In an exclusive DeepBrief interaction with MediaBrief, Leslie Christopher Morrison, Vice President – Sales and Marketing at Tamara Leisure Experiences, speaks about the evolving Indian hospitality landscape and how shifting traveller preferences are redefining luxury, wellness and experiential travel in the country.
He also discusses Tamara’s unique multi-segment portfolio spanning luxury eco-resorts, wellness-led Ayurvedic care, upscale city hotels and midscale hospitality offerings, and the strategic thinking behind building a responsible premium hospitality brand in a highly competitive market.
Morrison also shares insights on the group’s growth journey so far, its long-term vision to scale to 40 hotels by 2030 through a balanced mix of owned and asset-light expansion, and how sustainability, technology and immersive, experience-led storytelling are shaping its sales, marketing and brand strategy. Read on.
How would you describe the current landscape of the Indian hospitality sector, and where does Tamara Leisure Experiences fit within this evolving market in terms of positioning and differentiation?
India’s hospitality sector is at an extraordinary inflection point. Domestic leisure travel has surged in a way we have never seen before, fuelled by a growing affluent middle class, increased disposable income, and a post-pandemic rediscovery of experiential travel. International arrivals are recovering strongly, and India’s position as a destination for wellness, culture, and nature is gaining serious global recognition.
Within this landscape, two distinct shifts are shaping the luxury segment. First, travellers, especially younger, well-travelled Indians, are moving away from hotel stays defined purely by thread counts and room sizes. They want to feel something. They want connection to a place, to its culture, its ecology, its food. Second, sustainability is no longer a niche preference. It has become a genuine marker of brand credibility for the discerning traveller.
This is precisely the niche Tamara occupies. We are not a traditional luxury hotel brand trying to retrofit ‘green’ messaging onto a conventional product. Responsible hospitality has been our founding philosophy. Our properties are designed to immerse guests in their natural and cultural surroundings, whether it is 180 acres of coffee plantation in Coorg, the mist-covered hills of Kodaikanal, or the ancient Ayurvedic traditions of Kerala. We deliver genuine luxury while keeping our ecological and community footprint light. That is a rare combination in Indian hospitality, and it is increasingly what the most valuable travellers in the world are seeking.
Positioning Tamara in India’s evolving hospitality landscape
How would you define Tamara Leisure Experiences’ positioning in India’s hospitality market today, including its core offerings, key operating segments, and the current scale and composition of its portfolio?
Tamara Leisure Experience (TLE) today operates a thoughtfully diversified portfolio across four distinct hospitality segments, each designed to meet a specific traveller need with genuine depth and excellence.
At the pinnacle of our offering is Tamara Resorts, our luxury resort brand. The Tamara Coorg is our flagship, a rare, immersive luxury property spread across 180 acres of pristine coffee plantation, with 56 luxury cottages built on stilts 25 to 30 metres above.
The experience is intimate and exclusive, designed primarily for couples, honeymooners, and discerning adults seeking total privacy and natural beauty. The Tamara Kodai kanal, our second leisure property, occupies an equally dramatic setting in the Palani Hills and serves both family getaways and corporate offsites and meetings, combining natural serenity with world-class conferencing capability.
Our wellness vertical, Amal Tamara in Kerala, is in a class of its own. It is an authentic Ayurvedic hospital, NABH-certified, that delivers medically supervised, evidence-based Ayurvedic healing at a level of luxury and credibility that very few institutions in the world can match. This is not spa-tourism. This is genuine therapeutic wellness with clinical rigour and extraordinary hospitality woven together, run by certified Ayurvedic doctors
In the upscale city hotel space, we operate the O by Tamara brand, currently in Thiruvananthapuram and Coimbatore. These are design-forward, statement hotels built to be the definitive address in each of their cities, serving business travellers, leisure guests, and those exploring culture and heritage.
Our midscale Lilac Hotels, rounds out the portfolio. Lilac properties in Jayanagar, Bengaluru (3rd Block and 5th Block) cater to long-stay business travelers and relocating professionals seeking comfort, consistency, and value.
