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Do a Google search for P.R.S. Oberoi at the moment and you will stumble upon several articles on his virtues as one of the world’s greatest hoteliers, a worthy inheritor of the legacy of his father, M.S. Oberoi, the man who grew a hotel group from 13 to 33 hotels and introduced Indian luxury to the world.
But my favourite story revolves around eggs, that ubiquitous breakfast item served fried, boiled, scrambled, poached, or as an omelette. Many Oberoi hotel chefs have broken into a sweat at his habit of randomly breaking an egg to check the colour of the yolk, or even sending back his breakfast because the “colour is not right”.
It had to be a deep shade of yellow, or sunrise yellow, or he would ask the kitchen to dump the entire batch. When asked about this quirk, Oberoi once said, “If I go to a hotel and order eggs and the colour of the yolk is not right, I will tell the manager you cannot make an omelette or boiled eggs or even fried eggs from a yolk that is not of the right colour. I consider myself to be a very fussy guest.”
Years ago, on a stroll through The Oberoi Rajvilas, Jaipur, the then general manager of the property, Anshul Kaul had pointed out an intricate network of gardens with regal fountains, jasmine flowers, Gulmohar, Jakaranda, flaming red bottlebrush, and mustard yellow gooseberry or Indian amla trees, through which strolled the resort’s resident peacocks, and said, “Every tree here has been chosen carefully after long discussions with Mr Oberoi, who knows every single thing that has gone into the making of the property, including the kulhads in which we serve chai. Those, too, were chosen by him.”
P.R.S. Oberoi may have insisted that the stories about his attention to detail are “exaggerated” or urban legends, but his constant desire to excel, to offer the best luxury experience to his customers, has come to shape The Oberoi Hotels and Resorts’ very DNA. To a question about his instruction to his team to achieve 99% perfection, he had retorted, “No, it is 99.5%.” Luxury and perfection are difficult to achieve, he admits, perhaps why he allowed for a 0.5% chance of not achieving 100%.
By now, we all know that P.R.S. Oberoi has stepped down as Executive Chairman of East India Hotels (EIH) Limited. His nephew, Arjun Oberoi has taken over as Executive Chairman, while his son Vikramjit Oberoi is MD and CEO. It marks the end of an era, not just for The Oberoi but also for the Indian luxury hospitality industry, for which he set tough new standards.
Taking over a group, and building an empire
The Oberoi Group was set up by Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh. It is a quintessential rags-to-riches story: He was working as a front desk clerk at The Cecil Hotel after having escaped a plague back home. Impressed by his work, his mentor and the owner of The Cecil offered him a partnership. Rai Bahadur Oberoi used the opportunities life presented to buy his first hotel, The Clarkes Hotel, from his mentor in 1954 by mortgaging every asset he had.
By the time P.R.S. (Biki) Oberoi took over in 1984, the group was 13 properties strong.
In 1955, Biki Oberoi had already begun working with The Oberoi Hotels; his first assignment was managing The Grand Hotel in Kolkata. Not many know that he was also in charge of four hotels in Pakistan (through Associated Hotels of India, a leading hospitality company in 1943 that was acquired by his father). After the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the hotels were taken over by the Pakistan government.
But he wasn’t supposed to take over in 1984, not immediately at least. Biki Oberoi travelled the world, hotel-hopping across countries and continents, soaking in lessons at the world’s finest hotels, learning from the standards they set, the guest experiences they created, and the facilities they offered. He had quit the chartered accountancy course he was studying in London and worked for a bit in hotels in Switzerland and France, before setting out on his hotel hopping experience.
Unfortunately, his older brother Tilak Raj Oberoi or Tiki Oberoi, who was heading the hotel group in 1984, passed away. Suddenly Biki Oberoi found himself to be the man in charge since his father had retired.
By the time he hung up his boots this month after 38 years, the group has grown to include 32 hotels, a Nile cruiser, and an Oberoi motor vessel in the backwaters of Kerala.
The Padma Vibhushan winner also established The Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development in 1967 to help build a pipeline of talent. Among those who trained at the centre was Kapil Chopra, who joined The Oberoi Hotels and Resorts as a management trainee - quit it in 2018 after serving as President for five years, to create his brand, The Postcard Hotels. “I credit Mr Oberoi for everything he taught me – from the idea of luxury to putting customer satisfaction above everything else, to his management style. I remember the first 30 minutes of all our meetings were given to analysing customer reviews, and a complaint as small as ‘Why have there been so many complaints about the coffee being served in The Oberoi Mumbai?”
