Aman built one of the strongest brands in hospitality by refusing to behave like one. It kept its resorts small, its locations remote and its marketing silent, and it let its guests do the talking. That formula faces its hardest test. Aman has become a global group with hotels in New York, Tokyo and Bangkok, branded residences, a second hotel brand, a retail collection and a yacht under construction. The strategic question is whether a brand founded on scarcity can grow without spending the very quality that made it valuable.
Aman is one of the iconic brands to have emerged from Asia. Widely regarded as one of the most exclusive hotel brands in the world, Aman is known for ultra premium service and luxury, high profile clientele and some of the most remarkable locations in the world. True to the meaning of its name – Aman means peace in Sanskrit – Aman has built up a reputation of providing a divine and peaceful experience by maintaining exclusivity and being totally discreet about its clients, among them many famous celebrities.
Despite not going by the trodden path of traditional brand building, Aman has managed to build one of the strongest brands in the hospitality industry across the world. Creating a perfect blend of a resort experience with the local history, culture and heritage, Aman has been able to create a real world paradise. As with most iconic brands in the world, Aman was guided by its visionary founder, the Indonesian-born hotelier Adrian Zecha, and his clear cut business strategy right from the start.
The brand equity was built by creating a very strong and distinct personality in line with the organisation’s philosophy. For most of its first quarter-century, the management team led by Adrian Zecha ensured a continuous investment in all aspects of the brand to ensure consistent delivery of Aman’s brand promises.
Zecha left the company in 2014. Since then Aman has been led by its owner, Vladislav Doronin, who serves as chairman and chief executive, and it has changed more in a decade than in the 26 years before. The footprint has grown from fewer than 30 properties to 36 hotels, resorts and residence developments in 21 countries, with more announced. Sovereign and institutional investors have come in as minority shareholders. The company that once sent postcards to announce a new resort sells furniture, skincare and membership of private clubs.
This article examines how the Aman brand was built and what has happened to it under new ownership. Its lessons reach well beyond hospitality. Aman is a case study in founder-led brand building, in the cost of unstable ownership and in the discipline required to scale a luxury brand.
Every owner-led and family-controlled enterprise must answer the same questions in its own way.
Aman was born out of Adrian Zecha’s strong contempt towards corporatisation of the hotel and resort industry. He came to hotels late. Born in 1933 in Sukabumi, West Java, the third of five sons in a plantation family, Zecha declined the medical career his father had chosen for him and became a journalist. He took a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in the United States, joined Time magazine as a reporter and worked in its Tokyo office from 1956 to 1958. He went on to publish magazines about Asia from Hong Kong.
He entered the hotel business at 39 and became a partner in Regent International Hotels, one of Asia’s first luxury hotel groups, selling his shares in 1986. The experience taught him the trade and left him with a firm view of what luxury hotels had become.
The inspiration lay elsewhere. As a young reporter in Japan, Zecha had come to admire the traditional ryokan inn for its smallness and its absence of contrivance, and he has said that this was where his interest in hotels began.
The first of the Aman resorts opened in Phuket, Thailand in 1988 and it was called Amanpuri. It was never planned as a business. Zecha had been looking for a site for a holiday home, found a coconut plantation above Pansea Beach and decided to build a small hotel where friends could stay. Anil Thadani, a founding director, later recalled that the partners built Aman for the life they wanted for themselves and found that many others wanted it too.
Based on its founding philosophy, Amanpuri had fewer than 50 rooms as against the over 400 room norms of the big hotel chains. This was a part of the strategy. By having fewer than 50 rooms in each of the Aman resorts, the company was consistently able to provide a world-class personalised service to every guest. The limit had a practical purpose: with so few rooms, staff could know every guest by sight.
Twelve years after Amanpuri opened, the entire chain of 11 resorts had only 406 rooms. Aman has commanded some of the highest room rates in the industry and has made a principle of not discounting them.
The strategy has been so successful that by 2026 Aman had its “pieces of paradise” spread across 21 countries, from Bhutan and Cambodia to Greece, Morocco and the United States, with further projects announced.
Right location is the key factor in the hotel industry, and particularly for a luxury brand like Aman, it simply defines the success of the company. Adrian Zecha is known for being a great site locator and has an impeccable nose for future sites. “If there’s anything I have contributed, I spot the sites,” he said in 2019. He said Croatia would become the next hot destination in Europe while the Balkan war was still tearing countries apart. Many of the greatest and often hidden locations in the world reside with old families who only rarely consider selling their heritage jewels. When they did decide to sell, it was very likely Zecha would get the first call due to his reputation and exclusive network.
