Designing Meaningful Guest Experiences: Insights from Mr. Gaurav Shiva

Is an experience something you can deliberately design, or does the best of it happen organically?

I believe the best experiences are both designed and allowed to unfold organically. As hoteliers, we can design the environment, anticipate guest needs, create thoughtful touchpoints and ensure that every operational detail works seamlessly. But we cannot script the emotional response of a guest.

Some of the most memorable moments happen spontaneously—a conversation with a member of the team, a thoughtful gesture that comes at exactly the right time, or a guest discovering something unexpected about the destination. Our responsibility is therefore to create the right conditions for those moments to happen.

Good experience design provides the framework; genuine human interaction gives it life. The objective should never be to choreograph every moment, but to remove friction, create possibilities and empower our teams to respond naturally to individual guests.

What role will AI play in the future of experience design?

I see experience design as creating the architecture within which memorable moments can happen, rather than trying to script those moments. A hotel can deliberately design every element that shapes a guest’s journey—the arrival, the physical environment, the service philosophy, the pace of interaction, the sensory details and the way teams anticipate needs.

But the emotional impact of that journey will always remain personal and, to an extent, unpredictable. This is where the leadership of a hotel becomes important. Our responsibility is not simply to create beautiful touchpoints, but to build an ecosystem in which our people have the confidence, information and freedom to respond to what is happening in front of them. A guest may remember the room, the food or the design, but often what stays with them is something that was never part of the original plan—a team member remembering a small preference, an unexpected recommendation or a moment of genuine conversation.

I therefore believe experience design should have both structure and flexibility. The structure ensures consistency and quality; the flexibility allows individuality and spontaneity. When we try to control every interaction, hospitality can start feeling rehearsed. When there is no structure, the experience can become inconsistent. The real craft lies in finding that balance—designing the journey carefully enough to create confidence, while leaving enough space for the human moments that make a stay truly memorable.

Where do you begin when designing a guest experience — with the guest, the destination, the story, or the business objective?

I would begin with the guest, but not simply by asking what the guest wants. The more important question is: what should the guest feel, remember and take away from the experience? That shift in perspective is critical because experience design is not about accumulating amenities or touchpoints; it is about creating a coherent journey with a clear purpose.

From there, I look at three things simultaneously—the guest, the destination and the identity of the hotel. Understanding the guest tells us what is relevant to them; understanding the destination tells us what is distinctive and meaningful; and understanding the hotel’s own identity tells us what we can deliver with credibility and consistency. The business objective then has to sit within this framework, ensuring that the experience is not only desirable but operationally sustainable and capable of creating long-term value.

For a hotel in Mumbai, this becomes particularly interesting because the city itself is such a powerful part of the guest experience. Its diversity, culinary culture, energy, business ecosystem and contrasts offer a wealth of stories and experiences. But the answer is not to simply put “Mumbai” into the hotel through decorative elements or curated activities. The destination needs to influence the experience in a way that feels natural and relevant to the guest.

Where can technology make an experience significantly better?

I think the real opportunity with technology is not simply to digitise existing hospitality processes, but to fundamentally improve how a hotel understands and responds to its guests. The most valuable technology is the kind that allows us to move from being reactive to being anticipatory.

A guest journey generates a tremendous amount of information—from booking patterns and stated preferences to dining choices, frequency of visits and interactions with different hotel services. When this information is brought together responsibly, it can help a hotel understand the guest more holistically and enable teams to personalise the experience with much greater relevance. Instead of offering the same journey to everyone, we can increasingly create experiences that respond to individual needs while maintaining operational consistency.

Technology can also transform what happens behind the guest-facing experience. For a hotel, excellence depends on hundreds of operational decisions happening at the right time—room readiness, housekeeping, maintenance, food production, inventory, staffing and coordination between departments. Intelligent systems can connect these functions, identify patterns and enable teams to act before a small issue becomes a guest-facing problem. That has a direct impact on both efficiency and service quality.

I also believe technology will increasingly change the role of the hotel employee. If automation can take away repetitive administrative tasks and provide teams with better information, our people can spend more time on conversations, problem-solving and personalised service—the areas where human judgement matters most.

Ultimately, technology should not be measured by how much of the guest journey we can digitise. It should be measured by how much better we can make the journey because of it. The strategic opportunity lies in using technology to create greater relevance, anticipation and consistency, while ensuring that the human connection remains at the centre of hospitality.

Can genuine warmth and hospitality be trained, or can you only train the behaviours around it?

I would say that we can train people to deliver service, but we cannot train someone to genuinely care in the same way that we train a technical skill. Over three decades in hospitality, I have come to realise that memorable hospitality is created at the intersection of capability, culture and character.

Every aspect of service has a learnable dimension. We can train a team member on how to welcome a guest, read a situation, communicate effectively, handle a complaint, understand the product, anticipate requirements and maintain consistency. These disciplines are essential because genuine warmth without operational competence can still result in a poor experience. A guest may appreciate the intention, but ultimately expects the hotel to deliver.

The deeper dimension, however, comes from the culture of the organisation. When people feel respected, trusted and empowered, they are far more likely to take ownership of a guest's experience rather than simply perform a prescribed task. This is particularly important in a hotel because hospitality happens across hundreds of small interactions and functions—front office, housekeeping, engineering, food and beverage, security, stewarding and the many teams working behind the scenes. A guest may never see most of these people, but their work collectively determines how the hotel feels.

This is where leadership has a significant role to play. A GM cannot create a culture of hospitality simply through training programmes. It has to be demonstrated consistently in how we treat our own people, how we respond to mistakes, how we recognise initiative and how much trust we place in our teams to make decisions.

I also believe that genuine hospitality comes from giving people permission to be human. A scripted interaction may be technically perfect, but the most memorable moments often come when an employee listens a little longer, notices something that has not been said, takes ownership of a problem or simply makes a guest feel seen.

So, can warmth be trained? We can certainly create the environment, behaviours and leadership systems that encourage it. But genuine care ultimately has to come from within the individual. Our responsibility as hoteliers is to identify people who possess that instinct, develop their capabilities and build a culture where they have the confidence and freedom to express it.

That, to me, is the difference between delivering service and creating hospitality.

Where is the line between storytelling and manufactured authenticity?

The line is crossed when the story becomes more important than the reality behind it. In hospitality, storytelling should not be something created only by the marketing team; it should emerge from the product, the people, the destination and the choices we make as an organisation.

As hoteliers, we need to ask ourselves three questions: Is the story true? Is it reflected in the guest experience? And are we adding genuine value to the culture or community we are representing? If the answer to any of these is no, we need to reconsider the narrative.

Authenticity also does not mean simply recreating the past. The role of a hotel is often to interpret a destination for a contemporary traveller while protecting its essence. We can innovate in how we present a story, but we should never distort its substance for commercial appeal.

Ultimately, a good story should survive without the marketing around it. If the guest can feel the story through the food, people, service and experience itself, it becomes authentic hospitality rather than manufactured authenticity.