Galle, Sri Lanka/Bengaluru : Otherland Hotels, South Asia’s first independent lifestyle collective—is set to open Otherland Galle in June 2026, marking the brand’s first oceanfront international property and its most visible statement yet in the lifestyle hotels category it is here to redefine. Situated close to Galle Fort on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, the 66-key property positions itself at the intersection of the town’s surf culture, evolving tourism landscape, and emerging creative subcultures, a truly dedicated lifestyle address unlike anything the region has seen before.
Founded in 2023 in Bengaluru, India, by Rishi Sreedharan and Samarth Gowda, who previously built a successful co-living community in India, Otherland was conceived as a direct challenge to what the lifestyle hotel category has settled for. The Asia-Pacific lifestyle hotel segment quadrupled in supply between 2014 and 2024, with growth concentrated largely in South-East Asia. Otherland Hotels is betting on South Asia.
Commenting on the launch, Rishi Sreedharan, Founder & CEO, Otherland Hotels, said: “South Asia is loud, alive, dripping with culture and taste, and deserves a hospitality brand that can speak its language without putting on a costume. Otherland is our vision to achieve this. We want to be unmistakable somewhere, and then somewhere else, and then again , each time earning our place with a distinctive lifestyle language, built for the modern traveller who wants more than just an accommodation. Galle, with its excellent surf culture, evolving tourism landscape, and exciting creative subcultures, is exactly the kind of place where we want to be.”
The brand operates on four pillars: fluid experiences, rooms as basecamp, human hospitality, and differentiated F&B. Galle is the first in a planned collective of experience-led hotels, restaurants, and beach clubs across the region. Otherland Galle comes together with the vision of Emanuel Sidhartha as Co-Founder, a prominent name in the hospitality and cultural ecosystem in Sri Lanka.
Samarth Gowda, Co-Founder & COO, Otherland Hotels, adds: “The choice of Galle as our first location felt like the truest version of what Otherland could be—layered, alive, and completely its own. For us, going international didn’t mean going global in the conventional sense. It meant finding a place in our own backyard that the world hadn’t fully discovered yet, and building something there that belongs. Independent hotels, at their best, don’t just reflect a destination, they amplify it. That’s the only way we know how to do this.”
With a growing pipeline of properties, Otherland Hotels enters the market with the intent to build South Asia’s defining lifestyle hotel collective, on its own terms, from within the region. Otherland Galle is the first address in what the brand describes as a growing collective of hotels, restaurants, and beach clubs across South Asia, each one embedded in its place and shaped by the people who inhabit it.