The point about old families matters, and it has outlasted the founder. Aman’s access to exceptional sites has always depended on the trust of the families who hold them. As a later section shows, two of the brand’s most significant openings of 2025 are partnerships with business families who chose to keep their property and bring in Aman as operator.
Aman has emerged as one of the iconic brands of the global hospitality industry. Apart from a pro-active and supportive top-management, a dedicated alignment of the corporate vision with the branding strategies and programmes has been the other main factor contributing to the brand’s success.
Aman’s corporate strategy and hence its branding strategy has been built on four main pillars:
Right from the start, Aman has strived to be as far from being a typical commercial resort chain as possible. The founders’ aversion towards corporatisation of the hotel industry has led to a very unique work culture and atmosphere within Aman. With an objective of providing an excellent personalised service to all its guests, the staff members are constantly urged to be as innovative and creative in their service as possible to make every interaction with the guests a memorable experience. Most of the managerial and other staff that Aman recruited in its formative years were primarily people who had no experience in the hotel industry but possessed the right attitude and the ability to conform to the Aman culture. This was very strictly adhered to as Aman believed that people with no experience come without any hang-ups of doing things in a particular way, without any pre-designed mindsets. This fitted in very well with Aman’s philosophy of creative and innovative service.
The right attitude was the key point when Adrian Zecha once stumbled upon a great front office desk clerk in a Sydney hotel, who was subsequently hired to run Amanpuri. He developed later into one of the best performing managers at one of the resorts.
Further, there was no written manual describing Standard Operating Procedures nor were there any set ways of doing things. Managers and staff were asked to run the resorts as if they were their own companies. Zecha was blunt about it. He once warned colleagues that anyone who produced a manual would be hit on the head with it, on the grounds that no two Amans are alike and each should carry the personality of the people who run it. This unique work culture has enabled Aman to continue to delight its high-paying guests since the inception of the brand.
When Adrian Zecha started Amanpuri with just 40 rooms, it was evident that it was going to target the ultra-premium customer segment of Hollywood stars, pop singers, sports icons and wealthy business people. Given the limited number of rooms and the very expensive luxury facilities provided, it had to be priced in the very upper end. This justified its target customers.
Another main attribute was the strategy of providing ultra-premium and extremely personalised service to the limited few guests at each resort. At some properties, Aman maintains a 6-to-1 employee guest ratio, something that is unheard of in the hotel and resort industry. This is the second pillar in practice. Zecha’s premise was that a guest should feel invited to his country house for the weekend, not checked into a hotel.
With such a high commitment on delivering the brand promises, it is not surprising that Aman has maintained a highly loyal customer base that keeps returning to one of the many Aman resorts to experience the paradise once again. They are also referred to as “Aman Junkies” and would come back year after year and/or try the latest resort regardless of its location.
The next main pillar of the branding strategy has been the holistic holiday experience offered by blending comfort, personalised service and luxury with the culture and heritage of the local place. One of the main characteristics of any Aman is the fact that the location of all resorts has some historical background and importance. Aman states that 15 of its properties stand close to or within UNESCO-protected sites.
Aman offers special guided tours to the surrounding areas of the resorts to explore the local traditions and cultures through interactions with the local population. It also takes its guests on unique travel journeys around the resort.
Before the opening of Aman-i-Khás in India, the French manager spent six months exploring the neighbourhood in a radius of some 20 kilometres around the resort on a motorbike. He showed Anil Thadani, the co-founder of Aman and himself a native Indian from the region, an abandoned village from the 12th century that everyone had forgotten about.
The affluent guests at Aman are used to all sorts of haute cuisine in their daily lives and most travel extensively on business while staying at hotels and eating at restaurants everywhere all year round. Therefore, Aman traditionally provides no fancy food at its resorts, but instead simple local cuisines prepared with fresh ingredients served by local cooks to maintain the authenticity of the local place – and to great satisfaction of the guests who finally get a “home-cooked” meal. Most guests do not leave the resorts to eat outside. The city hotels have required a different answer. Aman Tokyo marked a step change in ambition for the kitchen, and the newer urban properties offer several restaurants, from Italian dining to Japanese counters, because a hotel in a great food city competes with the city itself.
