As founder and co-CEO of Ennismore, Pasricha turned a small, indie hotel brand into a global hospitality conglomerate now valued at more than $2 billion. Here, he explains his business strategy and management style in a candid, in-depth interview.
Ennismore CEO Sharan Pasricha inside the Hoxton's co-working space "Working From_Southwark" in London.
At this very moment, someone, somewhere on the grounds of Estelle Manor, the grand English estate commanding 60 acres in the ceremonial county of Oxfordshire, is almost certainly having a delightful time. With 108 rooms and suites, four restaurants, a 25-meter heated swimming pool, fitness center, padel tennis court, kids’ club, private work and lounge spaces — and a new neoclassical Roman bathhouse fit for the emperors who invented the concept, there is an amenity for practically every whim and inclination.
And we haven’t even talked about the outdoor adventure programming, which aims to match the renowned romp of Scotland’s Gleneagles (an Ennismore property) with expert archery, axe throwing, clay shooting, summer boating at the nearby Blenheim Palace, and long, guided tours through the area’s extensive network of public pathways — which one may attempt here, if properly outfitted in Le Chameau wellington boots.
Estelle Manor is a country club and hotel located in West Oxfordshire.
In 2018, the Indian-born, London Business School educated entrepreneur Sharan Pasricha, founder of Ennismore and the Hoxton hotels, bought a fading Jacobean estate called Eynsham Hall. When he reopened the property in spring 2023 as Estelle Manor, he had transformed a building into a luxury destination designed by Roman and Williams. The country club and hotel now evokes the heyday of Downton Abbey — but with free wifi and attainable antibiotics.
Estelle has created such a stir in this sleepy bucolic town, the biggest concern is the threat of paparazzi when A-list celebrities turn up. No drone footage is permitted on the grounds, and don’t even think about snapping selfies in the private club rooms. In this business, these are good problems. The kind of problems Four Seasons founder Isadore Sharp or hotelier Ian Schrager mastered decades ago. The guiding principles that made them great are now apparent in many of Ennismore’s 17 brands — currently comprising 144 operating hotels and resorts (including Gleneagles, Hoxton, SLS, Delano, Mondrian, Mama Shelter, and Rixos), with 100 more in the pipeline.
The company places high importance on creating ambiance and glamor without pretension. “We want class, but not formality… a standard of relaxed elegance,” wrote Isadore Sharp in his 2009 memoir, Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, which Pasricha cites as inspiration. Today, Sharan and his wife, Eiesha Bharti Pasricha, artistic director of Estelle Manor and its sister property, Maison Estelle — one of Mayfair’s most desirable membership clubs — have become luxury travel’s new power couple. Notably, the Pasrichas privately own the Manor lease, which means they have full creative freedom to run the show.
Inside Estelle Manor's "Living Room" bar and lounge.
Still, many in the industry are wondering how Ennismore became the world’s fastest-growing lifestyle hospitality company. The short version is that in October 2021, Ennismore entered into a joint venture with Accor, a French hospitality juggernaut with a $9.2 billion market cap. Accor became the majority owner of Ennismore Holdings Limited, completely morphing the small London-based hotel operator into an “asset-light” growth machine with a stable of 14 brands and little real estate on its balance sheet.
As for how Pasricha plans to juggle his personal real estate bets while running a global management company, comprising private membership clubs, residences, restaurants, bars, co-working spaces, hotels and resorts? That’s an entirely different question.
How do you reconcile the need for creative control with the demands of a publicly-traded conglomerate?
To answer that, I'm going to take you back to how I began my journey with the Hoxton. When I first began [in 2011], I wanted to surround myself with individuals that, like me, didn't have any biases of how things should be done. But they had really strong opinions on what's been done in other industries and how they can apply what they learned in consumer businesses like Nike, or on digital [service] platforms like Spotify, to hotels. Over the years, my approach is trying to figure out a way to industrialize that creativity.
Ten years later, I think the Hoxton is one of the most creative, authentic lifestyle hospitality brands that exists. It's founder-led, but its culture has been so well documented and communicated that it doesn't need me anymore. And that's how I built the brand. I didn't build it so that every decision ultimately has to come to me. I'd say for the first five hotels, I made every decision about everything. And that made me feel important for a handful of years. Now, I turn up as I did when we opened the Hoxton in Brussels and I was walking around thinking God, my team have done such a phenomenal job.
You know, I could have made a decision a long time ago to be a cute, cuddly company with 12 hotels and one brand. But we've decided to take that ethos of building lifestyle hotels at scale, and now we're doing it across 30 countries, 25,000 employees and 17 brands.
The Strathearn, a modern-Scottish fine dining restaurant inside Gleneagles hotel.
Where are you most needed now?
Where we don't have founders. That's kind of where I step in, really working with our teams to make sure our brands have real purpose. Because unless it's got a purpose, then it’s just a product, not a brand. We take brands pretty seriously. Martina Luger, Ennismore’s Chief Brand Officer, joined me almost 10 years ago from Nike. She has built an incredible ecosystem around our structure of brands, making sure there's a good tension between local and localization, [managing] what's covered centrally and then having our founders ensure these brands remain relevant. So that's my role within. Of course, there's brands like Gleneagles and Estelle where we're probably not going to scale them past a handful. With these, every decision still comes up to me and I enjoy it.
How do you know when to stop growing?
