A hotelier’s DIY guide to social media notoriety 3

How Akshita Bhanj Deo and Mrinalika Bhanj Deo created a new idiom for heritage hotels one counter-intuitive move at a time

By Shikha Sethi

It’s not every day that you drink Chardonnay with a princess from the Kalinga dynasty. It’s 6pm at Soho House, Mumbai, and Akshita Bhanj Deo has just delivered a sold-out masterclass on brand building for members. Which is apt, because I’m here to understand how she and her sister, Mrinalika Bhanj Deo, put Belgadia Palace, their ancestral home-turned-boutique hotel in Mayurbhanj, Odisha, on the hospitality map, and built a digital audience around it.

Deo is easygoing and warm, but clear-eyed about the problem they were trying to solve. Belgadia is several hours from the nearest major airport, in a rural, agrarian district that had little association with luxury hospitality when the sisters began restoring it. “If you Googled Orissa at the time, luxury hospitality was not going to come up,” she says.

The first thing they had to work out, then, was not how to market the hotel. It was what, exactly, they were marketing.

Mrinalika had worked in luxury brand houses in New York and had seen how highly prized estates, villas and palazzos were in Europe. “She thought we have this in India, but we never thought it was a big deal,” Deo recalls. “Here, royalty that’s associated with a certain kind of architectural splendor. In the West, that’s less important – the focus is on your access to land, the history of a place, how many cultural relics it has.”

It was a useful reframe. Rather than treating Belgadia as a stage on which to perform royalty or “heritage theatre”, the sisters could treat it as a home, a piece of history and a living part of its destination. They kept “Palace” in the name, but deliberately moved away from the visual shorthand of crests and inherited grandeur. Their brand language became contemporary, with an Art Deco typeface and a more feminine visual sensibility.

“We worked with female photographers who cast a different eye on what cultural heritage could look like,” Deo says. Royalty and palaces, she felt, could too easily become caricature.

“Women see the world differently,” Akshita says. “Our experiences were different.” So, instead of cars and armories, they looked at self-help groups, crafts and dances that were disappearing. Guests might have alta applied by a local community, encounter Rajo, the Odisha festival associated with menstruation and fertility, or visit craft clusters and meet practitioners.

The building itself gave them a head start. Construction on Belgadia began in 1804 on the orders of Maharani Sumitra Devi, and the property had originally functioned as a royal guesthouse for visiting dignitaries. “We inherited a blueprint that we can thank our ancestors for,” Deo says. By the time it came to them, the house already had salons, parlours, a library and spaces designed for entertaining. And beyond that, the destination, rather than the building alone, became the product.

“When you’re creating a boutique hotel, it has to be about the destination. I’m not a fan of fortress-style tourism,” Deo says. “We never say, come stay with me, it doesn’t matter where I am.”

That meant turning the hotel into a starting point for exploring Mayurbhanj. There are property tours, local artists and craft practitioners, excursions into handloom and craft clusters, and experiences involving food and homegrown traditions. The all-local staff were trained to speak about the property as a living museum by curators from the Mehrangarh Fort Museum Trust. The intention was not to keep guests at arm’s length from the heritage, but to bring them into it.

Whether that’s guests being allowed to get curious about a part of the building that’s being restored, or witnessing how damage due to a cyclone has affected the property, the aim was not to keep things sanitised. “The more you bring guests into the experience, the more they become part of that journey with you,” Akshita says.

That same principle shaped their communications.

Belgadia went digital first. Instagram came before the website, and the sisters began telling the story while the palace was still being restored. Their early images showed them in jeans and shirts, standing amid bamboo scaffolding and watching workmen paint. “It was always from in to out, the inside story,” Deo says. “Never just the final, polished picture.” As Deo puts it, it was “founder branding before there was founder branding.” They spoke about the restoration, the learning curve and the people around them in their own voices.

When they shot formal campaigns, they focused on creating a contemporary visual iconography for Odisha. “When people say God's Own Country, I can already imagine Kerala. Or the Land of Royals, and then Rajasthan appears. We needed to be category-makers for Odisha.”

They also treated media as a set of different audiences rather than one undifferentiated press list. YourStory was approached through the lens of entrepreneurship: could a hotel function as a startup and catalyse investment in the district? The Better India was a better fit for the social-impact story. When journalists came for the royal angle, the sisters redirected the conversation towards the craftspeople and communities around the palace.

Instead of assuming that an international travel publication was automatically the most valuable route to a guest, they prioritised regional media. They chose “educational formats”, including podcasts. Their reels and posts focused on telling bite-sized stories about local cultural practices.

“Don’t assume that your guest is only an English-speaking/reading person,” Deo advises. “Around 60% of their guests, she says, come from places like Kolkata and Ranchi, including DINKs [Double Income No Kids] and multi-generational families travelling together.”

A 2022 episode on Raja, Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyaan shot at the Palace, focused on the region's unique tribal and royal culinary heritage, brought them significant visibility. A flurry of local visitors and Odia expats followed. (Deo wrote about this moment on LinkedIn, where she often shares insights on running a boutique palace hotel.)

The sisters handle much of the social themselves and are less interested in securing the person with the largest following than in finding the person whose audience has a genuine connection to what Belgadia is trying to do.

The approach to individual collaborators was also deliberately loose. A Kathak dancer, Saloni Satpute, was invited to stay and simply “do what you do” rather than fulfil a prescribed influencer brief. The resulting dance video became one of Belgadia’s highest-performing posts, reaching around five million views.

