October 18 2026
Shoba Rudra: Championing conscious tourism across India, Nepal and Bhutan through RARE India
(Oct 18, 2026) From growing up in Visakhapatnam to building RARE India, a collective of independent hotels across India, Bhutan and Nepal, Shoba Rudra has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of hospitality, conservation and local culture. Through a focus on slow travel and independently owned properties, she champions experiences that bring travellers closer to the landscapes, communities and traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Growing up in the salt-crusted tranquillity of Visakhapatnam, back when it was a sleepy coastal whisperer in Andhra Pradesh, Shoba had a simple upbringing. “My domestic universe was a strange binary: a father orchestrating the iron logic of the Indian Railways and a mother who decoded the sacred alchemy of hosting and hospitality,” she tells The Global Indian. Her mother taught her that service was an invisible art.
Shoba describes her youth as a mix of eco-warrior activism, classical dance mudras, traditional ballads, cinema reels and hours spent staring at the tide. This eclectic upbringing would later intersect with her interest in travel, nature and hospitality.
She decided to study the creatures of the earth, earning a B.Sc. in Zoology from Andhra University before pivoting to a postgraduate degree in journalism and mass communications. Soon after, the magnetic pull of Delhi drew her in, and she discovered that travel wasn’t just an escape hatch but an actual profession.
Her sojourn with media began at The Hindu in Chennai as an intern, followed by a stint writing advertising copy and a couple of years hunting stories for niche magazines. Then came Fotomedia, which Shoba describes as the analogue ancestor of Shutterstock in the 1990s. Cataloguing photographs of wild animals, ancient stone structures and landscapes opened up new possibilities for her.
“It broke my brain open and pointed me toward the horizon,” she recalls.
Shoba next took a leap into entrepreneurship with a neighbour in Gurgaon. Together, they built Travel Scope India to manage destination logistics and create distinctive experiences for multinational corporate employees and expatriates arriving in the city.
Building a community around conscious travel
By 2003, Shoba’s interest in discovering stories had taken her to the jungles of Bandhavgarh National Park. There, she found her first partner hotel, a conservation-focused lodge that helped shape the direction of her work.
“We called it T S Marketing Services back then,” she says. The business was formally rebranded as RARE India in 2009.
RARE’s early community grew around small, privately owned properties with distinctive stories and a commitment to their surroundings. Churhat Kothi in Bandhavgarh was the first lodge to join, followed by properties including Chhatra Sagar, Shahpura Bagh, Ramathra Fort, Bhainsrorgarh Fort, Windermere Estate, Tiger Mountain Pokhara Lodge and Sarai at Toria.
Rather than focusing on conventional hotel offerings alone, RARE’s approach centres on the people behind these properties, their locations and the experiences they offer. Its website describes them as owner-operated palaces, forts, retreats and lodges that seek to preserve heritage, protect nature and celebrate their surroundings.
The collection’s philosophy has evolved alongside the market for experiential travel. RARE describes its early years as a time when such travel occupied a niche, with storytelling helping bring the properties to the attention of travellers. By 2009, the organisation had found its place amid growing interest in more experience-led journeys.
Today, Shoba says, RARE’s slow-travel network extends across India, Bhutan and Nepal.
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Rethinking luxury through slow travel
Shoba’s work has taken her across India, Bhutan and Nepal and into places far removed from conventional luxury. After years of travelling and observing destinations at ground level, she has developed a distinct view of what luxury means.
Luxury is a word that leaves a funny taste in my mouth, and I routinely banish it when speaking of our boutique. To me, real luxury is an act of slow, deliberate, almost meditative psychological trespassing. It is the absurd privilege of melting into a landscape so deeply that you know it by its human pulse, its decay, its raw edges, and its ancient ghost stories. It’s about a single, unrepeatable millisecond in time that leaves a permanent, radioactive mark on your memory. If a place doesn’t trigger a subtle, quiet coup inside your brain, it isn’t luxury.
Shoba Rudra
RARE’s emphasis on conscious travel reflects this broader understanding of hospitality. The organisation describes its experiences as authentic and connected to place, while its evolving philosophy has increasingly brought sustainability and regeneration into its understanding of travel.
After 23 years of building RARE, Shoba says her understanding of responsible tourism has changed considerably. “In 2003, I had romantic notions,” she recalls. Today, she sees responsible travel as a way to help protect the ecosystems and communities on which destinations depend.
For tourism to be genuinely conscious, she believes, it must do more than celebrate native art, culture and biodiversity. It must also generate economic opportunities for local people, strengthen cultural pride and support the preservation of the places travellers visit.