Architecture has carried the philosophy as much as service. From the start Aman worked with a small group of architects, among them Ed Tuttle, who designed Amanpuri without a conventional lobby or reception desk, Kerry Hill and Jean-Michel Gathy. Each resort was drawn from its setting and built with local materials, so that no two look alike and yet all are recognisable. The consistency lies in restraint: low buildings, natural materials, space and quiet. That design language became so influential that it has shaped much of luxury hospitality, which is both Aman’s achievement and, as discussed below, part of its competitive problem.
The final brand pillar has been the exclusivity of Aman. Given the high profile of Aman’s clientele, it could have been very easy for Aman to capitalise on the presence of the celebrities to gain wide scale publicity and media coverage in the global press. But in line with its overall strategy Aman has refrained from doing so. Aman was never meant for the mass public and will never become one. It has been created for people who pay an extensive premium to have an experience of a lifetime. So the company has maintained a strict policy of exclusivity.
Exclusivity has also meant price integrity. “Aman never discounts in low season. It’s like an Hermès bag,” its chief executive at the time, Olivier Jolivet, said in 2015. The policy has a cost. He acknowledged that the Bali resorts then ran at 30 to 40 per cent occupancy, and argued that what mattered was the break-even point, not the number of rooms filled. Fortune estimated in 2014 that occupancy across the group ran at around 30 per cent, against 76 per cent for the luxury hotel sector as a whole. Most hotel companies manage for occupancy. Aman has managed for the integrity of the brand and accepted empty rooms as the price. That choice, more than any other, separates a luxury brand from a premium one.
The company has put in place a system where by all the employees act as brand ambassadors. It has managed to do this not through any brand manuals (by and large Aman does not use manuals), but by being a very responsive and caring employer.
Aman has also invested a lot of time and effort in nurturing the leadership in its organisation by regular training programmes. In fact each resort manager has become so attached with the resort that it has created a culture that is self-fulfilling. With these measures, the management has been successful in aligning its entire staff in line with the activities of the organisation.
Aman, by religiously practising and consistently delivering on all four of its brand promises externally and aligning the commitment of its staff to its brand promises internally, has been able to build an almost iconic brand with a very loyal customer base without resorting to the traditional ways of brand building.
What made the four pillars powerful was their internal logic. Small scale made personal service possible. Personal service justified the price. The price kept the clientele narrow, and a narrow clientele made discretion credible. Each pillar depended on the others, which is why the model proved so hard to copy and why a change to any one of them puts pressure on the rest. That interdependence is the lens through which Aman’s later expansion should be judged.
Aman is probably the only resort brand in the world to have achieved this iconic status with absolutely no advertising in its founding era. Being true to its underlying philosophy of exclusivity, Adrian Zecha and his team decided against any form of advertising right from the start. The company did not send out press releases. The only brand communications that Aman made use of in its first 15 years was word-of-mouth. Ninety days before the opening of every Aman, the company sent out postcards to its list of approximately 120,000 recipients with the new beautiful location shown but without mentioning the actual place to tease the prospective customers in advance and create attention about the new resort.
In addition, Zecha invited a close circle of friends to experience the resort before it opened. This way news about the resort spread quickly within the target segment of Aman’s customers and would also reach very exclusive travel media like Condé Nast Traveler and Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report. The exclusivity in itself enticed more customers towards the Aman brand. With the leading Hollywood stars, pop singers and sports personalities visiting these resorts, it created a very desirable attribute for the brand in the eyes of prospective customers.
Stories did the work that advertising does for other brands. Zecha has told of an employee at Amanpuri who wound an orchid around the suitcase handle of a visiting travel writer, a single gesture that was reported as standard practice and became part of the Aman legend. The lesson for brand builders is precise. Aman did not communicate less than its competitors. It communicated through experience, and it let the most credible voices in its market carry the message.
That era has ended. By 2026 Aman ran a full communications operation: A global website with direct booking, press announcements for each opening and a presence on the major social platforms, international and Chinese. Its owner gives on-record interviews to the international business press about funding, pipeline and strategy. None of this is unusual for a luxury group of its size. It is simply the opposite of how the brand was built.