Our Lilac Guruvayur property serves the significant pilgrim and devotee traffic to the celebrated Sri Krishna Temple, located just five to seven minutes on foot from the South Nada entrance. Lilac Kumbakonam similarly serves travelers to this famous temple town. Together, these properties allow us to serve a wide segment of Indian traveler’s without diluting the premium character of our flagship brands.
Take us through the journey from the brand’s launch to its current standing. What are the key milestones, turning points, and phases of growth that have shaped the group into its current multi-segment hospitality portfolio?
TLE’s journey began with a single, deeply held conviction: that India deserved a luxury hospitality brand built on authentic immersion in its extraordinary natural landscapes, not on imported aesthetics or generic five-star formulas. The Tamara Coorg was where that conviction first took physical form. Carving a luxury eco-resort out of a working coffee plantation in the Western Ghats, while preserving the ecosystem and the community that sustained it, was a formidable challenge. But it established the blueprint for everything that followed.
From Coorg, the brand expanded to Kodaikanal, bringing the same philosophy to the Palani Hills and adding a strong corporate and family dimension to our leisure offering. The establishment of Amal Tamara was a defining milestone, it took our wellness commitment from a hotel amenity to a full medical and healing institution, and placed us on the global map for authentic Ayurveda. This was not an incremental step; it was a statement about who we are.
The O by Tamara brand marked our entry into India’s rapidly evolving upscale urban hotel market, allowing us to serve business and city-break travellers with the same attention to design and guest experience that defines our resorts. The Lilac brand, meanwhile, demonstrated our ability to build operationally excellent hospitality at a more accessible price point, serving pilgrims, long-stay business travellers, and regional tourists with the same integrity we bring to our luxury properties.
Today, the group stands as a genuinely multi-segment, multi-geography hospitality company with a clear identity, a consistent ethos, and an exciting runway ahead.
Give us a breakdown of the current offerings, from the luxury eco-resorts and upscale city hotels to the mid-scale Lilac brand and wellness-focused Amal Tamara. Also explain the strategic logic behind this multi-segmented approach.
Each is differentiated in positioning, guest profile, and pricing, but all share the same operational culture and values. The strategic logic is deliberate and has multiple dimensions.
First, it gives us resilience. Luxury leisure travel is seasonal and cyclical. Corporate travel has its own rhythms. Wellness travel tends to be more needs-driven and year-round. Pilgrim travel follows religious calendars. By operating across these segments, we are never overexposed to any single demand cycle.
Second, it allows us to serve the same guest at different points in their life and travel needs. A couple that honeymoons at Tamara Coorg may return for a corporate offsite at Tamara Kodai, take their family there years later, and eventually seek a deep Ayurvedic healing journey at Amal Tamara. We want to be their hospitality partner for life, not a single-occasion brand.
Third, the multi-segment approach accelerates our ability to grow. Asset-light models such as leases, revenue-share agreements, and management contracts work well in the midscale space, where owners value proven operational systems. The credibility and brand equity we have built in the luxury segment make it easier to enter new markets across all segments.
Today, the portfolio is not a collection of unrelated bets; it is a carefully constructed ecosystem.
Sales, Marketing and Building Direct Relationships
How do the marketing and PR functions at Tamara Leisure Experiences directly support the sales team, and how do you measure the impact of brand awareness and earned visibility in driving direct bookings and overall conversion?
Marketing and PR at TLE are not support functions, they are growth drivers, and they work in lockstep with the sales team to move guests from awareness to aspiration to booking.
The foundation of everything we do is authentic, purpose-led storytelling. At TLE, our story of responsible hospitality, properties built with genuine care for ecology and community, experiences rooted in a sense of place, is inherently compelling. Our campaigns reflect that.
Whether it is our Earth Week activations across properties, bringing guests into farm-to-table experiences and community-led sustainability engagements, or The Tamara Collaborative, where we partner with individuals and brands that share our values to co-create experiences around wellness, nature, and conscious living, every campaign is an extension of who we are, not a departure from it. For us, sustainability is not a seasonal campaign. It is our daily operating philosophy, and our marketing reflects that with consistency.