I think the beauty with Ennismore and this joint venture with Accor — it allows us to do something fundamentally very unique, whereby you get the best of both worlds. On one hand, you get an entrepreneurial, young, agile, founder-led company. But then you also get the scale, the might and the distribution of Europe's largest hotel company. I think the brilliance of Ennismore is to be able to sit in between that because very few small founder-led companies have scaled past 10, 12, 15 hotels. They either get fully acquired, in which case they get integrated into the larger entities, or they remain autonomous, which is what we've managed to do with [Accor CEO] Sébastien Bazin’s support.
We're 144 operating hotels, with 100 in the pipeline. That's a big, big operation. And our types of hotels are not ones where you could simply just hand a brand manual to an owner and say ‘see you in three years,’ like you would perhaps with some of the other formulaic, big box hotels. So much about what we do is about connecting with the local community. A lot of people say that, but 50% of our revenues come from outside the bedrooms.
That’s high. How do you pull that off consistently?
When so much of our business is outside of the bedroom, it means we've got revenues around restaurants, bars, day clubs, coworking spaces, and memberships. And that means we spend an awful amount of time thinking about the role these hotels play within these communities. We're not building a hotel restaurant, we're building a restaurant for people that live and work in the area. It's built to compete with High Street; which means it's got to do a lot more than, you know, a club sandwich and a burger. It's got to have a really unique point of view and be beautifully designed with fantastic service. And it’s got to have credibility with the locals by putting all those things together in a way that feels authentic and genuine. That's really hard to do.
The Hoxton Brussels' co-working café and lounge titled "Working From_ Brussels."
When I look at Ennismore, there are other business principles at play. You mentioned Spotify and Nike. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure, a few things come to mind. I've forever been inspired by Amazon's 1-click checkout. And by what Shopify has managed to do for e-commerce. Hotel websites are typically painful, and require way too many clicks. When we started, I was astounded by how many hotel companies felt it was okay to click 30 times to actually buy the thing you want to buy.
So we started by saying: hang on a minute, why can't we have Apple Pay on this website to check out in three seconds? Why can’t the way you select your room be inspired by how somebody is shown goods and services on e-commerce? Five years and a dozen software engineers, a dozen product managers, and a handful of tech support folks later, we've built an incredible platform where brands like the Hoxton get about 50% of our business directly through our website. Very few hotel brands can boast numbers as high as that.
Does that mean Expedia and Booking.com are becoming less important?
That’s meaningful for a number of reasons, especially in this age of metasearch and online travel, Booking.com and Expedia and all the rest, which are expensive channels for brands like ours. Whereas if somebody comes straight to our brand.com, the cost is minimal, and it means our customers are engaging with our platform, which we think is most important.
The second reason is it really reduces the cost of acquisition for our owners, because no longer do you have to go and acquire a customer by paying 20% on an expensive channel; the customer is coming to your website. My ambition over the next few years is to ensure that every one of our brands has a disproportionate share of customers booking on our channels.
What are three key trends or themes that you think will shape the market in the coming year?
There's probably three trends that I think are interesting. The first one is around personalization and this idea where people are looking for personalized moments. Ways to customize experiences that cater to individual needs. And how as an operator, as a management company like ourselves, how do we do that using technology, or algorithms to predict all those individual experiences?
Ultimately, it's on us to figure out how we can use data to deliver a more precise experience because at the end of the day, what’s the one thing that's the most memorable in your stay? Imagine the impact we could have across all of our hotels with access to that information, whether it is your wedding anniversary or the things that are meaningful to you, because that's the business we're in. We’re creating those moments that are memorable, and remain in your heart. Anyone can design a beautiful space or serve good food, but is it really going to have an imprint on you?
Second, is this world of wellness. I'm certainly not a wellness guru, but I think it's so much more than traditional facilities around gyms and spas. It's really thinking about nutrition and mindfulness and going deep into what wellness means for you. In today's day and age, you've got to think of it holistically. And as part of that, we’re thinking about sports and wellness brand collaborations to make sure we're always offering things that are new and dynamic.
For us, the final piece is around this idea of instant gratification — the belief that guests don't really want to wait for benefits. They don't want to accrue them. And this is why our program Dis-loyalty really plays to that, which is a shift away from traditional loyalty based points spending to a more subscription-led model that might attract a younger, broader audience.
So Dis-loyalty is a challenge to the traditional points system?
I wouldn't say it's a direct challenge. For us, it's a new distribution channel. Accor has a successful loyalty program that is used in many of our hotels. This is our take on thinking about our customer, the lifestyle customer who wants a lot more than just a bed for a night. Our belief is that they want something different. We’re trying to think like the customer: What would I want? What would I pay for and consider valuable? It’s kind of a disruptive mindset, because all of this is part of our quest to drive more business through our direct channels. That's the ambition, and in that we’ve been very successful.
The Mondrian Ibiza hotel, operated by Ennismore.
Why is lifestyle such a fast growing segment in the market?
Owners are pivoting to more high-touch, high-experience hotels, and they are doing it because they generate more revenue and therefore more profit per square foot, compared to traditional cookie-cutter hotels. If you think of a lifestyle retailer versus a traditional big box hotel, the costs are often similar. Sometimes all you need to do is spend 20% less on the bedroom, but choose a good designer and apply that money to the public spaces. Now you say okay, this ground floor is going to be the epicenter of where people want to come, have fun and be energized. So, how can I program the space?
This is where we love coming in, and sitting across from owners that say: I'm used to this big box brand and I've been working with them for a long time. We show them how we can drive more revenue by programming the space differently. Because our business is to drive value to our owners and our partners. You can only do that if you've got obviously great brands, great design, great operations, but ultimately it boils down to delivering a bottom line to your owner that is disproportionate to a traditional hotel. And I think we're doing a pretty decent job of that so far.
This interview has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.