As India’s travel landscape shifts towards more purposeful and experience-led journeys, hospitality brands are being pushed to evolve beyond conventional formats. Sterling Holiday Resorts has been at the forefront of this change, expanding its footprint while reimagining how travellers engage with destinations. Managing Director Vikram Lalvani shares insights into Sterling’s growth strategy, the rise of circuit-based travel, and how the brand is aligning itself with the changing expectations of the Indian traveller.
How would you describe Sterling’s position in India’s upscale leisure hospitality space today?
Sterling today occupies a distinctive space in Indian hospitality. We are not trying to be a generic hotel network spread across destinations. We are building a leisure-led hospitality brand shaped around how Indians are actually choosing to travel today.
Our portfolio has expanded well beyond traditional holiday locations into wildlife, spiritual, heritage, and emerging bleisure markets. What ties it together is not just scale, but relevance. We see travel increasingly being driven by intent—people are travelling to reconnect, recover, celebrate, explore, or reflect. Our role is to serve those motivations with consistency and depth.
We have also built the business with discipline. Sterling remains debt-free, has delivered sustained operating performance, and continues to grow through an asset-right model. So our position today is that of a brand with both range and clarity—one that understands leisure not as a seasonal category, but as a long-term shift in how India travels.
Your expansion seems deeply tied to circuits rather than standalone destinations. What is the thinking behind this strategy?
We do not believe the future of leisure hospitality lies in isolated pins on a map. It lies in connected travel journeys.
A single destination can attract interest. A well-designed circuit creates momentum. Travellers today are increasingly combining multiple motivations in one holiday—nature with spirituality, heritage with downtime, or wildlife with local culture. Our circuits strategy is built around that reality.
It also makes strategic sense for the business. Circuits help improve length of stay, encourage repeat travel within the network, and reduce overdependence on one season or one destination trigger. More importantly, they allow us to design travel in a way that feels more seamless and purposeful for the guest.
For us, this is not just about selling multiple stays. It is about building a more resilient and more meaningful travel ecosystem.
What are the key travel trends shaping your strategy right now?
The first is the continued strength of short-format leisure travel. People are taking more frequent breaks, often closer to home, and they want those breaks to feel restorative rather than routine.
The second is the shift from sightseeing to experience-led travel. Guests are no longer satisfied with simply arriving at a destination. They want to engage with it—through food, nature, wellness, culture, or community.
The third is the growing overlap between categories. Leisure and business are blending. Wellness and travel are converging. Spiritual travel is no longer seen as niche. Even formats such as digital detox, pet travel, and slow travel are becoming more mainstream.
Taken together, these trends tell us that hospitality has to move beyond accommodation. Guests are increasingly choosing stays that feel aligned with how they want to live, not just where they want to go.
How are you building experiences that feel rooted in place rather than standardised?
We start with a simple belief: a destination should not feel interchangeable.
That is why we do not treat experiences as add-ons. We treat them as part of the core design of the stay. Through our Discoveries & Experiences platform, each resort builds from the character of its location—whether that means plantation walks in one destination, safaris in another, birding and river trails elsewhere, or local cultural immersion in a heritage setting.
The same principle shapes our approach to food and wellness. Our dining concepts are designed to interpret regional identity in a way that feels authentic but accessible—whether it is lesser-known Odia specialities at Amo Odisha in Puri, timeless Moplah traditions at The Malabar in Wayanad, flavours inspired by the Gurkha heritage at Pahaare, or reimagined tribal favourites of Ooty presented at the Nilgiri Express. Each of these cuts across the barriers of distance and presents the destination on a platter.
Our wellness offerings through Subuthi follow a similar philosophy. Therapies are inspired by the region—ranging from Ayurveda-led treatments in Kerala to sea salt scrubs in coastal destinations and nature-led therapies in forest and hill locations—ensuring that wellness is shaped by the destination rather than standardised across it.
Guests may forget a room category. They rarely forget how a place made them feel. That is why rootedness matters.