They didn’t wait for people interested in heritage to find them either. They went looking for people interested in something else. “We used niches and showcased them on social media; we tapped into subcultures...For example, people don’t expect to read about a hotel in Rolling Stone magazine,” Deo says.

Music became one entry point. Fashion became another. Food became another. Design became another through their collaboration with Sabyasachi for Nilaya by Asian Paints. Rugby became another. The sisters worked with fashion brands, decor brands, food writers and restaurants, artists and performers. A collaboration with Ekaa brought Chef Niyati Rao and her team to Mayurbhanj to work with local ingredients like mahua. Music collaborations brought Mayurbhanj Chhau into contemporary contexts.

The point was not reach alone. It was the route to discovery.

“People like music? You don’t have to like heritage or culture, but you like music. Fine, we’ll reach you on Rolling Stone. You like fashion? We’ll get to you through Harper’s Bazaar, where we will showcase these cool handloom silhouettes by Hasa Atelier [their in-house design store],” Deo explains. “You like food? We’ll reach you at Ekaa.”

Akshita soon realised that their audience overlapped with people attending India Art Fair and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The question, then, was not how to collect the most coverage, but where else those people were already discovering things they cared about.

“We’re not playing a game of many, but of meticulous detailing [of our customer],” Deo says.

The guiding principle extends to choosing collaborators as well. With Art & Charlie, for example, the starting point was shared values around purpose and a natural resonance with the gallery’s female founder Ayesha Parikh.

The collaboration developed into an art residency with artist Kumar Misal and work drawing on Mayurbhanj’s materials and practices. The works co-authored with the women of the Rangamatia Sabai Grass Cluster will be part of Misal’s solo during Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2027.

Deo describes the broader strategy as “productization of the destination”: creating objects, art, experiences and stories that allow someone to encounter Mayurbhanj even when they are not physically there. The in-house store Hasa Atelier offers design-led products from scrunchies to cool totes to high-end furniture. In the works is a special Belgadia-inspired scent, developed in collaboration with a homegrown Odisha brand.

In other words, a collaboration is not simply an acquisition tactic. It becomes another way of translating the destination.

The hotel’s programming has followed the same trajectory. What began as individual experiences has developed into repeatable IP. Its Chhau festival brings together the three forms of the dance from Odisha, Bengal and Jharkhand, with lecture-demonstrations in the morning and performances in the evening. Durga Puja celebrations and the Jagannath Rath Yatra are two other major events that are unique talking points. The lens is clear though: to make the past contemporary and relevant rather than simply glorifying it. “You can't keep saying we had Rolls Royces, and go on about the Chanels, and the pearls and tiaras. A lot of the time we’re just wearing Stan Smiths and in work mode at home.”

There are local festivals, workshops, residencies and collaborations, with further programming in sport, music and design being developed.

“What is a signature moment? What’s a high-touch moment? What’s your IP? How can people remember you?” Deo asks.

That may be the most useful distinction for other hoteliers: content is not the end product. The most effective content often comes from building something worth talking about in the first place.

A hotel can post a picture of a Chhau dancer. Or it can build an annual festival around Chhau. It can photograph a craftsperson. Or it can create an experience in which a guest meets them, learns how something is made and then takes that object home. It can collaborate with an artist simply for a social-media post, or use that relationship to introduce an entire destination to a new cultural audience.

Belgadia's next phase seems to be heading further in this direction, towards smaller, more deliberately curated communities and experiences. Next year’s artist residency will bring together two musicians from South America and the UK. A music and craft festival is being developed, alongside more sport and movement programming. The ambition is less mass event than a tightly-edited universe of experiences.

The final piece of the puzzle was audience mapping. The sisters discovered that their audience was not necessarily the one they had imagined. “Don’t be biased towards who you think your audience is,” Deo says. “Be prepared to relearn who your audience is.” Today, she says, much of their feeder market is regional.

That discovery changed the way they thought about marketing. If the audience is already close enough to return, the job is not endless acquisition. It is giving them reasons to come back. One way to do this, Deo realised from observing private members’ clubs like Soho House, is to build consistent community-style programming – including workshops and events – people come back for. They’ve also introduced day passes for guests.

“We want repeat customers,” Deo says. “My marketing funnel shouldn’t focus on only acquiring new customers. Once you’re a customer, how do I make sure you keep coming back?”

Which brings Deo to her advice for hoteliers starting out now.

“Find your narrative and your point of view,” she says. Identify the two or three things that make the property unique, understand the values behind them, and ask why you are the right person to tell that story.

Work out where the audience actually is, rather than where you assume it is. And keep revising the answer. Belgadia's own experience showed the sisters that a curious, sophisticated, well-travelled audience could also be highly local.

“Your guest is evolving, so you have to evolve too.” A heritage hotel does not have to offer only heritage experiences. Belgadia can offer Chhau and Rajo, but also swimming, vinyl, and by early next year, a new pickleball court and mahjong.

“Don’t be so narrow-minded in what you feel the guests should be experiencing. After all, you can’t beat them with the stick of culture,” Deo says. “Let them choose.”

For a hotel trying to build a distinctive brand today, perhaps that is the real DIY lesson. Start with a point of view, build something only you can build, understand who might care about it, and then give those people more than one way in.

For Akshita and Mrinalika, there is another ambition beyond building Belgadia into a destination: to see more women take ownership of inherited homes, land and histories, and find contemporary uses for them. In that sense, their story is not only about turning a palace into a hotel. It is about what can happen when two women decide to look at an inheritance differently. Somewhere, I’m sure, Maharani Sucharu Devi has a small smile on her face.