Sixty-seven-year-old Ramesh Ramanathan has been selling holidays for the past three decades, but even as he steps down as MD & CEO of Sterling Holiday Resorts and Vikram Lalvani takes over, Ramanathan’s role as Executive Chairman will see that he can’t take too many holidays himself. As he says, he will be focussing on governance, digitisation and special customer experiences, and keeping a benign eye on future expansion.   

Since returning to Sterling — the Fairfax-owned company — as its MD in 2011 in his second stint, Ramanathan has transformed the moribund resorts company, which had fallen on hard days. From 10 resorts and 1,000 rooms, Sterling has added 38 resorts and 2,400 rooms in the past decade. Existing resorts were completely overhauled as well.  

Ramanathan can look back with some satisfaction at having turned around the company. He points to TripAdvisor ratings of 4.5 to 5 for Sterling properties. “I decided to step down as we achieved certain milestones. We became highly profitable in spite of curtailed operations and revenue due to Covid and secondly, we are now a leisure hotels company and not just a time share one. Non-members account for over 60 per cent of the business,” he explains. The resorts company is now on a capex-light model, and signs management contracts with owners of properties, which, he says, is the growth model of the future. “We do have 1,400 rooms of our own, but we also found that building our own resorts or leasing them was very expensive.”   

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Sterling has a land bank of 250 acres and when the company has more cash, Coorg, Goa and Bhimtal are three locations identified for development, he says.   

For Ramanathan, a graduate of Madras Christian College and IIM Calcutta, coming back to resorts was a full circle. After 10 years with Shalimar Paints, he joined the founding team of Sterling Resorts in the ’90s. He moved on to be the founding MD of Mahindra Holidays, then moved to Sify, transitioned to the RPG group, with Ceat and the erstwhile Foodworld, and then returned to Mahindras again before coming on board at Sterling.  

“I am stepping down from Sterling, not from life,” he says, “I am exploring new areas and have also started a charitable trust to help finance school education for disadvantaged children.” He will also have time for the 3,500 Ganesha figures he has collected from all over the world. “I want to give the Ganeshas a home, so my next project is perhaps a small museum. Each piece is unique and represents the art and craft of a region,” he says. His collections include Ganeshas from Tibet, China, Bali, Sri Lanka and even one from Australia! “Only 25 per cent is on display at home and the rest are all in lofts. They are literally guarding me from above,” says Ramanathan, chuckling.

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