On the influencer and media front, we have deliberately moved away from only transactional, one-off collaborations. What we invest in instead are immersive, first-hand experiences. When someone shares from a place of genuine experience rather than a paid brief, the resonance is entirely different. That authenticity is what converts curiosity into consideration, and consideration into a booking.
Guest voices are equally powerful. User-generated content, real testimonials, and organic social sharing from guests who have experienced TLE carry far more weight than any campaign we could produce. We actively nurture this, because nothing sells a stay better than someone who has lived it.
PR amplifies the brand in spaces that advertising cannot reach. Editorial coverage, awards, thought leadership, and industry conversations that build long-term credibility and keep TLE front of mind with both consumers and trade partners. Every piece of earned media feeds directly into the sales pipeline by strengthening the brand’s authority and desirability.
On measurement, we track brand awareness to direct conversion through a combination of digital attribution, direct booking trends, and channel mix analysis. Growth in direct bookings as a proportion of total revenue is a key indicator, it tells us that brand equity is doing its job, reducing our dependence on OTAs and strengthening our margins. We also track enquiry quality and source, repeat visit rates, and how earned media coverage correlates with spikes in website traffic and booking intent.
Ultimately, the measure of good marketing in hospitality is not just reach, it is the quality of guest that walks through the door, and whether they come back.
Could you explain the role of CRM and data-led personalisation within Tamara Leisure Experiences’ sales process, and how these tools help your team anticipate guest needs, strengthen engagement, and ultimately improve booking conversion and repeat visitation?
CRM is the foundation of our guest relationship strategy. Every interaction a guest has with us, from their first enquiry to their feedback after checkout is captured and used to build a richer understanding of their preferences, occasions, and communication style. This allows our team to reach out at the right moment, with the right offer, in a way that feels personal rather than promotional.
A guest who celebrated their honeymoon at Tamara Coorg sometime ago should receive a thoughtful anniversary communication, not a generic rate promotion. A wellness guest who completed a 14-day programme at Amal Tamara should hear from us when we introduce a new treatment modality, because they have already demonstrated the depth of their commitment to Ayurvedic healing. This kind of anticipatory personalisation is what turns occasional guests into lifelong advocates, and it is entirely data-enabled.
Which marketing channels are proving most effective for Tamara today, performance marketing, social media, content, PR, influencer collaborations, loyalty marketing, partnerships or database-led CRM?
No single channel dominates, our most effective results come from a well-orchestrated mix. Social media, and Instagram in particular, is our most powerful discovery channel for leisure and wellness guests. The visual richness of our properties lends itself beautifully to the medium, and we work with carefully selected content creators whose audiences align with our guest profiles.
PR and editorial coverage remain among the most cost-effective channels we invest in, particularly for our luxury tier properties. A well-placed editorial story in a premium travel or lifestyle publication delivers qualified reach with a credibility that performance marketing cannot match. Performance marketing supports direct booking conversion once a guest is in the consideration phase, and our database-led CRM drives repeat bookings and reactivation of lapsed guests. The combination of these channels, working in sequence across the booking journey, is what drives our results.
How important is direct booking for Tamara, and what are you doing to strengthen direct customer acquisition and reduce overdependence on intermediaries?
Direct booking is a strategic priority, not just a commercial preference. Every booking we generate directly is more profitable (without OTA commission), more relationship-rich (we control the entire guest communication), and more likely to convert into a repeat stay. The economics of direct booking compound over time, because a guest who books direct is more likely to call us directly for their next stay, refer friends, and engage with our CRM communications.
We are investing in several areas to strengthen direct acquisition. Our website has been redesigned to deliver an immersive, brand-led experience that converts browsers into enquiries. Our reservations team is trained to handle enquiries with the same warmth and personalisation that a luxury travel advisor would provide.
