Who Owns Somani Hotels?

Somani Hotels is owned by one man. Companies House records Mr Hassanali Karmali Alibhai Somani, resident in England, holding more than 50% but less than 75% of Somani Hotels Limited (03929881) since 21 February 2017. It is a genuine family business — a small independent group of hotels in Essex and Hertfordshire, several trading under franchised international brands. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns the Somani Hotels brand?

The company is SOMANI HOTELS LIMITED (03929881), incorporated 21 February 2000 and registered at Bell Common, Epping, Essex.

Its sole person with significant control is Mr Hassanali Karmali Alibhai Somani, at more than 50% but less than 75% of shares, notified 21 February 2017.

This is one of the more straightforward answers on this site, and it is worth saying why that is unusual. Most brands covered here resolve to a listed parent, a private equity chain or a foreign corporation. Here a named individual holds a majority of a company that bears his own surname, and the register says so directly.

Parent company and ultimate owner

There is no parent. Somani Hotels Limited sits at the top of its own structure — no holding company, no fund, no offshore vehicle.

The group is organised as a small set of companies, one for each property or location, all controlled from Essex:

• SOMANI HOTELS (STEVENAGE) LIMITED (06378402, incorporated 2007) — at the Roebuck Inn, Stevenage
• SOMANI HOTELS (CROYDON) LIMITED (09461124, incorporated 2015)
• SOMANI HOTELS (ST ALBANS) LTD (14704087, incorporated 2023) — at Aubrey Park, Redbourn

One company per hotel is standard practice in the trade. It ring-fences each property’s borrowing and liabilities, so a problem at one site does not reach the others — the same logic as the layered holding companies at Heathrow, applied at a very different scale.

Brand owner vs operating company

The distinction matters more here than the group’s size suggests, because the name over the door is often not Somani’s.

The Stevenage company’s registered address is the Best Western Roebuck Inn. Best Western is not an owner and not a chain in the usual sense: it is a membership and marketing organisation that independent hoteliers join, keeping ownership of their own hotels while using the brand, the booking system and the standards.

So a guest booking a Best Western in Stevenage is booking a hotel owned by a family in Essex. The brand supplies the reservation channel; Somani supplies the building, the staff and the risk.

That arrangement is extremely common and almost invisible to guests. Across the industry, hotels operate under four distinct models — owned and operated by the brand, franchised, managed under contract, or affiliated through a consortium like Best Western — and the sign outside is identical in all four.

When the ownership changed

It has not. Somani Hotels has been controlled by the same person since the PSC register began, and the company itself dates from 2000.

• 21 February 2000 — Somani Hotels Limited incorporated.
• 2007 — the Stevenage company is formed.
• 21 February 2017 — the PSC entry is notified, seventeen years to the day after incorporation.
• 2015, 2023 — Croydon and St Albans companies added as the group expands.

The 2017 notification date is a filing event rather than a transaction: the PSC regime began in 2016 and companies filed their entries over the following period. It does not indicate that anything changed hands in 2017.

No sale, no outside investment and no change of control in a quarter of a century.

Related brands in the same group

The group’s hotels trade under a mix of its own name and franchised or affiliated international brands, which is the norm for independent operators of this size.

Somani Hotels is not connected to Best Western‘s ownership, nor to Premier Inn (owned by Whitbread), Travelodge, Holiday Inn (IHG) or Hilton — all separately owned, and most of them operating principally through franchising rather than ownership. IHG and Hilton own comparatively few of the hotels carrying their names.

The general lesson is the one this site draws repeatedly about high street brands: the name on a building is rarely evidence of who owns it. In hotels the gap is wider than in almost any other consumer sector.

Sources and verification

Every company number, incorporation date and the PSC entry with its band and 21 February 2017 date come from Companies House and can be checked directly. The ownership here is register-verified, including the controller’s name and country of residence — which is not the case for most brands covered on this site.

Two limits. The register gives a band, not a percentage: the holding is somewhere between half and three-quarters, and nothing filed narrows it. And the register says nothing about the hotels themselves — which properties the group owns freehold, which it leases, and which brand agreements apply to each are commercial matters, recorded where relevant at HM Land Registry rather than at Companies House, which does not verify most filed information.