India can become a source of new hospitality thinking, rather than only a market for global hospitality formats

Of all the service industries in the world, there is none as sensitively and precisely attuned to people as hospitality. Whether travel and tourism or food and beverage, hospitality’s greatest challenges and most rewarding returns are a consequence of recognising human preferences.

Because those preferences are dynamic—continuously altered by context, culture, function, trends and technology—hospitality learnt to optimise service through standardisation.

During the liberalisation and hyper-globalisation of the 1980s through the 2000s in particular, multinational hotel brands became a textbook example of what George Ritzer coined “McDonaldization”—a template of homogenised services built on four core principles: calculability, efficiency, predictability and control. Repeatable design typologies, highly codified operating procedures, globally recognisable service standards and increasingly integrated supply systems meant that individuality, environmental concern and cultural alignment could become subordinate to the demands of consistency and risk minimisation.

Over time, hospitality’s mass commoditisation and homogeneity triggered consumer fatigue. The resulting friction combined with emerging climate consciousness drove an appreciation for localisation, cultural authenticity, eco-responsive development and thoughtful service. Over the last two decades in particular, hotels have keenly adopted, tested and refined this holistic, human-centric, and personalised model.

This is where India has a compelling advantage. India’s national market is composed of extraordinary variations in language, landscape, culture, cuisine, climate, infrastructure and heritage. This wealth of multi-faceted diversity serves as a well-calibrated testing ground for operational excellence and innovation.

India demands both consistency and adaptability - the ability to deliver dependable standards while allowing each place to remain uniquely itself. This tension could become the foundation of a distinctly Indian hospitality philosophy: one that combines the rigour and reliability of global standards with the responsiveness, resource-consciousness and cultural specificity that individual places demand.

The opportunity India has is not to reject standardisation or any other process of optimisation and efficiency. It is, rather, to test and discern which operational components benefit from standardisation and which deliver their highest value in more organic and dynamic forms. For instance, safety, hygiene, training, technology and service quality all benefit from consistency. The guest experience, however, is unlikely to be memorable if delivered with clinical uniformity. Architecture, design, materials, food, wellness offerings and, especially, a property’s relationship with its surrounding environment and local communities must remain responsive to local culture, economy and infrastructure.

The future of hospitality—a category that India has the opportunity to define and lead—will be one in which we can regulate consistency without collapsing the art of service into templated sameness.

A guest should be able to rely on the quality of their experience without being able to predict every aspect of it. In a market as varied as India, that distinction is particularly valuable: standards can create confidence, while region-specific offerings create memory, meaning as well as an intuitive association with both the property and the brand.

Crucially, India also has the scale to turn this philosophy into a polished operating model rather than a collection of isolated experiments.

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, domestic visitor spending in India reached $203 billion in 2025, accounting for 86% of total travel and tourism spending in the country. At the same time, the geography of hotel development is changing rapidly. HVS ANAROCK’s India Hospitality Industry Overview 2025 found that Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities accounted for 44% of all hotel keys signed and 55% of all properties signed during the year, making smaller cities and emerging destinations an increasingly important part of India’s hospitality growth story.

This expansion creates a further opportunity. As travel and hospitality move deeper into smaller cities and emerging destinations, operators will have to respond to environmental, social and economic contexts that are fundamentally different from urban centers or metros. The Indian traveller is changing too. According to Booking.com and Accenture’s How India Travels 2025 report, 80% of Indian travellers spend most of their holiday at the property, compared with a global average of 51%. The property itself is therefore becoming a larger part of the destination experience, increasing the value of food, design, wellness, programming and cultural connection as meaningful differentiators rather than peripheral additions.

If India can solve for this complexity at scale, the resulting models will have relevance far beyond its own national borders. Many hospitality operators

around the world are presently contending with similar challenges: how to expand without compromising on brand culture, how to explore new markets without inviting overtourism, how to regulate quality without wasteful excess, how to operate responsibly under resource constraints and how to meet increasingly sophisticated demands for personalisation as well as authenticity. India is positioned to navigate these challenges not only as case-specific solutions but also as sustainable, large scale, systems.

The real measure of India’s hospitality innovation is, therefore, not whether Indian hospitality models can simply be replicated elsewhere. Instead, India’s global contribution to hospitality may come from a model of thinking—a philosophy of service—that travels across borders. One that demonstrates how consistency and individuality co-exist, how scale need not dilute character or culture, and how global standards need not produce global sameness. Instead of only remaining a market for global formats, India can become one the places in the world where the next generation of hospitality is imagined.

(The author is Director at Anticipatory and Executive Vice Chair of Tamara Leisure Experiences. Views are personal.)