Indian hotelier Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, known as Biki, died on Nov. 14 at the age of 94, according to a news release from the New Delhi-based hotel firm Oberoi Group.
Between 1984 and 2022, he was the executive chairman of Oberoi’s holding companies, EIH Ltd. and EIH Associated Hotels, the parent company of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts that his father Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi founded in 1934.
Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi was given the top position by his father despite there being an older brother.
Biki is credited with making Oberoi the luxury hotel company it is today and forming, in 1967, hotel school The Oberoi Centre of Learning & Development at New Delhi.
In 2022, he handed over the chairmanship to his nephew Arjun Singh Oberoi, and his son Vikramjit Singh Oberoi is currently CEO.
Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi started working for the family firm in 1954, when his father gave him the opportunity to manage the Maidens New Delhi, a hotel that remains in the portfolio of what is now the EIH businesses.
When he became chairman, the firm had 11 hotels under the Oberoi Hotels & Resorts brand.
The Oberoi brand has 21 owner-operated hotels today — 12 in India, three in Egypt, two in Indonesia and one in each of Mauritius, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also has an alliance partnership with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
The company also owns and operates 10 Trident hotels, all in India, and the 55-room Maidens Hotel Delhi, which opened in 1903.
The Oberoi family has obvious similarities with the Marriott family running Marriott International.
Until Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi’s death, both firms remained within their second generation of leadership and ownership.
At Marriott, John Willard Marriott founded a restaurant business in 1927 that eventually became the hotel company. Following his death in 1985, the reins were handed to his son J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr., who had worked at the firm since 1956. Marriott Jr. remains at the head of the company today at the age of 91.
When Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi bought Indian hotel chain Associated Hotels in 1943, he took possession of The Cecil, now the Oberoi Cecil, in Shimla, India, where he had worked on the front desk or, as other sources state, as a “coal clerk.”
Writing in The Times of India, Bachi Karkaria, who published a 2003 biography of Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi titled “Dare to Dream,” said of Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi that from his parents he “learnt that you could not build palaces without also keeping a watch on the cost of potatoes, but with Biki luxury became an obsession, and the only way to burnish it was to bring to bear upon it his equally legendary attention to detail.”
Karkaria added that he would insist every general manager checked at least 10 guest rooms per day to maintain the exalted standards of his hotels.
“Biki would walk into a room and know at a glance that the carpet has been vigorously shampooed instead of being washed with a gentle detergent. His rationale was: Millions of rupees have gone into creating the brand, the restaurants, the clothes of the [general manager], the choice of silver. A sloppily placed comma could undermine it all,” Karkaria added.
There were times of extreme worry, notably when in 2008 terrorists attacked his adjacent Oberoi, Mumbai, and Trident Hotel Nariman Point Mumbai, which, along with other coordinated atrocities on the same day in the city, resulted in the deaths of 171 people.