A man beyond any Power List, PRS Oberoi is what hospitality legends are made of. CNBC TV18 voted him amongst the Top 18 Indian Business Icons, Forbes honoured him with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, few years after Conde Nast Traveller; he was felicitated with the first Hall Of Fame award at the Hotel Investment Forum India in 2009, barely a year after Ernst & Young and Business India decorated him with honours for shaping India’s Hospitality Landscape. These are only a few of the gorge of awards that the Hotel Mogul has been bestowed with in his lifetime – and yet none of those have effectively capsulated the achievement of the legendary PRS Oberoi – or as the industry lovingly addresses him, Biki Oberoi.
His rise as a hotelier and as an industry game-changer is the holy grail that has inspired many to take the road less travelled to create hotel history – much like the legend himself, who with the Oberoi Hotels transformed the concept of Indian Hospitality. Thanks to him, Indian hotels became a serious competition in the West, who began adopting parts of the excellence called “Oberoi Experience” to bring a new lease of freshness to their brands. A pioneer in creating most of the practices that one believes to be a standard process in Indian hotels, it is under the visionary leadership and entrepreneurial skills that The Oberoi group truly developed and became a steering legacy.
His other brainchild, OCLD, which he set up in 1966, is in fact, considered to be the benchmark of producing the best hoteliers in the world. Little surprise that PRS Oberoi was awarded the Grand Officer of the Alalaoui Wissam, the second highest award in Morocco, but none other than His Majesty King Mohammed VI himself in 2001.