We have introduced direct booking incentives, not crude discounts, but value adds that make the direct channel genuinely more appealing without undermining rate integrity. And our CRM programme systematically works to bring OTA-acquired guests into a direct relationship for future visits.
The Coorg story: Building luxury around conservation
Your sustainability journey at The Tamara Coorg is often underscored by the fact that only 17 trees were removed during its development. Could you take us through the story behind the creation of the property and the principles that guided its design and construction while ensuring minimal impact on the surrounding ecosystem?
The Tamara Coorg was not built in the conventional sense of the word. It was conceived with a question that guided every single decision that followed, “How do we create something extraordinary without taking anything away from what already exists here?
The year was 2008. Our founders, the family offices of Mr. S.D. Shibulal and Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, had identified 185 acres of a working coffee estate in the Western Ghats. The estate was pristine, dense, alive. The instinct of most developers would have been to clear, level, and build. We did the opposite.
Our architect was given one non-negotiable brief, minimum disturbance to the landscape and ecosystem. Every cottage location was mapped around the trees, not the other way around. When a proposed location required cutting a tree, the cottage moved. We had permission to build 60 cottages. We stopped at 56, because those last four would have required cutting another 14 to 16 trees. We only cut 17 trees across the entire 185 acres. That decision, to leave four cottages unbuilt and four potential revenue streams on the table, says everything about who TLE is.
Rather than conventional construction on contoured land, which typically demands heavy retaining walls and significant concrete, we built the cottages on stilts. Minimal concrete, maximum connection to the earth beneath. Guests sit in their rooms genuinely suspended above the forest floor, with the sounds of the estate; birdsong, rustling leaves, the occasional mist rolling in as their constant companion.
Water, always a challenge in hill stations, was addressed with foresight. A natural curvature in the landscape became a 30 lakh litre rainwater harvesting pond. As the estate’s needs grew over the years, we added another pond of 80 lakh litres, because our commitment was always to give back to the ecosystem, not draw from it.
Our commitment to responsible hospitality and eco-conscious luxury is the outcome of every considered, sometimes commercially inconvenient, decision made in those early years.
How do you incorporate such tangible and measurable sustainability proof points into your brand storytelling, and how do they help strengthen authenticity, media interest, and long-term editorial credibility?
In an industry where sustainability has become an increasingly important conversation, what truly builds credibility is specificity. Saying you care about the environment is one thing. Being able to say exactly how many trees you chose not to cut is another entirely.
That specificity is the foundation of our storytelling. These are not talking points crafted by a marketing team, they are the founding decisions of the company, documented, lived, and independently verifiable. When a journalist, a content creator, or a guest encounters that level of detail, it registers differently. Because it is real.
Our approach is to always let proof lead the narrative. In media interactions, press materials, and the immersive experiences we create for visiting journalists and content creators, we anchor every conversation in the specific and the tangible. We do not say we care about the environment. We say we moved a cottage rather than cut a tree. That is the difference between a claim and a story, and stories are what build lasting editorial credibility.
The GSTC certification for The Tamara Coorg adds another critical layer. It is independent, internationally recognised validation of practices we have upheld since inception, and for editorial audiences, that external endorsement carries a weight that no press release ever could. It moves the conversation from brand narrative to verified fact.
Ultimately, in responsible hospitality, the most powerful marketing asset is not a campaign. It is the integrity of what you do every day, articulated with clarity and conviction.
Marketing ‘responsible premium hospitality’ can sometimes risk being perceived as a trade-off rather than an enhancement of the guest experience. How do you navigate this challenge, and ensure that sustainability remains a compelling premium proposition and a key differentiator for the brand?
There is a prevailing bias in the industry that is worth addressing, the assumption that responsibility and luxury are in tension. At TLE, we have never experienced them that way. In fact, our experience has been precisely the opposite. Responsibility, when it is genuine and deeply considered, is what elevates the luxury.
Consider what a guest actually encounters at The Tamara Coorg. They are suspended above a living forest floor, surrounded by 185 acres of an estate where the ecosystem was protected at every stage of construction. The silence is serene. The air is clean. The coffee they drink at breakfast grew on the estate they are sitting in. None of that is possible without the restraint and intentionality that responsible hospitality demands. The responsibility is not a limitation on the luxury, it is the source of it.
