Conversation
One of a Kind
A conversation with Aditya Samadhiya, founder of ONEOFF Hotels
Varanasi has a way of making you feel as if time is not a straight line. It loops. It returns. It doubles back on itself. You can walk a lane off Dashashwamedh Ghat and hear a temple bell, a scooter horn, a shopkeeper calling out tea, and the river breathing somewhere behind it all. The city does not announce itself. It accumulates.
Aditya, Founder of ONEOFF Hotels
It is an unlikely place, on paper, to debut a modern hospitality brand. It is also exactly the kind of place where a founder with strong opinions about sameness would start.
Aditya is warm, unhurried, and quietly direct. The kind of person who has sat through enough “brand playbooks” to know that most of them turn into templates, and most templates end in boredom. He is the founder of ONEOFF Hotels, a young hospitality brand building what the industry claims it wants, but rarely has the discipline to execute. A portfolio where each property is genuinely, irreducibly different.
The name is not accidental. ONEOFF. As in, there will never be another one exactly like it.
From Gwalior to the ghats
Aditya grew up in Gwalior, studied in Bombay, and found hospitality through travel rather than marble lobbies. He talks about the kind of trips where you end up in a hostel common room at midnight, sitting on a floor cushion, learning someone’s life story in the span of a single cup of chai.
He spent time with Poshtel, India’s earliest posh social hostel/hotel, absorbing what he calls “social hospitality”. Spaces designed not just for sleep, but for collision. For strangers becoming briefly, genuinely familiar.
Before COVID interrupted everything, he was consulting for a property in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. After it, he joined Minimalist Hotels as their expansion head.
Scale teaches you many things. It teaches you what breaks first. It teaches you what a team will do at 2:00 AM when the occupancy is high, the supplies are low, and a guest wants the impossible. It also teaches you something else. As brands grow, they tend to compress.
“A hotel in Goa would look exactly like a hotel in Varanasi,” he says. “Safe. Predictable. The design became a formula.”
That observation became the starting point for ONEOFF Hotels.
The problem with safe
Boutique hotel chains have an unavoidable identity dilemma. They either stay truly independent, which often means one brilliant property and no replication. Or they scale by standardising, which is commercially sensible, and aesthetically numbing.
ONEOFF Hotels is built on a different premise. What if you could grow, but every single property still told a completely unique story. Not just a different colour palette, or a different local art print above the bed. A different personality entirely, drawn from the neighbourhood, the architecture, the city’s rhythm, and the kind of traveller the place naturally attracts.
“If you stayed at ONEOFF Dashashwamedh and then ONEOFF X,” he says, “you would not know they were from the same brand. That is the point.”
Why Varanasi first
Varanasi was not chosen for romance alone, although the city offers plenty of that. It was chosen because, operationally and commercially, it made sense.
There is demand without a true off-season. There is a broad mix of travellers, from foreign guests drawn to the history and ritual, to domestic guests arriving for family visits, ceremonies, and pilgrimages. There is also a very specific gap. Despite consistent footfall, quality boutique accommodation has been limited.
Aditya also had practical tailwinds. A strong network from his Minimalist years. Familiarity with the local deal dynamics. A sense of what would work, and what would quietly bleed cash.
He frames Varanasi as a city that already has story and texture. Hospitality here does not need to invent meaning. It needs to curate it.
“If you are afraid of making the wrong decision,” he says, “you will never create something genuinely unique.”
Two properties, two philosophies
The first property, ONEOFF Dashashwamedh, runs at over 90% occupancy with monthly revenue of roughly ₹15 lakhs.
The second, ONEOFF X, is an apart-hotel format. It is sold as a unit rather than per key. It runs at 95% occupancy and ₹18 to ₹20 lakhs a month.
OPEX sits at around 30%, significantly below the industry average. Aditya says this is not an accident. It is a by-product of design decisions that were made with operations in mind, and operations decisions that were made with the guest in mind.
A third Varanasi property, with 14 rooms and a café, launches imminently. By the end of 2026, the target is eight hotels.
The line that stays with you
At the end of our conversation, I asked Aditya what he would say to someone just starting out.
He did not hesitate. “Stay foolish, stay hungry.”
Then, after a pause. “And do not be afraid to fail. The fear of the wrong decision is what makes everything look the same.”
In the end, ONEOFF Hotels is a bet against sameness. So far, it is paying off.