“Ensuring tourism acts as a shield of preservation rather than an invasive parasite that leaves the destination hollow” is how she describes the responsibility she believes the industry must embrace.
Giving conscious travel a practical framework
RARE’s philosophy has continued to evolve. In 2019, the organisation introduced The RARE Touchstones, a framework built around conservation, community, heritage, wellbeing and mindful hospitality. These principles give practical expression to its approach to responsible tourism and provide a shared reference for the properties within its collection.
The organisation’s stated mission is to preserve and celebrate India’s cultural heritage while creating travel experiences that benefit local communities, protect the environment and encourage responsible exploration.
RARE is now entering another phase, with SAMHI Hotels Limited having acquired a 70 percent majority stake in the company, according to the information provided for this feature.
For Shoba, the organisation’s South Asian identity remains central to its work, even as its ideas about hospitality speak to broader questions about travel and sustainability.
Our DNA is unapologetically South Asian, but the heavy lifting done by our rogue independent hoteliers speaks a universal dialect.
Shoba Rudra
That belief also informs Right Out of Place, an archival book project launched through BRIDGES for Conscious Travel. The book documents 55 independent hospitality journeys across India, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka between 1997 and 2017, with the accounts gathered by naturalist Hashim Nadir Tyabji.
Shoba is keen to distinguish the project from a conventional coffee-table publication. The aim, she explains, is to document the stories behind hospitality ventures and recognise their journeys independently of commercial relationships.
“We did something completely insane for this industry: we stripped away all commercial network loyalty,” she says, explaining that inclusion in the book was intended to reflect a property’s story rather than a commercial association.
The project also has a charitable component. Shoba says 100 percent of the proceeds from the first 100 collector’s editions will go to Nepal Relief.
For her, the book is another way to invite travellers to look beyond accommodation as a commodity and engage with the art, craft, food and traditions associated with a place.
We want the global traveller to taste our hospitality not as a commodity, but as raw art, ancestral craft, and indigenous culinary sorcery.
Shoba Rudra
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Navigating the challenges of purpose-driven travel
Building a business around a clear philosophy has not been without its difficulties. Shoba admits that steering a purpose-driven enterprise through commercial realities has often been challenging.
“Early on, it was a brutal game of counting pennies, chasing talent that didn’t just care about a pay cheque, and finding people whose internal compass aligned with sustainability,” she says. Finding people who share the same values, managing different expectations and remaining committed to her principles have all shaped her experience as an entrepreneur.
“The real masterclass?” she asks. It has been navigating human behaviour without abandoning her own rules. “Staying fiercely uncompromised while staring down compromise has been my true, bruising, beautiful alma mater,” she says. “It’s the only university that ever mattered to me.”
Carrying India’s cultural identity across the world
Being a global citizen means having the wings of a migratory bird but the gravity of a tectonic plate rooted firmly in your own home dirt. Wherever I wander on this spinning rock, India remains my cosmic north star and my unyielding badge of honour.
Shoba Rudra
She speaks of carrying India’s cultural layers, resilience and syncretic traditions wherever one travels, while recognising differences as part of life’s variety rather than barriers to overcome.
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Outside work, Shoba enjoys sketching, nature walks and drawing kolams, the intricate geometric floor designs associated with South Indian traditions. She also supports causes that extend beyond travel and hospitality. “On the human front, I quietly funnel my extra energy and life force into funding primary classrooms, upgrading women’s healthcare, and backing radical wildlife and environmental conservation cells,” she signs off.
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Shoba Rudra
| Born | May 5, 1969 |
| Based | Gurugram, India |
| Studied | A T College, Visakhapatnam. |
| Languages | Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, English |
Signature work
Shoba Rudra co-founded RARE India, building a network of independent hotels and distinctive hospitality experiences across India, Nepal and Bhutan. Through its focus on conscious travel, conservation, cultural heritage and community engagement, she champions a more thoughtful approach to experiencing the Indian subcontinent.
Idea
Championing conscious and slow travel that connects visitors with local landscapes, cultures and communities while supporting conservation and heritage preservation.
Network
Building a community of independent hotels and hospitality partners across India, Nepal and Bhutan through RARE India.
Impact
Promoting responsible tourism through a focus on conservation, community, heritage, wellbeing and mindful hospitality.
Giving Back
Supporting primary school classrooms, women's healthcare, and wildlife and environmental conservation initiatives.
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Vandana Vijay: Facebook professional turned cyclist and curator of slow travel experiences
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