The challenge in marketing responsible premium hospitality is not making sustainability sound premium. It is ensuring it never sounds performative. Today’s discerning traveller is sophisticated enough to distinguish between a brand that has retrofitted a sustainability narrative onto an existing product and one where responsibility is authentically foundational. Our job is to communicate that distinction clearly and confidently, without ever being preachy about it.
Our approach is to lead with experience, not ideology. We do not open a conversation with our sustainability credentials. We open it with the experience, the stillness of Kodai at dawn, an Ayurvedic consultation tailored specifically to you, a coffee plantation walk where your guide grew up on that very estate. The responsibility emerges naturally from those experiences, because it is what made them possible.
For our sales team, the framing is equally important. Responsible premium hospitality at TLE is not sold as a conscious choice that requires sacrifice, it is positioned as the intelligent choice for a traveller who understands that the most exceptional experiences are those that are rooted in something real. When a luxury travel agent understands that The Tamara Coorg’s exclusivity is partly a function of the fact that we chose not to build more rooms in order to preserve the ecosystem, that restraint becomes a selling point, not a limitation.
The GSTC certification, Amal Tamara’s NABH accreditation, our local hiring practices, our rainwater harvesting systems, these are not footnotes in our marketing. They are headline proof points that tell a consistent story. A story that says TLE’s luxury is not assembled from imported materials and global templates. It is grown from the ground it stands on.
Building trust through recognition and measurable impact
Which awards, recognitions, guest ratings or industry benchmarks have been most important in strengthening Tamara’s credibility with travellers, trade partners and corporate clients?
Over the years, sustainability credentials, guest experience benchmarks and industry recognitions have played an important role in strengthening our credibility with travellers, trade partners and corporate clients. At a group level, being recognised as Boutique Hotel Chain of the Year – India by the Pacific Area Travel Writers Association (PATWA) at ITB Berlin was a key milestone that reinforced our positioning in boutique experiential hospitality. Multiple properties have also been recognised at the FHRAI Wedding & MICE Tourism Awards 2026 across wellness, spa and destination hospitality categories.
In parallel, our positioning as a responsible hospitality brand, supported by sustainability-led operations, community engagement and low-impact luxury experiences, has strengthened industry trust, while our Great Place to Work accreditation reflects the strength of our people practices and workplace culture.
At the property level, certifications and guest ratings have been equally significant. The Tamara Coorg holds Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) certification and has received recognitions including the Delicious Dining Award 2024 by Travel + Leisure India, alongside Global Spa Awards and FHRAI honours. Amal Tamara has earned multiple recognitions for Ayurvedic and integrative wellness excellence and is also NABH accredited, reinforcing medical-grade wellness standards.
The Tamara Kodai, O by Tamara Coimbatore and O by Tamara Trivandrum have similarly received FHRAI recognitions for wellness and sustainable hospitality. Consistently strong Tripadvisor and Yatra ratings across our portfolio remain especially valuable, as they reflect direct guest feedback on service quality, wellness offerings and immersive nature-led experiences.
Sustainability and evolving guest expectations
How do you measure the impact of sustainability across properties, in terms of energy savings, water conservation, waste reduction, local sourcing, community impact or guest feedback?
Our sustainability commitments are not managed as a communications exercise they are embedded in our operations and measured with the same rigour we apply to financial performance. We track energy consumption per occupied room, water consumption per guest night, waste diversion rates, and the percentage of food and beverage sourced locally, across all properties. These metrics are reviewed regularly and inform our capital expenditure and operating decisions.
Community impact is measured through local employment ratios, our commitment to hiring from the communities surrounding our properties is both a social value and a tangible sustainability metric. Guest feedback on sustainability experience is captured through post-stay surveys, and the scores we receive in this dimension are consistently among our highest, which reinforces our conviction that responsible hospitality is not just the right thing to do, it is a genuine differentiator that guests value and respond to.
