Join us on Our American Stories as we hear from Mike Levin, a visionary leader in the hotel industry known for his incredible work at Las Vegas Sands. His journey took an unexpected turn when he became president of Days Inn, launching him into the world of economy lodging and franchise business. This new challenge quickly revealed a landscape far different from his luxury resort experience, setting the stage for a story about leadership, discovery, and a surprising path to community building in the American hotel industry.
As Mike delved into his new role, he uncovered a troubling reality: widespread prejudice and unfair stereotypes aimed at Asian American hotel owners. Despite the derogatory labels and dismissive attitudes, Mike’s own research revealed a powerful truth – these entrepreneurial hoteliers were often excellent business partners, their properties thriving. This eye-opening discovery ignited a passion to champion fairness and opportunity, leading Mike to take action. This is the inspiring tale of how he helped forge a path toward unity and empowerment for countless individuals, ultimately founding the groundbreaking Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA).
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: Fast forward to 1985. I get the Days Inn job. And the interesting thing about getting the Days Inn job was that I was referred to Henry Silverman by a guy that I had been, I had fired. There was a guy named Dick Appleby, who was the sales director of the Americana Hotel in New York. He did. He was not doing a very good job, and I had to let him go. And a few years later, I’m sitting in my office in Chicago, and I’m on my way to the airport. I had a trip, and I had these message things. Well, the telephone calls, you know, you didn’t have no cell phones then, and, uh. I go to a pay phone. I call the guy back. I said, ‘Vic, how are you? I haven’t spoken to you for three or four years.’
Speaker 1: “Why are you calling?”
Speaker 2: “He said, ‘Well, I’m the sales director for the Tollman-Hundley Company, and they’re looking for to, to recommend somebody to be the president and chief operating officer of Days Inn.’ And I recommended you. I said, ‘Are you, would you be interested?’ I said, ‘Sure, ’cause we’re selling—we’re selling the assets of Americana Hotels now, and then I’m not going to have a job in a few months.’ So, anyway, I get the job. And I, in order to get the job, I’d never been in the economy lodging business, and, uh, and I never really be—I had some franchises at Dunfey. We had some Sheraton franchises at Dunfey, but I never—and we had one franchise at Americana, but I was never really in the franchise business. And it was a very life-changing experience, too. So I decided I would go and sit with a consultant who was at, uh, a consulting company.”
Speaker 1: “In New York.”
Speaker 2: “A guy named Dan Daniellie, who was supposed to be the guru of economy lodging, or it’s just like budget hotels, but, you know, the, the euphemism is economy lodging, you know. So I go see him, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ I said, ‘You know, you have all these curry palaces there.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, they’re owned by Indians.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, Indians? Soup?’ ‘You know, Cherokee? No, Indians from India.’ ‘Oh, window, those—all those Indians.’ I said to him, ‘So what?’ He says, ‘Well, apparently, uh, Henry Silverman and Saul Steinberg bought Days Inn in September, and it’s now, uh, February or March of the following year, and they sold off half of these hotels, many of them to these Indian hotel owners—guys named Patel and Shah and a few people like that. It’s franchises.’ I said, ‘So, what are you telling me?’”
Speaker 2: “He says, ‘Well, they’re very difficult.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, there’s, you know, they call them curry palaces because they live in them, and they cook, so the place smells of curry and the stuff and that and whatever. You know, once again, the same, the establishment is, you know, whatever. He’s the guru or, the consulting in this. He’s a nice guy, too, actually. But, once again, you know, this is the way people would label things.’ So I get to Days Inn, and I start meeting with these people, and about six or eight months later, I hear the same thing inside the company. ‘Well, the quality scores are down, they don’t pay their bills, they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ So, I have a guy calls—comes into my office. A guy calls me up, named Lee Douchef. I said, ‘Who are you?’ He says, ‘I do projects for people.’ I said, ‘Come and see me.’ Just out of the blue, really nice guy comes to see me, and he says, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Mike, I just want to tell you something. “If you’ve got a project that you can’t do, call me, I’ll do it.”‘ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, lots of times I find that people like to do new things in companies, but when they try to do it with the same people, they can’t get them done.’ ‘Well, that makes sense.’ So, he goes away. A couple months later, a guy shows up in my office named H.P. Rama. There’s a very, very serious Hindu. He comes to see me. He said, ‘Mike, we have problems. We had billboards up that say “American r American owned,” which is really derogatory to us because people are saying, “Don’t stay in a, in a Patel-owned hotel or an Indian-owned hotel,” stuff like that. We had problems getting loans from traditional companies, and we can’t get franchises from anybody else other than the lowest end of the pole.’ And, w-I, I, I, I think he had a Days Inn franchise to this guy. I said, ‘I’ll look into it.’”
Speaker 2: “So, I, I, I talked to Douchef, and I said, ‘Come see me.’ But before he did that, I had my people study a hundred or so Asian American-owned hotels that we had. ‘Give me the total amount of quality scores, give me the receivables, give me all the information on honesty on these hotels.’ It turns out they’re exactly the same as anybody else in the chain. There was absolutely—if anything, they paid better. I caught Brian Lee and H.P. ‘We have a meeting,’ and I said, ‘Let’s form an association. Let’s call it the Asian American Hotel Association. H.P., you get me another good, strong Asian guy like yourself, Indian guy like yourself. I’ll set up a board of people with some, quote, “white people,” Asian people mixed, and we’ll start a trade association with the mission being to take your rightful place in the American hotel lodging industry.’ So I went to Silverman. I said, ‘I need a hundred thousand bucks, a budget to run a little conference, convention, bring it, some speakers, do some things like that.’ And then Lee Douchef was to not only organize it, and also helped position the company and me in the industry with the Asians. So I marched in the India Independence State Parade in New York City. I did various things. He got me an education. I started reading the Bhagavad Gita and other stuff, and, uh, I’d learned more about Hinduism than the average person would ever know. We set the membership fee at twenty-five dollars to join the association. We had a convention, and the other industry people didn’t show up to exhibit. I was accused of doing it for business, pe versus, anyway. And fast-forward now: twenty thousand members, the biggest trade show in the hospitality industry. H.B. Rama became the president of AH&LA, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, as the first one. They own over 50 percent of the select-service business in the country. Plus, they’re all—all the sons in the next generation are all massively successful entrepreneurs. I sit on the board of an Asian American company. It’s worth over a billion-dollar company that they built from one. When I went to Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn, no one gave them franchises. I had to get—I gave. Once I started to do it, they all started to do it. They jumped on the bandwagon, and I gave a lot of speeches to Indian groups and whatever. And the best thing about it is: they never forget. They never forget the Bapu. What is their name? Father? It was a name for Gandhi. They never forgot.”
Speaker 1: They never forgot Bapu. That’s Mike’s nickname. Any Indian hotel, that’s what they call them. And we can all be Bapu, and we can all help the other. And here’s the irony. Mike understood the sting of discrimination, remembering the sign at The Breakers Hotel that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’ And, by the way, the Jews were the richest per capita income group in this country despite discrimination, only to be overcome ten years ago by Indian Americans, who were now number one. Fifty percent of all hotel franchises owned by this small group of Americans. The wealth they, of the massed, understanding capitalism, understanding free enterprise, working hard, risking and sacrificing—the American dream wide open for every religion and skin color and minority religions like Jews and Hindus. A beautiful American story. Mike Levin’s story. Bapu’s story, here on Our American Stories.
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