The change was probably unavoidable. A portfolio of 11 resorts can be filled by word of mouth among a loyal circle of guests. A group selling residences, club memberships and yacht voyages across several continents cannot. The more useful question for leaders is what should remain silent as the rest of the brand becomes visible. Aman’s answer so far has been to keep the guest invisible even as the company becomes public. Its owner continues to describe everything Aman does as discreet and private. The instinct for silence has not disappeared. When Amanvari opened in Mexico in August 2026, the resort held to a month-long media blackout and declined stays that involved content coverage. The task is harder than it was. A brand built on discretion operates in a world where any guest can be a broadcaster, and privacy has to be defended actively where once it could be assumed. Discretion about who stays, the fourth pillar, is the asset to protect above all, because it is the one no competitor can buy.
The phrase that long described Aman, the unbranded brand, therefore needs qualifying. Aman was never unbranded. It was a brand built without the conventional tools of branding, which is a different and more demanding thing. The tools have arrived. What matters is whether the substance behind them stays the same.
A brand this consistent would suggest a stable owner behind it. Aman’s history is the reverse. In its first 26 years, control of the company changed hands at least four times, and its founder twice left the business he had created. Few luxury brands have endured so much change of ownership and kept their identity. How Aman managed it, and what it cost, is the most instructive part of its story for owners and boards.
The founding partnership: Aman began as a company of friends. Its shares were held by Zecha and a circle of associates who shared his taste and left him to run the business. The arrangement suited a founder with a strong point of view, but it carried a weakness common to founder-led companies. Growth needed more capital than the partners wished to provide, and some wanted the option to take money out.
The first outside owner: In the 1990s the partners brought in a majority shareholder, Clément Vaturi, a long-standing friend of Zecha whose family ran a French hotel group. When his own business came under financial pressure, control of his Aman stake passed to Colony Capital, a US real estate investment fund that had financed him against it. From late 1998 Colony asserted its position and went on to take most of the board seats. Zecha resigned as chairman and left the board, keeping a small minority stake.
The disagreement that followed was about the meaning of the brand. Zecha objected to what he understood to be a plan to place the Aman name on other hotels, an idea Colony denied it had considered. “That’s not growth, that’s poison,” he said in 2000. He likened the Aman he had built to a handmade watch, as against one made in a factory. Whatever the precise facts of the dispute, the founder had stated the brand’s central risk a quarter of a century before it returned as the central question of its present strategy.
The founder’s return: The shareholder dispute was settled in 2000. Control passed to investors aligned with the founder, and Zecha came back as chairman and chief executive. The years that followed were productive, with new resorts in Cambodia, India, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. In November 2007 DLF, India’s largest property developer, bought control in a transaction valued at USD 400 million. DLF later moved to reduce its debts by selling non-core assets, and Aman was put up for sale.
The 2014 sale: In February 2014 DLF sold Aman for an enterprise value of USD 358 million to a joint venture between Zecha, who was to remain chairman, and a group of new investors. The group was led by Vladislav Doronin, a property developer who had been an Aman guest since 1990, and a co-investor. The partnership did not hold. A dispute over control between the two lead investors was argued in the courts of London and New York, and Zecha stepped aside as chairman and chief executive on 31 July 2014. A restructuring in 2015 left Doronin in control, and in March 2016 the High Court in London confirmed a settlement with the liquidators of his former co-investor’s company.
A decade of single control: Since then Aman has had what it lacked for most of its history: one owner with a long view and the authority to act on it. Doronin combines the roles of owner, chairman and chief executive. His spokesperson said in 2015 that he had bought the company because he loved the product, and the record of the following decade is one of sustained investment in new properties and new lines of business.
New capital partners: Expansion on that scale needed outside capital, and from 2022 Aman brought it in without surrendering control. In August 2022 Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the London-based real estate investor Cain International invested USD 900 million, valuing the group at USD 3 billion. In September 2023 a further USD 360 million came from a group that included Mubadala Capital of Abu Dhabi and Alpha Wave Ventures, at the same valuation. Doronin remained the majority shareholder. In July 2026 his development company, OKO Group, and the South Korean retail group Shinsegae announced a fund with an initial USD 500 million to develop luxury hotels and other properties. Its first project, in Seoul, will include an Aman hotel, residences and a private club.
The structure deserves attention. Aman has long operated resorts owned by others alongside those in which it has a stake. The capital raised in 2022 and 2023 went into the group itself. The 2026 fund sits beside it and brings a partner’s capital to the development of new properties that Aman will brand and operate. The direction is clear: more of Aman’s growth will be built with other people’s capital. That is how most global hotel groups have grown, and it is efficient. It also multiplies the number of parties with a claim on the brand, and it makes the quality of those partnerships a governance matter of the first order.