Wellness and sustainability are becoming central to travel. How is Sterling approaching this?
Both wellness and sustainability have to be approached with substance, not as trend language.
In wellness, our view is that relevance comes from context. Wellness in Kerala naturally draws from Ayurveda, often anchored in structured therapies such as Shirodhara and diagnostic practices like Nadi Chikitsa. In other destinations, it may take the form of yoga, aromatherapy, sound healing, or simply immersive, nature-led experiences that allow guests to slow down and reset. Through Subuthi, we are building wellness experiences that are rooted in the destination—designed around its traditions, ingredients, and environment rather than applied uniformly across locations.
Our sustainability agenda follows a similar logic. Through Sterling SANKALP, we are integrating responsible practices into operations—from renewable energy and water conservation to EV charging, reduction of single-use plastics, and broader community impact initiatives.
Hospitality depends on healthy destinations and thriving local ecosystems. For us, sustainability is not separate from growth—it is what makes growth durable and meaningful.
Technology and AI are transforming hospitality. How do you see their role?
We see technology as a way to make hospitality more intuitive, not more mechanical.
AI and digital tools can help us reduce friction, anticipate needs, personalise communication, and improve service consistency. Merlin, for example, helps us support guests across the journey in a more responsive way. Internally, data and feedback systems help us identify patterns, improve decision-making, and sharpen delivery across properties.
But the principle is very clear to us: technology can enhance hospitality, but it cannot replace care. It can help anticipate a need, but it cannot create warmth. In our business, the real opportunity is to use AI to make our people more effective at the human aspects of hospitality, not to remove the human layer from it.
That is where the balance lies.
Food seems to be playing a larger role in your overall experience design. How are you approaching F&B?
Food has become one of the most powerful ways in which guests experience a destination. So we do not view F&B as a support function to the room product. We view it as part of the destination story.
Our effort is to move beyond generic multi-cuisine hospitality and build culinary experiences with stronger regional character. That is the thinking behind concepts such as Pahaare in Darjeeling, Slate & Pearl in Kodaikanal, Udaipur Katha and Airavat in Udaipur, Doon Diner—winner of the Best of the Best Awards—in Mussoorie, The Malabar in Wayanad, Amo Odisha in Puri, and Nilgiri Express in Ooty. Here, the menu becomes a cultural bridge rather than just a transactional offering.
At the same time, we remain conscious that great F&B in hospitality is not only about concept. It is also about consistency, freshness, comfort, and execution. The aspiration is to make food both memorable and dependable.
When done right, F&B strengthens recall, drives preference, and deepens the emotional connection guests have with a place.
How did the pandemic reshape your business and outlook?
The pandemic did not create every shift we see today, but it accelerated many of them.
It made domestic leisure travel more important. It increased the appeal of open spaces, shorter getaways, and destinations closer to nature. It also changed the emotional contract people have with travel. Guests became more intentional. They began asking not just where to go, but why they were travelling in the first place.
For Sterling, that reaffirmed the importance of being diversified, agile, and experience-led. It also reinforced the value of trust—trust in safety, trust in consistency, and trust in service delivery.
In many ways, the pandemic reminded the industry that hospitality is not only about occupancy. It is about relevance. The brands that remain relevant to changing guest needs are the ones that stay strong.
What is the leadership philosophy that guides you?
For me, leadership in hospitality begins with respect—for people, for place, and for purpose.
This is a business built on human energy. Guests feel what your culture is long before they read what your values are. So leadership has to create clarity, openness, and accountability without losing empathy. You have to drive performance, but you cannot do it by draining the people who deliver it.
I have always believed that authenticity matters. Teams can tell when leadership is performative, and guests can tell when hospitality is scripted. So I try to keep things simple: stay grounded, stay open, and stay focused on what really creates trust.
At the end of the day, hospitality is a business of memory. People may not remember every detail of a stay, but they always remember how they were treated. The same holds true for leadership.