Do guests actively ask about sustainability before booking, or does it become more meaningful after they experience the property?
Our experience suggests it is both and the dynamic is evolving. A growing segment of guests, particularly those in the 30-45 age group and international visitors, do ask about sustainability practices during the booking process. They want to know about our environmental and community commitments before they arrive. For this group, sustainability is a qualifying criterion, a reason to choose us over alternatives.
But for an even broader group, the sustainability story becomes most powerful after arrival. Walking through a forest that was preserved rather than cleared, eating food grown in a kitchen garden or sourced from farmers minutes away, meeting staff who are from the villages surrounding the property, these experiences create an emotional resonance that no pre-booking communication can fully replicate.
Many of our most vocal advocates began as guests who were drawn by the luxury offering and discovered the sustainability story experientially. Both pathways lead to the same outcome: deep loyalty and enthusiastic word of mouth.
How do you avoid the risk of sustainability becoming a marketing label, and ensure it remains a measurable business and operating discipline?
The risk of ‘greenwashing’ where sustainability becomes a marketing veneer without operational substance is real across the hospitality industry, and it is one we are deeply conscious of. Our protection against it is structural: our sustainability commitments are written into our operating standards, not our marketing briefs.
Property General Managers are accountable for sustainability metrics alongside revenue and guest satisfaction scores. Capital investment decisions from kitchen equipment to energy systems to landscaping, are evaluated through a sustainability lens from the outset.
We also believe that transparency is the ultimate discipline. The moment sustainability becomes something you only report selectively, it begins to drift. We share our metrics, including areas where we have room to improve, because honesty builds more durable credibility than curated success stories.
Our NABH certification at Amal Tamara is an example of this, it is not a self-assessed standard, but an independent, rigorous third-party validation. This kind of external accountability keeps us honest and keeps our standards rising.
Personnel and Local impact
With nearly half of your workforce hired locally, tell me about the operational and sales advantages of this high level of community integration.?
Hiring locally is one of our most consequential decisions, and it delivers advantages that are simultaneously ethical, operational, and commercial. Operationally, local team members bring irreplaceable knowledge, of the land, the seasons, the culture, the cuisine, the community, that cannot be imported.
A team member from Coorg who grew up walking through coffee plantations understands the ecosystem in a way that shapes how they guide a guest, describe a landscape, or curate a local experience. This depth of authentic knowledge is a significant differentiator in the guest experience.
From a sales and marketing perspective, it also provides powerful storytelling material. When a guest knows that the person serving them, guiding them, or caring for them is from the community that surrounds the property, it creates a connection and a sense of purpose that is deeply valued by the traveller who cares about where their money goes.
Economically, our local employment commitments have a multiplier effect, salaries earned by team members circulate within the local economy, supporting families and businesses in the communities we operate within. That is a form of impact that resonates strongly with the values of our most loyal guests.
Growth strategy: The road to 40 hotels by 2030
Could you outline Tamara Leisure Experiences’ growth roadmap for the coming years, including the strategy, priorities, and milestones that will support its vision of expanding to 40 hotels by 2030?
TLE has a clear, phased growth strategy aimed at doubling the portfolio with 550-600 additional keys and a banquet by 2030. We currently own and operate 9 properties, concentrated in South India, and have an active pipeline of 8–9 additional owned assets.
Key projects include the pioneering 24-houseboat solar-EV resort in Alleppey, a 50-key farm resort in Hosur, a luxury resort in Kaziranga (Assam), our first North India property in Bodh Gaya, a 200-room O by Tamara in Whitefield, Bengaluru, and several Lilac properties in strategic locations.
We have also initiated our asset-light journey with the first signing in Kufri and plan to aggressively pursue more such opportunities, particularly in the mid-scale Lilac segment. This will enable a balanced portfolio of owned and asset-light hotels, targeting a near 50:50 mix over time.