The lesson of these four decades is one that business families will recognise. Ownership is not a background condition of brand building. It is part of the brand. Aman did its best work under aligned owners. Under owners with different horizons it lost its founder, many of its senior people and several years of momentum. Stable, committed ownership is among the strongest advantages a family-controlled enterprise holds, and Aman shows what its absence costs. That advantage is the foundation of multi-generational success in family business.
Under its present owner Aman has grown along five lines at once. Each extends the brand into territory the founder avoided, and each applies the four pillars differently.
The city: Aman Tokyo opened in December 2014 on the top floors of a tower in the Otemachi business district, the first Aman in a city tower. Aman New York followed in August 2022, with 83 suites and 22 residences in the restored Crown Building on Fifth Avenue, and Aman Nai Lert Bangkok in April 2025. The urban hotels break the old rule on size, and they answer a commercial logic the resorts never could. A remote resort may stand half empty for much of the year. A hotel in Tokyo or New York trades every day, draws local members and diners, and sits where Aman’s guests live and work. Doronin described the strategy early on as the urbanisation of the brand.
The residence: Private villas have stood beside Aman’s resorts since Amanpuri, where the founding partners were among the first villa owners, and the company’s leadership has been candid about their importance. In 2015 its chief executive compared Aman resorts to golf courses, where people come to play but the real business lies in selling the villas around the course. The model has since moved into the cities and grown in scale. Doronin said in July 2026 that the group had sold nearly USD 9 billion of branded residences over the previous four years. For the developer, residence sales help to finance costly construction. For Aman, they earn fees and bind its most loyal guests to the brand for decades. Industry estimates reported by Nikkei Asia in 2025 put licence fees for the most exclusive brands at up to 10 per cent of sales. For buyers, an Aman residence is both a home and a holding in a scarce asset. Assets of this kind raise the questions of purpose and governance that a family office exists to answer.
The club: Aman New York introduced the Aman Club, a private members’ club within the hotel, and clubs have followed in Bangkok and are planned elsewhere. Membership in New York is priced in six figures. The club changes the relationship with the guest. A hotel guest returns when travel allows. A member belongs, pays every year and brings the brand into ordinary life. For a company built on devoted repeat guests, the club is the formal version of what the Aman Junkies had always been.
The second brand: In 2020 Aman announced Janu, its first sister brand, and the first Janu hotel opened in Tokyo in March 2024 with 122 rooms at roughly half the rate of Aman Tokyo. Janu takes its name from the Sanskrit for soul. It is larger, more social and more energetic by design, with extensive dining and wellness facilities open to the city. The strategic purpose is to grow without stretching Aman itself. “I will keep Aman very, very unique and very private,” Doronin said in March 2024. Janu absorbs demand and development opportunities that would dilute Aman if they carried its name. It is the classic answer of the luxury houses to the problem of scale, and it is the right one, provided the two brands stay clearly apart in the guest’s mind.
Beyond the hotel: The fifth line carries the name into products and experiences away from the properties: skincare and fragrance, a ready-to-wear and leather goods collection launched in 2021 and a furniture and interiors studio introduced in 2023. They sit beside the private jet journeys that Aman has offered with a specialist partner since 2013. From spring 2027 the brand will extend to the sea, when Amangati, a yacht of 47 suites for 94 guests, is due to begin sailing in the Mediterranean. The yacht is operated by a separate company that uses the Aman name under licence.
The geography has widened with the offer. Aman’s portfolio was built first in Asia. Its announced projects reach the United States, the Bahamas, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Mozambique and the Maldives, as well as Singapore, Seoul and Hokkaido. Opening dates in this industry move, and several of Aman’s have. The direction has not.
Taken together, these moves change what Aman is. The company describes itself as a lifestyle brand, and the description is accurate. The comparison its own leadership has reached for is Hermès, a house that sells many categories at one uncompromising level. The parallel is instructive in both directions. Hermès keeps tight control of what carries its name. Aman’s extensions increasingly rely on partners, licensees and other people’s capital. The ambition is the same. The degree of control is not. Fashion houses such as Giorgio Armani have come from the opposite direction, extending a founder’s aesthetic into hotels and residences.
