Some might consider this an inopportune moment to open a new hotel in Hong Kong. Aron Harilela thinks it’s perfect timing
Can anyone really say anything with absolute certainty these days?
Well, there’s this: “I think 2020 is going to look very ugly,” says Aron Harilela, chairman and CEO of Harilela Group, the Hong Kong-based hospitality company that has owned hotels since it was established by his father, Hari Harilela, and uncle George in 1959. With occupancy rates dropping as low as the single digits industry-wide this spring, no one could argue the year will be anything but a financial disaster for companies that rely heavily on tourism and travel. The big question is what comes next. And certainty holds a great deal of importance in the worldview of Harilela, who, during his recently concluded tenure as chairman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, was frequently vocal about his belief that much of the city’s unrest was rooted in the disillusionment of young people with their government and their future.
“I’ve said this recently, and I will get my wrist slapped for saying it again, but I don’t care,” he says. “I think that people don’t have security in Hong Kong. They don’t.”
Against The Odds
Nevertheless, Harilela, 49, remains decidedly optimistic. So much so, he’s going ahead with plans to open a new upscale hotel, The Hari, a ground-up construction with 210 rooms, a Japanese restaurant and a chic outdoor terrace within the commercial heart of Wan Chai later this year, a move that could have been seen as considerably risky even before the onslaught of a global pandemic.
“We’ve always wanted to reinvest in Hong Kong,” says Harilela during an interview in the Harilela Group offices, just a few blocks from the Holiday Inn Golden Mile in Kowloon that his father opened in 1975. He looks as relaxed and dapper as ever in his signature style of a Milanese custom-tailored suit and open-collared shirt, offset with bracelets of wooden beads and one shaped like a polo mallet. “We’ve gone from Thailand to New York to London, but we’ve never really spent our time reinvesting in Hong Kong, and this is the place that started us in the hotel business.”
Neither protests nor Covid-19, nor a trade war, nor even the swift passing of the National Security Law in June has shaken his confidence.
“This one has to work,” Harilela says. “If it works, and I'm quite certain it will, then this will be the direction of the company.”
See also: The Best Staycations In Hong Kong 2020
Major Player
While the privately held Harilela Group ranks among the hotel industry’s most formidable and savvy players when it comes to buying properties—its portfolio of 16 hotels includes five Holiday Inns throughout Asia, the InterContinental Grand Stanford in Hong Kong, 50 Bowery in New York City and the Grand Coloane Resort in Macau—it had never actually managed a hotel until Harilela, eager to venture in a new direction, opened his first The Hari in London in 2016. That hotel replaced an existing Harilela Group property that was being managed by Thompson Hotels and that had been known as the Sheraton Belgravia when Harilela acquired the building in 1997 (this was just a few years after he completed his studies in law and political philosophy and joined the family business).
But The Hari in Hong Kong, which is being built from scratch, is more symbolic, as the physical representation of the Harilela family’s importance to a city where so many luxury hotel brands are headquartered, including The Peninsula, Mandarin Oriental, Shangri-La, Rosewood, Langham and Ovolo, that hotel rooms might be considered one of its most important exports.
“Well, that's the plan for The Hari: to be recognised, maybe not in the same space as the Mandarin or the Shangri-La, but it will evoke what Hong Kong is all about: dynamism, multiculturalism, just efficiency that comes in a nice way, efficiency that’s not charmless. ‘Charmed efficiency,’ if you can put it that way,” says Harilela.
Family Legacy
The name—The Hari—is obviously a homage to his father, who died in 2014, but it also speaks to the legacy of an extraordinary Indian family that has long fascinated Hongkongers with its incredible spirit of community. The Harilelas live together in a distinctive green mosaic-tiled mansion in Kowloon Tong built in the 1970s that features lavish spaces for entertaining, a temple, a movie theatre and separate apartments for the various branches of the four-generation clan, housing more than 80 people at times. According to the family, Hari Harilela built the compound to fulfil a promise made long before he achieved his success: “As we were together in poverty, we should not separate in wealth.”
It was Naroomal Lilaram Mirchandani, Hari’s father and Aron’s grandfather, a Sindhi Hindu merchant from Hyderabad, who established the family’s presence in East Asia in the 1930s and invented the surname Harilela—a portmanteau of those of his mother, Haribai, and his father, Lilaram.
“He was travelling to India when his mother passed away, and they cremated her before he arrived, so he got very upset with the family,” Aron Harilela says. In Hong Kong, Naroomal’s oldest sons, George and Hari, worked as hawkers and sold precious stones and antiquities, making ends meet during wars and occupations, until the second generation of Harilelas entered the tailoring business, making uniforms for British and American soldiers and opening stores throughout Asia. One of their largest shops was in the Imperial Hotel on Nathan Road, the first property the Harilelas bought in 1959.