Biki Oberoi’s definition of understated luxury is inspired not just by Indian palaces and forts but also by his peripatetic life. “For Mr Oberoi, luxury is about height, light, and space,” says Chopra. He drew the lesson about height and volume from hotels such as Peninsula and Four Seasons. His focus on unobtrusive service similarly was the result of his travels. Among his many journeys was one to Tokyo “in unpressurised DC-4 aeroplanes,” from Calcutta via Rangoon, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, Biki Oberoi once sought out Bob Burns, who ran the Regent Hotel chain, to ask him why the size of the bathrooms at the hotel had suddenly become voluminous. It led to him insisting on large naturally lit bathrooms in The Oberoi Hotels and Resorts set up or refurbished later.
The Oberoi Vilas properties especially embody Biki Oberoi’s vision of what global level Indian luxury should be. The first of the Vilas properties, The Oberoi Rajvilas, opened in 1998, and was built at Rs 100 crore! Over years, it has won several awards and been rated as one of the world’s best hotels in several different listings.
Several other Vilas properties followed: The Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra; The Oberoi Udaivilas, Udaipur, The Oberoi Vanyavilas, Ranthambore, and The Oberoi Sukhvilas, Chandigarh. In an interview, while opening one of the Vilas properties almost 20 years ago, he said, “I would brief the architect on what I wanted from a hotel. In the case of Agra, I couldn’t have a hotel in Mughal style in front of the Taj Mahal. But I also did not want a glass box. Instead, I suggested Moorish architecture.”
So, how beautiful are Vilas hotels? At The Oberoi Udaivilas, peacocks and white-spotted deer roam free on a 50-acre plot. There’s even an 18th-century palace on site. Biki Oberoi chose to build every Vilas from scratch, rather than resort to buying the many forts and palaces under private control and converting them into palatial hotels. Not many Indian palaces were suitable for conversion into the kind of resort properties he envisaged.
According to Chopra, opening The Oberoi Rajvilas was a rather risky proposition. “Back in 1998, there were no hotels in the country charging over $100 a night in leisure destinations. He has always been ahead of his time.”
All the Vilas properties are in ‘destinations’ that foreigners had already discovered, such as Rajasthan and Agra, which is what made them so successful. Guests did not baulk at the idea of paying $500 to $1000 for the kind of luxury they epitomised.
And yet, that did not stop him from creating a destination where there was none. When Wildflower Hall, Shimla opened in the early 2000s, Mashobra, where it is located, was not the destination it is today. “For the first decade, every year, the hotel made operating losses. In the next decade, the property made so much money that it is one of the most profitable hotels in India,” says Chopra. “I believe Indians began spending on luxury vacations only post 2010. And that is when the fortunes of Wildflower Hall changed. It was discovered by the affluent Indians.”
Biki Oberoi’s passion for his hotels extended beyond the Vilas properties.
When The Oberoi Trident, Mumbai was attacked and parts of it destroyed in that infamous 26/11 terrorist attacks in 2008, a traumatised Biki Oberoi—who was staying at the property but had travelled out for an event—followed the news from his hotel room somewhere in the north of the city.
Two days later, when he returned to the hotel and realised how much was destroyed and how grief-stricken his employees were, Biki Oberoi did two things: He promised his employees they would not lose their jobs and would be paid their salaries and set out to recreate the hotel. At the end of the process, the group had spent Rs 175 crore, and only the outer façade remained unchanged.
The newly reinvented hotel had marble flooring sourced from the Greek island of Thassos. The lobby was airier, the check-in counter was eliminated, and Tiffin, the restaurant where many guests and staff had perished in a grenade attack, was renamed Fenix, a reference to the mythological Phoenix who rose from the ashes. The suites were bigger. And Kandahar, the restaurant serving Northwest Frontier cuisine, had given way to Chef Vineet Bhatia’s Ziya and his version of modern Indian cuisine. The 300 rooms had given way to 287, with The Kohinoor Suite the most expensive at Rs 3 lakh per night.
Chef Bhatia, who had worked with The Oberoi, Mumbai, first in its continental restaurant and then at Kandahar (which he left disappointed because of the “lack of the opportunity to find my voice and experiment”), made a comeback to the hotel with a completely contemporary form of Indian cuisine.
