry.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/09/south-asia-america-motels-immigration/
I am not a Patel, but I too followed that advice.
