Stories from the Road: Vishant at the Motorcycle Inn
Who is Vishant Patel? The owner of the Motorcycle Inn in the Tennessee mountains, famous for having a different bike in each room, and the man on a lifelong journey to facilitate as many motorcycle conversations as he can.
Welcome back to Pit Stop, the corner of American Moto Co. where we pull over to explore the craft, the culture, and the creators who keep the raw, unfiltered soul of motorcycling alive. Today we're catching up with Vishant, or Sean as his American friends know him.
Vishant likes working the morning shift at his hotel. It is his chance to meet guests, ask where they are from, talk about their motorcycles, Vishant loves people. But before he built the motorcycle Inn he struggled watching each guest do the same thing in the parking lot.
"They'll pack the cars up, they won't look at each other, they'll get in the car, and they're racing to who gets out through the exit first. We are shunning ourselves away from everybody else. We've got plugs in our ears, we've got our eyes in our phone."
He knew exactly what those people were missing, because seven years ago he was one of them.
Vishant grew up in a farming village in India, sugarcane and vegetables, and got shipped off to boarding school up in the hill stations because his father wanted him educated in English. He was home three months a year. He rode motorcycles there, badly, cutting through traffic and doing the kind of things that get a young man killed.
So when his aunt's immigration petition finally came through after fourteen years, his parents made him a deal. You can go to America. You give up riding.
He took it. He got here, got a degree in logistics and international business, got married, worked a corporate job, then followed the family rule about getting into business young. A gas station first. Then hotels. In 2015 the family bought the property he is standing on now.
And his life got very small.
"Work, meet family, work, meet family. Got boring for a guy who went to boarding school and did a lot of other activities and made friends and had people outside the family in the loop."
Then in 2018 a friend from India moved to town. They got to talking about being back in the mountains again. The friend said he was buying a motorcycle. Vishant started riding that year, after more than a decade off.
"During the whole riding process, I'm making more friends, but I'm also making better friends. Friends which actually call and ask, hey, are you doing all right? When are we going riding?"
Every Sunday at seven in the morning they rode the Tail of the Dragon. They watched MotoGP together after, and Vishant went from one bike to six.
So that is the man watching the parking lot monitor. Somebody who knows precisely what it costs to have no one to call.
His first swing at fixing it was going to be an Ace Cafe kind of place, coffee and food trucks and bikes everywhere. The land was too expensive and the model did not work. Then the extended stay building he owned went sideways, tenants fighting, rooms destroyed, and he emptied it out entirely. Which left him sitting on the mountain on Foothills Parkway watching his cash flow disappear.
The answer he came up with was to put a motorcycle inside the room.
His uncle asked what was cooking in his head. Vishant said it out loud for the first time. Every room a different bike, a different style, a motorcycle themed hotel. He went looking to see who else had done it and found one place in Utah with two rooms, one Harley in each, otherwise ordinary.
The family passed on the idea. They told him if he had picked anything normal, another extended stay, they would have been in, but for this one was his alone.
He was also done with franchises for a different reason. He had started riding for Ride for Kids and the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, and when he went to hotel chains asking for support raising money, he got a lot of we'll look into it and nothing else. So he built the math the other way around. Without the franchise fees, Vishant could take two and a half cents of every dollar the Motorcycle Inn makes and give it to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation instead.
Then he emptied his savings, sold bikes he owned, and got to work with $2.48 in the bank.
The doors would have cost four thousand dollars apiece to widen, so he bought bikes that fit through the ones he had. He refused to make it all Harleys, because that is not how anybody actually starts. People start on crotch rockets and dirt bikes and get to a Harley later, so he went hunting nineties and early two thousands Hondas and sport bikes.
"It brings out the memory. Back in the day I had this bike and I did some crazy stuff with my buddies. It's about getting the child lit up again in a person."
The rooms are white bedding the same as any good hotel, real wood instead of particle board because real wood can be fixed. Then the bike gets rolled into the room, the walls have original magazine articles and spec sheets from the bike's release, lit up so you can stand there and read about the thing you are sleeping next to.
It took a while to get there. His furniture guy Jesse still gives him grief about it.
"Sean, you're changing your mind like diapers."
But Vishant told me a story that highlights why he has put some much into this.
He put two riders in rooms across from each other. One of them heard a bike pull in, popped his head out the door, saw the motorcycle, went back inside, put clothes on, and came back out. They started talking. Then they went to dinner. Then they sat on the patio half the night. Then both of them extended their stay by a day.
Their families now meet up at the Motorcycle Inn once a year.
"It was very intentional. Everything I've done on the property had to do with creating conversation."
That is why there is a Bimota Tesi H2 on the property, a bike with a swingarm at both ends and no forks at all, one of about twenty in the country. He bought the most expensive machine the dealer had, partly to prove he was serious about all this, and it does exactly one job.
"Everybody comes in here is like, what is a Bimota? And I'm like, BAM. I nailed it. Finally, I can start a conversation."
What he actually wants is bigger than a hotel. He wants a motor park, family weekends, and winter events where three people tear a motorcycle down while three more watch and then have to put it back together from what they were told. Communication, patience, a kid finding out what a carburetor does.
"That's the America I visioned when I was sitting back home in India as a young kid."
You can find the Motorcycle Inn at motorcycleinn.com, and while you are there, take a seat on one of the benches out front you just might meet you next riding buddy.
