South Asian lifestyle collective Otherland Hotels announces its debut in Sri Lanka

Otherland Hotels, South Asia's first independent lifestyle collective, has announced that it is set to open Otherland Galle in June 2026.

The company said the 66-key property is situated close to Galle Fort on Sri Lanka’s southern coast. Otherland Hotels was launched in 2023 by Rishi Sreedharan and Samarth Gowda, who co-founded Hyphen coliving in 2021.

Sreedharan’s company has also been building hotels for Marriott International and others since 2012.


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The Asia-Pacific lifestyle hotel segment quadrupled in supply between 2014 and 2024, with growth concentrated largely in Southeast Asia.

Otherland Hotels is betting on South Asia.

“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,” said Rishi Sreedharan, founder and CEO of Otherland Hotels.

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“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 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,” he added.

The company said the brand operates on four pillars: fluid experiences, rooms as basecamp, human hospitality, and differentiated F&B. It states that Galle is the first in a planned collective of experience-led hotels, restaurants, and beach clubs across the region.

Otherland Galle also has Emanuel Sidhartha on board as co-founder.

Samarth Gowda, co-founder and COO of Otherland Hotels, said the choice of Galle as the 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,” he added.