Aman is not a family business, yet its growth depends on business families to a degree that deserves notice. The founder’s observation still holds: many of the world’s finest sites belong to old families who rarely sell. Two openings in 2025 show a different transaction from the one he described. The family keeps the asset and brings in the brand.
Bangkok: Aman Nai Lert Bangkok stands in Nai Lert Park, a rare expanse of green in the centre of the city on land the Nai Lert family has owned for generations. The family’s fourth-generation steward chose Aman as partner for the hotel and residences, and the name of her great-grandfather sits beside Aman’s on the door. The building was designed around the park’s old trees.
The Dolomites: Rosa Alpina in San Cassiano has been run by the Pizzinini family since 1939. It reopened in July 2025 as Aman Rosa Alpina, not through a sale but through a joint venture in which the family keeps a majority share and Aman manages the hotel. The third generation remains closely involved. The family has explained that the partnership served two purposes: to raise the hotel to a new level, and to give the next generation a real choice about whether to continue in the business.
Both cases repay study by any family that owns an asset of this kind. The family contributes what cannot be manufactured: the site, the history and the legitimacy of long ownership. The brand contributes design, standards, distribution and a global clientele. The structure determines who captures the value. A sale ends the family’s story. A management contract or joint venture can extend it, if the family negotiates as an owner and keeps the rights that matter. The Pizzinini arrangement is notable because it treats succession as a design question. It creates options for the next generation without forcing a decision on them, and that protects the unity and cohesion of the family as well as the asset.
For Aman, such partners bring more than land. A family that has held a property for three or four generations brings the patience, the local standing and the care for detail that the brand itself was built on. In an industry where most capital is impatient, they are its natural allies.
Aman approaches its fifth decade in a stronger position than at any point in its history. It has committed ownership, capital, a full pipeline and a brand that commands some of the highest rates in the world. Its challenges are those of success, which are harder to see and slower to show.
Company culture as driver: With its iconic status and following from all over the world and the cream of the society being the die-hard patrons of the brand, nothing seems to be challenging to Aman at the outset. The biggest challenge will be to sustain the unique company culture and commitment to delivering the brand promise without manuals and detailed management practices. With success comes the obvious threat of copycats – different hotel and resort chains starting their own version of Aman in an effort to give a similar paradise experience. That threat is taken up below.
The cultural challenge has grown with the company. A culture carried by a founder and a few dozen managers who knew one another cannot be carried the same way across 36 properties, a second brand and several thousand employees. The founding practice of hiring from outside the industry has given way, at least in part, to hiring experienced luxury hoteliers, as a group of this size must. Urban hotels with several restaurants, spas and clubs need systems that a 40-room beach resort did not. None of this need weaken the culture. But it must be taught, measured and renewed deliberately, because it will no longer transmit itself. The companies that have done this best, among them Singapore Airlines, treat service culture as an investment that is never finished.
Leadership transition: Leadership succession for the ageing founder Adrian Zecha (born 1933) was for years probably the most important challenge for the continued success of Aman. Olivier Jolivet, whom Zecha had recruited in 2008, was appointed CEO in 2014. Most “Aman-junkies” shuddered at the thought of Adrian Zecha not being at the helm of the luxury chain. Adrian Zecha personified the brand. The resorts’ niche clientele had come to see hotelier Adrian Zecha as a living legend, with his creative vision being the cornerstone of the Aman brand offering. The upmarket and highly personalised lifestyle strategy pursued by Zecha had a high uptake by Aman’s discerning patrons.
The transition has happened, and the brand survived it. That is the strongest evidence of what Zecha built. A brand that depends on one person’s taste is fragile. A brand whose principles are understood by its people and its guests can outlive its creator. Aman passed that test. Zecha, for his part, has continued to build. He has opened small hotels under new names in Laos, Vietnam and Japan, the most recent a 24-room retreat on a working farm in Iwate prefecture in April 2026, when he was 93. Asked about Aman in 2025, he observed that “the Aman now is of course very big” and that it was no longer his, though he still loved it in memory.
The second challenge was to nurture a solid lineup of capable and passionate managers, who were well-equipped to carry on the organisation’s unique culture and philosophy after the first generation of managers led by Adrian Zecha faded out.
