The numbers are mind-boggling. The 600-room five-star Sofitel hotel being built at Heathrow’s Terminal Five is so large its floor space is equivalent to more than 50 football pitches. The project costs £180m and at peak times, has 600 builders at work on the site. This hotel will boast a total of 620 windows, and 250 kilometres of cabling will be laid to provide its electrics and telecommunications.

The group charged with building the hotel is Arora International – the UK’s largest private hotel group. Almost as impressive as the head-spinning statistics of the new hotel is the way the company has catapulted itself from running one hotel for British Airways crew, to competing with the world’s international hotel heavyweights in just seven years.

Arora was started when the group’s eponymous chairman, Surinder Arora, decided he wanted to do more with his life than run a row of bed and breakfasts and persuaded British Airways to give him a five-year contract for crew that needed to stay overnight at the airport.

The seven years since the opening of the first £20m hotel on Bath Road, near Heathrow, has been a white-knuckle ride for the group’s IT director, Sunny Roda, as he has had to keep up with a company that has expanded to a group running five hotels and is in the process of building its sixth.

‘When I started with the group and we set up the first hotel, the challenge was fairly tedious: how to pool information from the 30 or so IT systems involved in running just one hotel. In those days, IT for hotels was very transaction-based, there was not much strategic IT,’ he says.

Roda grew up on the same side of London as Arora’s Heathrow headquarters – he was born and went to school in West Ealing. A first-generation Asian, Roda’s father grew up in Kenya while his mother is from India. The couple settled in Britain in the 1960s.

When Roda was at school, IT hardly existed and his boyhood dreams were to become an aircraft engineer: ‘I had a logical brain and liked to fix things,’ he says.

But like other IT directors, Roda came to rapidly realise that technology is not an end in itself, and to be successful at his job he needed to have equally well-developed people skills. Early on he realised he had to be more than just a technology expert, so he took a Masters degree in business IT.

‘I decided that I was not going to be the kind of IT director who sat in his ivory tower, waiting until the job was done and signing-off the sheet, but one that met every single salesman and engineer and asked as many questions as possible,’ says Roda. ‘I realised that the only way to improve my knowledge was to talk to the people who did it every day.’

Such interaction keeps him abreast of rapid technological developments, and in the know about who is developing the most future-proof technology. And the company’s decision to open its second hotel in 2001 meant Roda’s task stepped up a gear.

‘I faced a massive challenge from 1999 to 2001 thinking about running a group rather than just one site,’ he says. ‘I had to link the sites so we didn’t have three different accounting departments. And we had to ensure that all the systems at all the hotels communicated with one another.’

When it came to making important decisions, Roda’s choice to build contacts within the IT industry paid off: ‘Whatever challenge you face, someone else has faced it before and, it’s just a question of getting yourself in front of that someone.’

In 2004, Roda faced a new test when the company’s chairman made a snap decision to buy a hotel in Manchester.

‘One of my biggest trials was opening this hotel. I had five weeks from the time the chairman told me we had bought it to the first guest walking through the door,’ he says. ‘Getting all the systems in place in that short window seemed impossible, but nothing is impossible and we did it on time.’

Yet the biggest change for both the company and Roda happened when the group decided it wanted to be in the bidding for the exclusive hotel at Heathrow Terminal Five (T5). To stand any chance of beating the hotel heavyweights such as Hilton and Intercontinental, the group realised it had to team-up with another hotel group.

Accor was looking to get a foothold in the UK airport hotel market, an aim that complements Arora’s ambition to build and run the hotel at T5. Accor also wanted a hotel at Gatwick, so last year Arora bought the Meridien hotel at London’s second airport and re-branded it as Sofitel. Taking over the hotel gave Roda a dry run of the IT challenges that will come with running the new hotel at T5 in partnership with Sofitel.

One of the key benefits to plugging into a firm the size of Accor has been access to a global brand with all of its reservations, sales and marketing muscle. ‘We will have 600 five-star rooms to fill every night, says Roda. ‘We need access to the global presence and we need to be able to hook into their electronic distribution channels to achieve that.’

Arora decided to create a hybrid network at the Sofitel hotels, integrating with Accor’s systems, which was difficult because Accor had never integrated another firm’s technology. ‘Access to Arora systems from an Accor desktop was a problem because of its tight security,’ says Roda.

While such challenges are both complicated and necessary to ensure the commercial success of a hotel, it is not the IT that really excites Roda. ‘Technology has the capacity to revolutionise the client’s experience of a hotel,’ he says.

IT helps the company build a detailed profile of customers and the information can be used to personalise experiences at the hotel. ‘It’s all about putting the customer at the heart of the business,’ says Roda. ‘Technology is now so sophisticated that if the guest tells us what temperature they prefer to have the room set to, we can ensure that it is already at that level when they arrive, then change it automatically to be a different temperature at night, if that’s what they want. We can also pre-set the television in the room to their local language.’

When it comes to supporting business travellers, Roda says his organisation must ensure all forms of technology are available. ‘Guests without laptops need to be able to surf the web over the interactive TV systems with a wireless keyboard,’ he says.

‘There will also be a high-speed internet connection in the room for those with their own computers, as well as a free business centre. You have to realise that for people who travel a lot, it can be a very lonely lifestyle, so we need to make it as much a home away from home as possible.’

Roda has some ideas that might smack of Big Brother to some, such as ensuring a picture of the guest’s family appears on their phone – but if the customers want it, he will try to provide it. And for the next few years, the mantra of the luxury hotel business will be about personalising the guest’s stay.

But he thinks Arora is in good shape to handle the task: ‘After all, for years we’ve had to keep the air crew – the world’s most frequent travellers – happy.’

The way the company plans to use technology will help to give it that extra edge. And for Roda, the past seven years of his development as an IT director have been mirrored by the way technology plays an increasingly important part in every aspect of running a hotel.

‘Seven years ago I used to sit silently on the board listening to other people, but now they are asking me questions about ways of using technology to make the guest come back to us again and again,’ he says.