Our Pan-India expansion will span luxury leisure, upscale, and mid-scale segments, with focused presence in experiential leisure, wellness, pilgrimage, and high-growth Tier-2/3 markets. All growth will be anchored in our core purpose of Responsible Hospitality and our three strategic pillars, sustainability, wellness, and technology, ensuring disciplined, high-quality scaling that delivers long-term value.
The group has outlined a planned investment of INR 600–650 crore as part of its growth strategy. Could you elaborate on how this capital will be allocated across property development, technology, sustainability initiatives, and other key areas to support the next phase of expansion?
The planned capital investment of INR 600–650 crore reflects our confidence in the growth opportunity ahead and our commitment to building for the long term. The allocation across property development, technology, and sustainability reflects our understanding that excellence in any one dimension is insufficient a world-class property requires all three working together.
Property development investment will fund both new properties and the enhancement of existing assets ensuring that our established properties continue to deliver the standard of experience that our guests expect as the brand grows. Technology investment will focus on guest experience platforms, CRM capabilities, revenue management systems, and the digital infrastructure needed to support a larger, more geographically dispersed portfolio.
Sustainability investment will fund energy efficiency upgrades, renewable energy systems, water conservation infrastructure, and the community programmes that make our local impact tangible and measurable.
Tamara Leisure Experiences is moving towards a 50:50 mix between asset-heavy and asset-light models. What is driving this strategic shift at this stage of the company’s evolution, and how will it enable faster, more capital-efficient expansion while maintaining brand consistency and operational standards?
We believe this is the right stage for us to complement our owned portfolio with a disciplined asset-light strategy, having already built a strong operational foundation through our existing properties, systems and teams.
The shift is also aligned with the evolving hospitality landscape in India, where we are seeing strong demand across midscale and upper-midscale hospitality, particularly in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets, pilgrimage destinations and emerging leisure locations. Guests today are increasingly seeking experience-led, wellness-oriented and shorter-format travel, creating opportunities across multiple hospitality formats.
The asset-light model allows us to enter these markets faster, optimize capital deployment and partner with like-minded asset owners, while maintaining consistency in operational standards and guest experience. The objective is not to chase signings, but to scale thoughtfully across the right markets while remaining aligned with our approach to responsible hospitality.
The future of luxury hospitality
Looking ahead, what is your vision for the future of luxury hospitality, and how can India leverage its unique cultural, wellness, and natural heritage to lead the global conversation around immersive, experience-led, and responsible travel?
The future of luxury hospitality will be defined by meaning, not just comfort. The generation of travellers that is becoming the dominant force in global luxury spending, the affluent millennials and Gen Z cohorts are the most educated, well-travelled, and values-conscious consumer generation in history. They can see through a veneer. They want to know what a brand truly stands for, and they want their spending to be an expression of their own values. Comfort and aesthetics are the baseline; meaning is the differentiator.
India has a genuinely extraordinary opportunity to lead this global narrative. We possess something that no amount of capital or clever marketing can manufacture elsewhere: A civilizational heritage of living in harmony with nature, of healing practices rooted in millennia of knowledge, of community structures and cultural traditions that are the very definition of immersive travel. Ayurveda, yoga, forest ecosystems, temple towns, artisan traditions, diverse regional cuisines – these are not tourism products we have invented; they are the inheritance of a living culture. The world is hungry for what India authentically has to offer.
The Indian hospitality industry’s role is to be a worthy custodian of this inheritance, to present it with excellence, with integrity, and with genuine respect for its origins. That means building properties that do not damage the landscapes they inhabit. It means ensuring that the communities surrounding our properties benefit meaningfully from our presence. It means investing in the training and development of hospitality professionals who can deliver the world-class standards that today’s luxury traveller expects, while retaining the warmth and authenticity that is distinctly Indian.
At TLE, this vision is not aspirational, it is operational. We are building it, one property at a time, in the belief that responsible hospitality is not just the right way to do business, but the most compelling and durable competitive advantage available to an Indian hospitality brand. The global travel industry is looking for new leaders with a new story. India has that story. Tamara is committed to telling it, and living it, at the very highest level.
