“Adding Supply Is Easy, Absorbing It Is Hard. In Hospitality, the Guest Never Forgets”: Sohail Mirchandani

In our latest edition of Media mohalla MM Talk’s we spoke with Sohail As part of its conversations with entrepreneurs shaping Indian hospitality, we spoke with Sohail Mirchandani, Chief Operating Officer and Co Founder of EkoStay. An entrepreneur with deep experience in hospitality and property development, Sohail has spent eight years building the operational backbone of one of India’s leading holiday home brands. In this interaction, he talks about the journey since 2018, the changing Indian traveller, the discipline behind scaling a villa hospitality business, and what lies ahead for EkoStay.

Q1. EkoStay has been on quite a journey since 2018. What inspired the idea, and what gap were you trying to solve in Indian hospitality?

When we started out in 2018, the private villa and holiday home space in India was completely unorganised. Beautiful properties existed, but the experience around them did not. A traveller never quite knew what they were walking into. Would the photographs match reality, would the caretaker show up, would the basics work. Hotels offered consistency but not privacy, and villas offered privacy but no consistency.

That was the gap we set out to close. The idea behind EkoStay was simple. Give Indian travellers the warmth and freedom of a private holiday home with the reliability of a professionally run hospitality brand. Eight years in, that founding thought still drives every decision we make.

Q2. As Chief Operating Officer, you own the engine room of the business. What does it take to deliver a consistent experience across so many properties and locations?

Systems, honestly. Hospitality looks like an emotions business from the outside, and it is, but behind every warm guest experience there has to be an unglamorous machine that works every single time. My world is that machine. Backend operations, logistics, partner coordination, vendor management, guest servicing, all of it has to run like clockwork whether the property is a hill villa or a beach home.

The way we have approached it is by standardising everything that should be standard and personalising everything that should be personal. Check ins, housekeeping protocols, quality audits and response times follow one playbook everywhere. The experience inside the stay, the food, the little touches, the local flavour, that is where we let every home have its own soul.

Q3. You come from an Accounting and Finance background. How has that shaped the way you build and run a hospitality company?

It has probably been my biggest advantage. Hospitality is an industry where it is very easy to fall in love with the romance of the product and lose sight of the economics. My training keeps me honest. I look at every decision through numbers first. Occupancy trends, unit economics, cost per stay, repeat rates. If the numbers do not work, the poetry does not matter.

At the same time, I have learnt that data tells you where to look, not what to feel. The numbers might flag a dip in guest satisfaction, but you still have to pick up the phone, talk to guests and caretakers, and find the human story behind the metric. The blend of both is where good operations live.

Q4. Indian travel behaviour has changed dramatically in the last few years. What are the biggest shifts you are seeing on the ground?

The most striking shift is that travel has moved from an occasion to a habit. Earlier, a holiday was an annual event that took months of planning. Today we see travellers taking multiple short breaks through the year, often planned within days. Long weekends have become a serious travel economy of their own.

The second big shift is what people are travelling for. There is a clear move towards slower, quieter, more restorative holidays. Guests are choosing privacy over crowds, experiences over checklists, and homes over hotel corridors. Groups of friends and multi generational families want spaces they can take over completely and make their own. That behaviour sits exactly where we have built EkoStay.

Q5. The holiday home segment is getting crowded. What keeps EkoStay ahead?

Discipline. Anyone can list a villa online. Very few can guarantee what happens after the booking is made. Our edge has always been the seriousness with which we treat operations. Every property we onboard goes through real scrutiny, every stay is backed by processes we have refined over eight years, and every complaint is treated as data that makes the system better.

The other thing is trust with our homeowner partners. We treat their properties like our own assets, and that reputation compounds. In this business your supply is your product, and homeowners choose to stay with brands that respect both their home and their returns.

Q6. What have been the hardest lessons of building EkoStay?

That growth tests your systems far more than it rewards your ambition. In the early days, every new property felt like a victory. We quickly learnt that adding supply is easy and absorbing it is hard. If your operations do not scale with your inventory, the guest pays the price, and in hospitality the guest never forgets. So we have learnt to grow at the pace our quality can keep up with.

The other lesson is about people. This business runs on caretakers, housekeeping teams, local vendors and ground staff, many of them far from any head office. Investing in them, training them and treating them as the front line of the brand is not a soft initiative. It is the whole game.

Q7. You have built this alongside your co founders for eight years. What has kept that partnership working?

Clear lanes and complete trust. Each of us owns a distinct part of the business, and we respect those lanes deeply. I run operations and the numbers side of things, my co founders drive their own domains, and we come together on the big calls. There is very little ego about whose idea wins, because the business has always been bigger than any of us.

We also genuinely enjoy the work. Eight years is a long time, and there have been stretches that tested us, but the shared belief that Indian hospitality deserved a better holiday home experience has never wavered. That common conviction is the glue.

Q8. What is next for EkoStay?

Deeper before wider. We want to strengthen our presence in the destinations our guests love, keep raising the bar on experience quality, and continue investing in the technology and analytics that make every stay smoother, from booking to checkout. The festive and holiday seasons ahead are looking exciting, and we are preparing for them with the same operational rigour we bring to everything.

The larger ambition is simple. When an Indian family thinks of a holiday home anywhere in the country, we want EkoStay to be the name they trust without a second thought. Everything we are building is in service of that.