LINA PATEL, Red Roof’s director for strategic franchise initiatives, knows what it’s like to face formidable obstacles. Her solution? Climb that mountain, Girl. Literally.
Lina is part of Himalaya Glacier, a trekking company that leads amateur hikers and climbers through the mountains in Nepal and other countries. Lina’s journey is physical as well as spiritual as the trekkers stop at Lake Manasarovar, where Hindus believe Lord Brahma, the god of creation, manifested the lake from his mind, symbolizing pure divinity.
She has guided more than 1,000 people on her climbs, most of them women and some of them her close friends.
Lina’s role as a trekking guide easily translates into her entrepreneurial skill and passion to lead other women to success in the hotel industry.
Lina’s family immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1983 when she was 13 years old.
“I immediately became part of the hotel industry, where we lived with my uncle for about a year just to get to know the hotel, and how it works and all the aspects of that,” Lina told the Women of Color Power List 2025. ”Soon, we purchased our first hotel which was an Econo Lodge in Opelika, AL. I remember going to school, I was in high school at the time, coming home at 3 p.m., quickly eating lunch and going straight for my shift because we used to help out our parents quite a bit.”
Helping out meant spending weekends and summers helping her mother clean rooms.
“I remember one time we cleaned about 96 bathrooms in one day. It just became part of our upbringing, became part of our family business.”
Lina, who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been a hotel owner for 23 years. Prior to joining Red Roof, she was the member of one of the industry’s largest franchise advisory committees. In 2007, Lina joined the board of Leuva Patidar Samaj of USA, a non-profit religious, cultural, and non-political organization providing support to American immigrants from India’s Leuva Patidar region.
Lina has long been an advocate for advancing women in the hotel industry.
“I spent a lot of my time advocating for women on various platforms such as AAHOA and AHLA,” Lina says. “Fast forward to today, I am a director of strategic franchise initiatives with Red Roof in franchising, where we've launched a program called RIDE. It stands for ‘Road to Inclusivity and Diversity in Entrepreneurship,’ which helps to advance women and minorities in hotel ownership.”
Lina also helped launch the AAHOA’s HerOwnership program that is dedicated to opening doors for women in hotel ownership. There remains much work to be done to bring equality to the hospitality industry, Lina says, but she believes it can be done.
Women comprise 85 percent of the hospitality industry workforce. But only one in 10 women are owners. “Definitely, that needs to change,” says Lina. “Why can’t it be 10 in 10?”
Her desire to help others comes in part from the obstacles she had to overcome in her career.
“For example, in 2000, even trying to find a platform for me as a woman hotelier to advocate or network with was difficult. It's such a male-dominated industry. It was challenging to find information.
“Fast forward to today, we have so many brands, such as Red Roof, that provide a platform for women to network, to become educated, to learn, to connect with other industry organizations, and, more importantly, provide a pathway to own hotels.”
Mentorship is important to helping women advance, she says.
“Mentorship can come from any level. It can be your peer, somebody working for you or as part of your team. For example, I have conversations with our front-desk team, our housekeeping team, and I learned so much from them just having that conversation. It's having that open mind where you can find your own mentor.
“For me, mentorship works when I'm struggling and I know that I have this idea. And I've already cleared it and I have a plan, but I just need to talk with somebody to take it to the next level. Having that conversation with a family member or a friend or a mentor, it just helps you to boost the whole thing.”
Lina serves as mentor whenever possible.
“I'm always readily available for mentorship. A lot of my mentorship comes through my actions; if there's something that I believe that I want to share with our team.”
At a recent event in San Juan, PR, she had an opportunity to organize a panel and she was asked to choose co-panelists.
“I reached out to women who had never been on stage,” she says. “I find myself doing that quite a bit, giving women opportunity to be on the stage. They spend so much time preparing themselves, talking to their family and getting themselves ready to be on the stage and then they kill it.”
Times are changing for young female professionals, Lina says.
“Our generation, the young professionals and the girls that are coming on, they're seeing their moms, and they've seen their struggle and challenges of even simple things like finding opportunity to network. The culture around them is changing them to where in the next decade or two, the girls are going to rule the world.”
Lina knows firsthand what it means to tackle a tough assignment with other women. Soon after the Nepal earthquake in April 2015, she was leading a group of climbers through the mountains when they came upon a village whose school was destroyed by the 7.8 magnitude quake. The women decided to gather resources to reconstruct a school for the area’s children. They turned to the LPS USA to raise funds and sponsor the project. Lina and her female cohorts managed the project and a year later opened a new and safer place of learning, where boys and girls can grow to become tomorrow’s leaders.
