BIO

Gulshan Bhatia, 72, has steadily worked her way up the property ladder and made herself a multimillionaire as a result. Her hotel empire stretches from Hiltons in London's Euston and Paddington as well as a hotel in Kensington to Hyatt Regency properties in Birmingham and Grand Cayman.

She said, "I'm too old to work full-time now." Now her son Asif looks after the hotels. Her hard work has given her a fortune of £50m

She could not speak English when she arrived here in 1976 from Tanzania with her husband and four children. She was used to hard graft, having left school aged 12 to work for her father's textile business when he fell ill. In the UK Bhatia used her life savings to buy a B&B in Paddington for £190,000 and charged £3 per room. "I did everything on my own because my husband was ill and then passed away. I did 16-hour days," she says. They paid off.

Gulshan Bhatia gained a good reputation and became the first female franchisee in the UK to be granted a Holiday Inn licence when she took over the Holiday Inn Gatwick hotel in 1990. She eventually acquired five hotels and sold three to buy her crown jewel, the Great Western, in Paddington for £10m in 1986. The hotel, built to resemble a Louis XIV château, reopened in 2002 after a £60m renovation and is the antithesis of Bhatia's conservative lifestyle.

Shunning ostentatious displays of wealth, she doesn't own a mobile phone, won't use computers or even calculators and until a few years ago drove a Mercedes Benz she had owned for 16 years.

The latest figures of her Muirgold and London Plaza hotel companies show sales of £21.1m and £5.1m and pre-tax profits profits of £2.5m and £750,000 respectively.