SREE ESPRIT: A FAMILY WITH ROOTS IN INDIA AND FIJI MARK THEIR 40TH YEAR EXPANDING IN THE CAROLINAS HOTEL INDUSTRY.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Interstate 95 was just opening in the flatlands of eastern South Carolina, and gas at the local Gulf station was $1.05 a gallon. Florence, like many cities, was still struggling with public school integration when brothers Ravi and Chandra Patel showed up to buy a small roadside hotel in 1980.

"Go back where you came from," they were told. Competitors slapped "American owned" signs in their windows. "There was a lot of discrimination against Indian-Americans," nephew Vinay Patel says. They were undaunted.

"Hoteliers like Charlotte's Patel family had to overcome discrimination, sometimes in banking, sometimes in insurance, and sometimes even in their own communities," adds Cecil Staton, CEO of the 19,500-member, Atlanta-based Asian American Hotel Owners Association. "That," adds the former chancellor of East Carolina University, "is an unfortunate part of their story."

Forty years later, Ravi and Chandra Patel, now in their 70s, head Charlotte-based Sree Hotels, one of the Southeast's largest hotel chains, as chairman and vice chairman. Sree's more than two dozen Carolinas and Ohio hotels include mainstays of select or limited-service brands such as SpringHill Suites, Courtyard by Marriott, Marriott Residence Inn, Fairfield Inn and Aloft.

Among current ventures, Sree has more than $40 million in hotels under design in the Triangle for more than 200 rooms slated to operate as SpringHill Suites and TownPlace Suites franchises.

Like everyone in the hospitality industry, Sree has been slammed by the novel corona virus pandemic since February. Vacancy rates in the state's 154,000-room lodging industry soared as high as 90% because of stay-at-home orders. Like others, Sree responded by shutting down entire floors to consolidate resources and reducing staffing to minimum levels, hoping to avoid layoffs. As of mid-May, it had furloughed many of its 800 employees.

Sree is pushing ahead on its two newest projects despite the collapsed economy, reflecting the company's staying power. "Construction at the Courtyard by Marriott in Cincinnati is ongoing, and the permitting progress is still underway in Raleigh," Vinay says.

Sree's growth from a rundown roadside motel to a major Southeast lodging developer combines business, ethnic and cultural forces. Indian-Americans own more than half of North Carolina's 1,768 hotels, according to the Raleigh-based N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association and other sources, and as many as 80% of independent motels...