As the Hotel Investment Conference Asia Pacific (HICAP) celebrates 35 years, industry veterans bring their decades-long insight to the hotel investment landscape of today and share their predictions on what will shape travel trends of tomorrow.
‘Experience’ comes full circle
“Experiential” travel has been the buzzword that means nothing and everything at the same time. When taken back to its very origins, there is a much greater appreciation of what will continue to define travel preferences moving forward – memories.
“Experiential travel is not new. For some time, brand proliferation and standardisation caused the industry to move towards selling rooms rather than memories. This ‘new’ trend is really just a return to fundamental hospitality,” said Anil Thadani, chairman at Symphony Asia Holdings, who co-founded Aman Resorts in 1987.
Perhaps what has changed is that experience has become the expectation. Beyond the “Aman junkies” or luxury vacationers, even business travellers are now expecting experiential stays, he surmised.
Ticking boutique boxes
Hotels that want it all may soon fall out of favour, while boutique hotels will thrive, experts predict.
The lesson for the broader travel industry? Today’s consumers are making travel choices based on what speaks most strongly to distinct identities and “personas” at any one point – not middle-of-the-road, generic brands that do it all.
“We all have different ‘personas’ when we travel,” said Miguel Ko, chairman of CapitaLand Investment and former president of Starwood Asia Pacific Hotels and Resorts.
The same traveller can have different personas and priorities when taking different trips – whether with friends, family, or for business – and seek out products with a specific offering each time.
“In this day and age, hotels can succeed by catering to one persona (at a time) as a small boutique hotel with 200 keys. There is no one size fits all anymore,” Ko said.
Sell a dream
The top hospitality trend to watch is branded residences, experts at the HICAP conference agree. While it may not have direct implications for travel industry middlemen, the explosion of dream holiday homes reflects how aspirations are shaping overall travel demand in big ways.
“The growth of lifestyle brands that combine hospitality with a sense of belonging (is remarkable), take the Soho House (for example). Similarly, Aman is not selling rooms but a lifestyle, a state of mind, a dream. What we did worked. And today, there’s a huge market for this… branded residences are spreading like wildfire,” said Thadani.
Indeed, Savills’ Branded Residences: Asia Pacific 2025 report projected a 180% growth in the number of branded residences in Asia-Pacific by 2031, with Southeast Asia being one of the strongest growth engines.
Disrupting vs adapting
Beyond travel preferences, panelists agree that the heyday of disruption by the likes of Airbnb and OTAs is not over. If these disruptions continue, even room service may become a thing of the past, Ko anticipated.
“At first, OTA was a threat, and then Airbnb. The trajectory of the sharing economy is continuing, and we cannot prevent it. The question is how well and how far we can adapt. Even within the chain, there is now a centralised revenue management player. The hotel general manager is no longer managing within four walls. Be ready to share more. The smart ones will try to work with these forces to reduce costs and build the environment,” he said.
Echoing the sentiment that such technological disruption still has many good years ahead, Thadani added: “The industry is still under-utilising technology. There are still great opportunities to leverage technology and innovate. Look at brands like CitizenM running 400-room hotels with eight employees – that’s innovation”.
That said, Bastien Touzeau, regional vice president development at Hyatt Hotels Corporation, noted that the human touch can never go away completely.
“Technology is there to help and improve, but especially in the hospitality line, the ability to touch and live in reality – that’s something very hard to get technology to replace.”