The leadership question has since taken a different form. Ownership, the chair and executive leadership rest with one person. That concentration has served Aman well. It ended the instability of earlier years and allowed fast, consistent decisions. It also means that the group’s direction depends heavily on a single individual, which is the condition Aman was in under its founder. The arrival of institutional shareholders brings an opportunity to build the board, the management depth and the succession arrangements that turn a personal vision into an institution. Every owner-led enterprise faces this task in time, and those who handle it best begin long before they need to.
From turbulent ownership to many partners: Despite Zecha’s incredible leadership at the helm in terms of keeping the Aman brand a potent force, maintaining and managing exclusivity, while still expanding globally, the company has had a long history of ownership troubles. The dispute among the investors who bought the company in 2014, set out above, was the last of them. This constant challenge in terms of finding and maintaining a stable set of owners hampered the growth of the chain and thrust it into the eyes of the international media and law, a situation which went completely against the brand’s ethos and philosophy of remaining discreet. The earlier version of this article concluded that the chain needed an owner with a long-term interest in and vision for the brand. For more than a decade it has had one.
The challenge has changed shape. Aman answers to a majority owner, to sovereign and institutional shareholders, to development partners and to the owners of the properties it manages but does not own. Each has legitimate interests and a different time horizon. Managing them is a matter of governance, and one case shows the stakes. In August 2026 the owner of Amanyara, the resort Aman has managed in the Turks and Caicos Islands since 2006, signalled that it intended to end the management agreement. A letter from the owner’s representative cited concerns about service standards and about Aman’s plan to develop a Janu resort on neighbouring land. Aman and the owner said in a joint statement that the resort “continues to be operated by Aman without interruption” and that such discussions were customary in a long-standing commercial relationship. The outcome was not known at the time of writing. The structural point does not depend on it. When a brand operates assets it does not own, every owner is a stakeholder in every strategic move the brand makes, including the launch of a sister brand next door.
Brand innovation: Adrian Zecha’s impeccable penchant for hand selecting exotic locations for Aman, virtually makes him the inventor of the concept of the luxury hideaway resorts. The heady Aman success “formula” comprises unspoilt remote locales, minimalistic architecture, local cuisine and providing superlative guest experience. This innovative offering has gained it much adulation over the years.
Imitation is often called the sincerest form of flattery. Aman’s concept of a luxury hideaway resort has been copied by many hoteliers, including major luxury hotel groups such as Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and Rosewood. Though Aman may have pioneered this ultra-niche luxury hotel segment, the competition has caught up fast. On the other hand, the tastes of Aman’s main client group (high net worth individuals) are fickle and varying. This high-flying customer base continuously seeks new experiences that their money can buy and create and latch on to new trends.
The competitive field is of a different order from the one Aman entered. The rival bidders for Aman in 2014 included LVMH and the Carlyle Group, a sign of how the largest luxury and investment groups had come to value the category Aman created. The restrained, natural aesthetic that Aman pioneered has become the common language of luxury hospitality. Competitors with far larger balance sheets offer remote retreats, branded residences and yachts of their own. Others from Asia have built global hospitality brands on distinct foundations, among them Banyan Tree, Mandarin Oriental and Shangri-La.
In this field Aman cannot win by being first. It must win by remaining the reference, the brand against which the others are measured. That calls for innovation of a particular kind: new places and new forms that feel inevitable for Aman and impossible for anyone else. Amanvari, which opened in Mexico in 2026 with only 18 casitas after years of development, shows that the group can still build small and slow when the site requires it.
Execution at pace: Ambition on this scale has to be delivered. Luxury development is slow, and Aman’s standards make it slower. Amanvari opened six years later than first planned, and Aman Nai Lert Bangkok arrived after several postponements. Delay is forgivable in a single resort. Across a pipeline of this size, with residences sold in advance and partners’ capital committed, it becomes a test of organisation. The group will need development and operating depth to match the number of its projects, and the judgement to slow the pipeline before it stretches the standard.
Scarcity at scale: This is the challenge that contains the others. Aman’s value rests on scarcity: few rooms, few properties, few people who have been. Every form of growth draws on that scarcity. Some forms replenish it. A new resort in a place no one else could have secured adds to the legend. Other forms spend it. A product, a licence or a property that falls short of the standard subtracts from every other Aman. The discipline lies in telling the two apart before the market does. Doronin has stated the principle himself, saying in 2025 that “Aman isn’t for quantity”. He has also answered the charge of haste directly. Told that he was expanding too fast, he replied in 2024 that “I actually understand what I bought”. The pipeline will test how firmly it holds. With around ten further Aman projects announced, a growing Janu portfolio and nearly 20 hotels under construction across the group, Aman is set to grow faster than at any time in its history.