Recalling his first stint at The Oberoi, Mumbai, Chef Bhatia says, “We were told to forget everything we had learnt in catering college. The first three months were spent doing just that, as they trained us to their standards. My heart was in Indian food, so although they put me in the continental section, I used to go down to the Indian kitchen at Kandahar in my spare time. My motives were purely selfish. I went on to run the Indian operations at both the Oberoi hotels in Mumbai. Oberoi, before I moved to London. So, when I was asked to come back and open Ziya, I told Mr Oberoi, ‘If you want someone to make maa ki dal and chicken tikka, then I’m not the right chap for the job’. He gave me a free hand.”
Biki Oberoi did play a big role in designing the Ziya’s experience, which is luxurious without being pompous. The jaalis are all made of gold. The display kitchen has gold tiles on them. When you sit down to eat, the cutlery is gold polished.
The firsts the hotelier introduced to Indian hospitality are many. The Oberoi New Delhi was India’s first hotel to offer 24 hours in-room dining and butler service. It was also the first hotel to introduce a private club for business meetings and the country’s first 24-hour coffee shop, which eventually transformed into 360 degrees, an all-day diner that introduced sushi to the capital city. While setting up The Oberoi Gurgaon, Delhi, he insisted on the mock-up room going through 40 or 50 iterations.
The Oberoi Hotels and Resorts are known for their aesthetics – high ceilings, sprawling gardens, French-style windows, and natural light infusing spaces, including the bathrooms (the refurbished The Oberoi Delhi, The Oberoi Gurgaon, and The Oberoi Mumbai, for instance). And yet, Biki Oberoi believes functionality is much more important than aesthetics.
Biki Oberoi has often said that The Oberoi Hotels stand for, “good accommodation, good food, and excellent service.” Chopra recalls an incident: "I was opening the Trident Gurgaon. It was twilight and he was walking with me. He told me, ‘My only advice to you is, do not compromise on anything, because you are doing so at the expense of guest experience’. In my view, he's the world's finest hotelier, second only to his father. I feel he is a greater hotelier than Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts) or Adrian Zecha (founder of Aman Hotels). They worked in developed markets, while he worked in India, where luxury wasn’t such a well-developed concept thirty or forty years ago.”
Chopra recalls an affluent Delhi guest of The Oberoi Gurgaon telling him: “A napkin in an Oberoi hotel is whiter than my white shirt, and, in Delhi, few can afford a shirt as white as mine.” So obsessive was Biki Oberoi with housekeeping standards at his hotels.
Sanjay Rishi, the former President of American Express South Asia, recalls how he had once asked for a brand of a particular Oolong green tree at an Oberoi hotel. Today, no matter which Oberoi property he stays in, his room is stocked with the brand even before he checks in. Every time a guest checks into an Oberoi property, his details, from his dietary choices to her favourite flowers, sleep patterns, pillow options, and more are fed into a guest management system and shared across the entire Oberoi hotel eco-system.
Biki Oberoi’s need for perfection extended to his team, too. He has confessed that when he enters any of his hotels, he checks out how the staff is dressed and the first thing he looks at is their shoes.
His gumption and guts that led him to create world-class hotels also translated into how much the hotels charged for a room. When it was first built, the Oberoi Gurgaon has the highest room rate in India. He boasted before the opening of The Oberoi, Dubai that the emirate would have seen nothing like it before, despite the presence of global luxury hotel brands.
Biki Oberoi loves the good life: horses, Cohiba cigars, and impeccable style. His ties are perfectly knotted, and he always wears cufflinks and shining shoes. One of his favourite shoe brands is John Lobb, particularly their opera shoes with red insoles and black grosgrain bow. He is as passionate about his dinner jackets, as he is about his hotels. His preferred tea is the Earl Grey. His Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi houses his horses, dogs, and the paintings he has bought over years.
“Mr Oberoi has travelled extensively, and his idea of luxury and the good life is inspired by his travels,” says Chopra. “He has many interesting stories to tell. Once we were talking about brandy, and he talked about his trip to Greece. He broke his leg and was stranded in the country for over a month. And that is when he discovered Metaxa, a sweet brandy to which he took a shine. He introduced me to the brandy and even last month, I bought a bottle of Metaxa!”
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