Business Daily meets: Surinder Arora
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The billionaire entrepreneur was sent to England at the age of 13 after getting into trouble in his native India.
His family shared a house and his mother worked two jobs - something he said instilled in him the work ethic that led him to found his own hospitality businesses.
An interest in air travel led him to London's Heathrow Airport, the 4th largest airport in the world. But it was on the ground, in the hotel industry, that he made his fortune, with the Arora Group.
We hear Surinder Arora's story, and his proposals for an alternative way to expand Heathrow's capacity.
Produced and presented by Will Bain
(Image: Surinder Arora. Credit: Surinder Arora)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Will Bain. |
| 0:05.4 | Today, have you ever sat in work and thought to yourself, I could run this place? |
| 0:09.6 | Well, our guest today didn't just dream it. He made it a reality. |
| 0:13.5 | That's where I used to do my wine waiting back in late 70s and early 80s. |
| 0:18.2 | And then we were blessed about eight, nine years ago. We acquired that hotel. |
| 0:21.7 | We're meeting hotelier and self-made billionaire Surinda Aurora, the largest landowner at London's |
| 0:27.5 | Heathrow Airport. And he tells us about his journey and how he's hoping to shape the airport's |
| 0:32.9 | future too with his own proposal for its challenging expansion plans. |
| 0:37.4 | They're saying, well, Aurora, what does he know other than hotels and customers? two, with his own proposal for its challenging expansion plans. |
| 0:42.0 | I'm saying, well, Aurora, what does he know other than hotels and customer service? |
| 0:46.5 | Well, I like to think at the end of the day, whether I'm building one day an office block or I'm building a hotel, that we've got a track record, that we build everything on time, |
| 0:51.4 | on budget or ahead of budget. |
| 0:52.8 | So that's Business Daily meets Surinda Aurora. |
| 1:01.4 | What a view, Surinda? |
| 1:03.6 | Yeah, it's amazing views. |
| 1:04.7 | I always love coming here and watching the planes, taking off and landing, coming in over |
| 1:09.9 | London. |
| 1:10.7 | And as we can see, to our left, they're taking coming in over London. And as we can see to our left, |
| 1:12.5 | they're taking off on the southern runway, as we see that BA-Triple-7 racing down for take-off. |
| 1:18.7 | It's something of a plane spot as Paradise, your bar up here on the hotel. It is, and we're very blessed. |
| 1:24.2 | A lot of people come here, just literally to come to the bar. It's the second tallest |
| 1:29.0 | building inside the airport after the control tower. So you've got the most amazing views. |
... |
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