My father built this place as a gift for my mother. I came home to keep it alive.
Soul Vacation was a love letter before it was a hotel. My father was a businessman, but the thing he loved most was being a host — a full table, a warm welcome, the small art of making people feel looked after. He built this place for my mother, who is never happier than when she is travelling, living out of a beautiful room somewhere warm.
He chose Colva for its light. Here the old houses are whitewashed and trimmed in blue, and in the late afternoon the lane glows like a Greek island that had drifted east and settled on the Arabian Sea. For years it was simply ours — the place the family came to exhale, and where my father could do the thing he loved best.
I spent years away — studying, then a long stretch in fashion and design between Bombay and London. What I was really learning, it turns out, was what makes a place worth believing in. Wherever I travelled, I gravitated to the same kind of hotel: small, particular, warm in a way no chain can manufacture. I was taking notes, it seems, for a building I already knew.
In 2023, my father passed away, and I came home to take over what he had made. It would have been easy to keep it preserved in amber. Instead I tried to do the harder, more loving thing — to carry it forward. I built the hotel up around care: a kitchen worth travelling for, and KARE, our doctor-led Ayurveda centre, because I had come to believe that real hospitality should do more than impress you. It should restore you.
One quiet rule I will never relax: every guest who checks in is offered a complimentary consultation with our resident doctor. Not an upsell, not a formality — an invitation to be properly seen. The warmth of Goa, the wisdom of Ayurveda, and the feeling that someone here genuinely cares how you leave. It was my father's dream. It is, now, unmistakably mine.
One whitewashed retreat, three ways to be looked after.
The Hotel
The heart of it all: a small, family-run hotel of whitewashed rooms and blue-shuttered balconies, a swimming pool set into the garden, and the Arabian Sea a five-minute walk past the gate.
The day-to-day is run by our General Manager and a team of around sixty — front desk, housekeeping, gardeners, the people who remember how you take your coffee. The kind of service that feels less like a hotel and more like being someone's guest.
The Kitchen
Our restaurant cooks the food of this coast: the morning's catch from Colva, coastal Goan home cooking, and a fish curry the regulars would riot over. Sea-to-table, in the most literal sense — the boats are minutes away.
Alongside it, a Satvik kitchen prepares the dosha-aligned meals that belong to a KARE programme. One building, two kitchens, the same care.
KARE Ayurveda
Our doctor-led wellness and medical centre — not a spa menu. Every journey begins with a consultation: your constitution, your dosha, the patterns your body carries. From there a programme takes shape, overseen by your physician.
This is where the hotel becomes something more than a beautiful place to sleep. It is the part my father would have been proudest of.
A team kept small on purpose — so the welcome knows your name.
Pramod Gupta
Comes to us from five-star luxury hotels, with a career that has run from Zanzibar to the Caribbean. He runs the property day to day — the rhythm of arrivals, the team of around sixty, and the hundred small things you only notice when they're missing.
Nilesh Mandeidkar
Keeps the whole enterprise on steady ground, so that everything guests can see — and a great deal they can't — simply works.
Sachit Raikar
Twenty-six years with the property, and the keeper of its whitewashed quiet — the turned-down beds, the pressed cottons, and the particular stillness a room has when you walk back into it.
Dr. Niranjan Bhide
Our resident Ayurvedic doctor leads every consultation and writes every programme. He runs KARE the way he runs an examination — slowly, and with more questions than you expect. If you meet only one of us, it will be him: each stay begins with his hand on your wrist and an unhurried “tell me.”
Gautam Malik
Gautam teaches Iyengar yoga the way the method asks for it — props, patience, long holds, an almost stubborn attention to the angle of a single foot. Not a workout; a conversation with the floor. He teaches at sunrise, every day, for whoever shows up — programme guest or not.
And behind them, a team of around sixty and six trained therapists whose hands do the quiet work — the same faces, morning after morning.
Come and be looked after.
The hotel, the kitchen, and KARE — a five-minute walk from Colva beach...