Giri Hotels has quietly grown from 16 to 54 hotels primarily across Massachusetts and Maine since 2016 — with four more properties in the pipeline.
Ryan Amin, principal partner, said that Giri’s owners like to be able to drive to their hotels to maintain a family feel and “to remember where we come from.”
That regionality has been stretched a bit with new locations in Vermont and upstate New York, but Amin said there is still plenty of opportunity in the operator’s core states. Right now, he said, the focus is more on disposing midscale limited-service properties and acquiring more upscale locations and resorts. Giri, which Amin owns with three partners, owns and manages all of its assets and aims to continue doing so.
Giri, which according to Amin means either mountain or aspiration in Hindi, was created by its founding partner Ashish Sangani in 2006. Sagar Malavia joined him in 2010.
Amin’s own career began with his family’s 15-room motel in Massachusetts. He bought his first hotel in 2009, eventually taking on Sangani and Malavia as partners in 2017 and merging with Giri. Ankur Patel joined as a partner in 2020.
The Giri partners "are all best friends and all family oriented and that is reflected in how we operate,” Amin said.
The company is highly self-sufficient, Amin said. It builds its own hotels and does all of its own procurement. Giri even has its own software solution to deal with online travel agency payments called Reconcile OTA, a separate business that ensures that hotels are paid by OTAs. He sells the service to other operators, and it is now used by thousands of hotels.
“We always want to advocate for putting profits back into hotels and their teams,“ he said.
Another separate operation is an employee tipping system called TipGratify which is also sold to other operators, but on a smaller scale.
Currently, Giri’s inventory involves 60% to 40% branded vs non-branded hotels. However, its non-branded properties — mostly resorts — have a much greater asset value.
Giri has grown large enough that it has separate clusters within it. One group is marketed separately as the Ogunquit Resort Collection. It includes seven properties in the tourist-rich Maine coastal town. Giri's largest resort, Anchorage by the Sea, was purchased for a “nine-figure sum,” said Amin. CoStar data shows Giri bought the resort for $100 million in 2023.
Because of the diversity of Giri’s properties, Amin said, “the fun part of our business is that we get to have a different viewpoint every day with different mindsets.”
A number of executives from a boutique hotel operator were recently hired as Giri moves more aggressively into that segment.
Because of the weather in the region in which the hotels are located, Giri is running a highly seasonal business. Many locations are in secondary markets with a focus on leisure travel. Although nearly all of the properties are open year-round, there is a need for additional staff from May to October, and Giri uses 300 H-2B visa employees every year, Amin said.
With all the turmoil around visas these days, Amin is now recruiting actively in Puerto Rico rather than Honduras and Jamaica to avoid immigration issues. In the past, Giri has actively supported immigrants, sponsoring green cards for staff. The company has also offered $1,000 loans to employees and has loaned a total of $400,000 with a 98% payback rate.
In addition, Giri has a 60-person team in India which handles reservations, accounting and more and is “a huge support for hotels because they get all the calls so that on-property staff can pay more attention to guests," Amin said.
In the last year, Giri has seen a technology “revolution” with a new property management system, new central reservations system and a new text reservation system.
Giri has the resources to upgrade newly purchased hotels, Amin said. He added that maintenance is also key, asserting that the company always spends its full 4% reserves on improvements every year. One restaurant — the Porter Kitchen & Restaurant at Harraseeket in Freeport, Maine — was recently redone for $750,000.
Looking ahead, Amin said he thinks business might be a bit slower this year with rising costs and slowing revenue. Although Canadian business was a sizable portion of the market in the early days, that segment has been in decline since then, so any losses there will not be as substantial.
On the positive side, Amin said he believes that independent hotels now enjoy the technology that enables them to outperform brands and can be more agile in the leisure space. But Giri will still be open to branded locations when it’s best for a specific market, he said.
Even as Giri grows, family is still central, Amin said. His mother, Polly Amin, is vice president of operations and oversees hotels in the Ogunquit area. Kamlesh Amin, Ryan’s father, is vice president of design and construction. And family members of the partners are also involved in the business.