Three tests are useful for any luxury brand at this point. The first is recognition: a long-standing guest should know the new venture as Aman without being told. The second is control: the brand should govern the experience from end to end, whoever owns the asset. The third is depth: the venture should deepen the relationship with existing guests before it widens the audience. Janu passes these tests by design, because it carries a different name. The products and the yacht will be judged case by case.
Asian roots, global brand: Aman began as an Asian brand in every sense. Its founder was Indonesian, its first resort Thai, its headquarters in Singapore, its inspiration the Japanese ryokan and its names Sanskrit. By 2026 the group was based in Switzerland, its flagship investments included New York, the Gulf and a yacht bound for the Mediterranean, and its capital came from the Gulf, Europe and South Korea. The Asian character has not been lost. Sanskrit still supplies the names, from Amanvari to Janu and Amangati, Japanese craft and design recur in the newest projects, and more than half of Aman’s properties are in Asia. But that character can no longer be taken for granted, and it is worth protecting as a source of distinction. The world has many international luxury groups. It has very few with authentic Asian origins and global standing.
In the wake of a savvy customer base and heightened global competition, Aman can only maintain its elite status through market-leading brand innovation. The ownership turbulence that once threatened to push innovation down the management agenda has given way to a decade of investment.
The verdict on that decade is positive. Aman has resolved the weakness that shadowed its first quarter-century, the absence of a stable owner, and it has shown that the brand can live in a city tower as convincingly as on a remote beach. It has kept its prices, its privacy and the loyalty of its guests through a period of rapid expansion. Few brands survive the departure of a founder so closely identified with them. Aman has done more than survive.
The verdict on the next decade is open. Aman is attempting what very few luxury brands have achieved: to grow in size, in categories and in partners at once while remaining scarce. The founder called the wrong kind of growth poison. The present owner says Aman is not for quantity. They are describing the same boundary from different sides, and the future of the brand depends on where the company draws it.
For leaders and owner families, the Aman story offers five lessons.
1. Build the brand on a system, not a slogan. Aman’s four pillars reinforced one another, which made the model hard to copy and gave staff a clear basis for judgement without manuals. A brand promise that the operating model cannot deliver is only advertising.
2. Treat ownership as part of the brand. Aman did its best work under aligned, patient owners and lost years under owners with other priorities. Families who control their companies hold this advantage and should guard it.
3. Prepare the brand to outlive its creator. Zecha’s principles survived his departure because they lived in the culture and in the expectations of guests. Founders serve their companies best when they make themselves progressively less necessary.
4. Scale through structure. A second brand, clear tests for every extension and firm control over partners allow growth without dilution. Scarcity is an asset that appears on no balance sheet, and it should be managed with the same care as capital.
5. Choose partners as carefully as sites. Whether the partner is a sovereign fund, a developer or a family with property held for generations, alignment on time horizon and standards matters more than the terms of the deal.
Aman retains very strong brand equity, dedication to innovation and passion for quality in all aspects of its operations. Aman is a true iconic luxury brand with Asian roots, and the legacy of Adrian Zecha continues in a company far larger than the one he left. Its first chapter proved that a hotel company could become an icon by staying small and silent. Its second is testing whether an icon can grow large and visible and still deserve the name.
Leaders who face their own version of that choice will find few better cases to study.
About the author: Martin Roll – Global Family Business & Family Office Expert
The Stewardship Imperative: How to Build Multi-Generational Success in Family Business
The 3 Pillars of Success in Family Business: Family Unity, Harmony and Cohesion
What Is the Purpose and Value of a Family Office: A Global Overview
Hermès – The Strategy Insights Behind The Iconic Luxury Brand
Giorgio Armani – The Strategy Behind The Iconic Global Fashion Brand
Banyan Group – Building An Independent Global Hospitality Brand From Asia
Mandarin Oriental – An Iconic Asian Luxury Hotel Brand
Singapore Airlines – An Excellent, Iconic Asian Brand
Kering – Evolution of a Global Luxury Brand Company
Read more: Insights & Articles
Asian Brand Strategy provides key insights and knowledge about the rising Asian brands incl. model frameworks, brand cases and checklists on Asian branding. Download sample chapter.
