Texas-based Patel Family Office has signed a partnership agreement with Dammam, Saudi Arabia-based Abdelmalik Tariq Al-Qahtani Co., an affiliate of Abdel Hadi A. Al-Qahtani & Sons, to develop business hotels across Saudi Arabia.
The $1 billion agreement, which will see up to 50 hotels bearing the names of international brands by 2029, will be delivered “at scale” via new vertically integrated hospitality platform AYARA.
Lakshmi Narayanan, vice chairman and managing partner at Patel Family Office and chairman of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, said in a news release that “the size of the 50-hotel AYARA network places the Patel Family Office-AHQ partnership among the largest individual hotel investment deals in Saudi Arabia to date.”
The two partners have between them 130 years of history and experience, with AHQ having been founded in the early 1940s.
Narayanan added that the AYARA brand is designed specifically to address a structural hotel supply gap in Saudi Arabia. The country's Saudi Vision 2030 tourism plan is weighted more toward premium luxury segments.
“The fastest-growing demand is for reliable, branded mid-market business hotels — driven by corporate mobility, infrastructure development and relocation of regional headquarters,” according to the news release.
The integrated structure, which will include hospitality management, land acquisition, modular construction and FF&E manufacturing, has been designed to “enable faster delivery and cost efficiency,” the release said.
The plan is to open between 5,000 and 7,000 rooms by 2029 in key markets such as Dammam, Jeddah and Riyadh and in giga-project development such as NEOM and the Red Sea region.
Saudi Arabia’s “transformation is creating a new category of demand for reliable, practical and standardized business hospitality. Platforms like AYARA — combining global expertise with local execution — will play a critical role in meeting that demand," Narayanan said in the release.
In the release, Abdulmalik Tariq Al-Qahtani, CEO of AHQ and chairman of ATQ Hospitality Group, said for the country to realize its 2030 ambitions, there is a requirement for “new partnerships and new approaches to deliver economic transformation at the unprecedented scale we are seeing in Saudi Arabia.
“By integrating construction, procurement and hotel operations in the AYARA platform, we are establishing a new standard for development speed and efficiency,” he said.
The Patel Family Office, active since the late 1970s, has developed, owned, operated and sold a variety of select-service and full-service hotels, and it also has interests in multifamily apartments, technology and Fintech. Along with Texas, it also has offices in Canada, India and the United Kingdom.