“That’s the last thing I wanted to do,” Mitch Patel said of the hotel business, “because I grew up in it.” Funny how things changed for the founder, president and CEO of Vision Hospitality Group.
A Beautiful Business
“My father came to this great country with $8 in his pocket to pursue the American dream. And that American Dream is no different than anyone else's American Dream—it’s just simply a better life for the next generation,” Patel said. Though his family’s hard work and sacrifice gave them steady success in the hospitality industry, his parents urged him to do something more—become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. “I took the least of the three became a traffic transportation engineer.”
Patel was working in Atlanta, where as a transportation engineer, he’d surely have job security for life. But despite the time, effort and investment it took, “I didn't love it. I just didn't have a passion for it,” he said. “I've always felt like I had a creative mind. And I always felt like I was a people person. And what I was specifically doing didn't allow me to do that.”
Patel saved $3,000 and borrowed from friends and family (with interest) to take advantage of an opportunity to build a hotel as a general contractor, “even though I’d never built a shed before.” Once the hotel was built, he put on a tie and became the general manager of that hotel at the young age of 27. “It wasn't easy, but I found my passion where I never expected to,” he said.
Twenty-seven years later, Patel said he still has that same passion. His Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company now has 42 hotels in nine states, 1,600 employees, and several projects in the pipeline—15 total, with seven under construction. “And,” he added, “we're just getting started.”
The collaborative nature of the hospitality industry never ceases to inspire Patel. Sharing best practices and working together is not typical in many industries, yet he has found time and again that those things happen regularly in hospitality, which he noted is a serious industry not without its challenges, but more importantly, it’s an industry that has “a great purpose.”
Hospitality offers the opportunity to meet some amazing people, Patel explained. “Look at what happens at hotels—the connections that we're making, like wedding celebrations, reunions, milestone birthdays, business transactions, conferences—so much good. We employ millions and millions of people and the economic impact that our industry generates at the local level with property taxes, jobs, then transient taxes on top of the sales taxes… I just think it's a beautiful business.”
Protecting the Industry
The business may be beautiful, but it also needs minding.
Patel heeded the call to get more involved with the American Hotel and Lodging Association, which was originally founded as the American Hotel Protective Association in 1910. “I want to emphasize the word ‘protect,” Patel said. “Of course, I knew the value of the organization,” but acknowledged that he wasn't very engaged with AHLA seven or eight years ago. However, during the pandemic, Patel said that AHLA was the “guiding light in that very dark tunnel.”
Seeing how the association lobbied and educated politicians about the ways they could keep the hospitality industry from collapsing, Patel realized that the time was right for him “to step up, give back, pay it forward and help our industry going forward.” He is currently serving a year’s term as AHLA’s vice-chair, then will step into the role of chair in 2025.
Now, he said, “I'm fully engaged with organization. I believe in the mission. I believe in the team. I believe in the five-year strategic plan that that we have created and that we are following. And it's very simple to meet what AHLA’s mission is for me—it's simply to protect our industry and promote our industry.” Protecting the industry to Patel means owners blocking and fighting onerous policies and advancing positive legislation to protect the industry, and having a level playing field.
“That's all we're asking; we’re not asking for anything more than that. Why should our industry be more regulated or be singled out compared to other industries? We've been around for a long, long time, create tremendous economic impact, great job opportunities where people could come in—thousands of stories. I'm one of those guys. I'm an example where people have come into this industry as a dishwasher or a house person or a bellman, and look at what they've gone on to do. I think that we need to do a better job of telling our stories.”
As for his focus as AHLA chairman, Patel said one major issue is the transient tax. With every community in America looking for revenue streams to fund programs in their respective communities, whether it’s a park, a school, or a police department, Patel said that they're primarily looking for hotel taxes to fund them. “That is unfair,” he stated unequivocally. “I am not against the parks, the schools, the police department—I want to make that very clear. But we—the hotel industry—shouldn't be singled out to help on that. That is taxation without representation.”
Another issue of paramount importance to Patel is combatting human trafficking. When he was made aware of the issue 12 years ago by a women's fund in his hometown, Patel said he felt like he had a responsibility to do something about it, as a hotelier, as the largest hotel employer in the state of Tennessee, in his local community and as a father. Out of that sense of responsibility, Vision Hospitality created one of the first anti-trafficking training programs in the industry, then took it statewide to Memphis, Knoxville and Nashville. The, after partnering with AHLA and the brand companies, awareness has “ballooned” since.
“But then when the pandemic hit, I think the crime escalated,” he said. “We need to continue with the fight. It's something that our entire industry could rally behind and do good. I think that we have a moral responsibility to do that.”
Patel said his job is to educate legislators on the industry, and the way he does so will be uniquely his own. “The experiences that I've had starting my company, being an owner, entrepreneur, operator, and being an employer of so many people, I think I have a different lens to share my story.”
Protecting and promoting the hospitality industry means sharing that “this is about our livelihoods. We put our hard-earned money, our personal money in these ventures… and if we don't grow, if we don't flourish, I think communities won't. It’s important that we educate people outside our industry about who we are, and we educate people to join our industry. We've got to tell those stories and create those opportunities better.”
This article was originally published in the October edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.