Hyatt’s New India Chief Brings an Outsider’s Eye to an Ambitious Growth Story

When Hyatt Hotels appointed Vikas Chawla as president for India and Southwest Asia this month, it made an unconventional choice. Chawla has never run a hotel. His career has been built in food and beverage, at multinationals like Coca-Cola and Compass Group, and in between, at an enterprise he founded and eventually sold. Hotels, he admitted, are “definitely different from whatever I’ve experienced up to now.”

But that may be precisely the point.

Hyatt is in the middle of an ambitious push to double its presence in India, from roughly 55 properties today to 100 by 2030. To get there, it is moving beyond metro cities into spiritual circuits, resort towns, and smaller cities. Executing that kind of expansion requires not just operational muscle but brand discipline, and that is where Chawla’s background proves helpful.

“The kind of experience I bring in, whether it’s Coca-Cola or my own enterprise where I built a brand from scratch before selling