Moving forward as we get into the next leader speak hope session, we will also be moving forward with the visual narrative. This one adds another feather in unstoppable India's cap. Here we talk about India's space program. From the moon to the sun, India's space program is demonstrating how precision engineering and cost innovation can expand global access to space. Landmark missions such as Chandrayaan-3 and Aditya-L1 highlight India's growing role in delivering high-impact space capabilities at globally competitive costs. Let's take a look.
It's just the perfect setting to our next leader speak at home session. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege to welcome onto the stage a global hospitality leader who has played a defining role in shaping Hyatt's brand evolution and guest-centric philosophy across markets worldwide. So please, with all hands in this room, put together, let's welcome onto the stage the President and CEO of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Mark Hoplamazian, in a very special conversation with President and CEO South Asia HBS Anarok, Mr. Mandeep Lavanya.
Once again, very good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm glad to see that we now have a hall reasonably full of people and everyone has woken up after the hangover of last night. This is an extremely special session. Just quickly giving you a little background, when we planned the first HOPE, which was in 2023, the first global CEO that I had reached out to was Mark. And since then, we've been trying to find the schedule to bring him into India for HOPE. And I'm so delighted that we have one of the most influential global hospitality leaders right here in this room. So, ladies and gentlemen, can we please welcome Mark with a big round of applause.
Thank you very much, Mark. And greatly honored. It's a great, great pleasure to be here. I'm honored to be here. Thanks. So, thank you for the invitation.
Mark, let's start with the fact that although you took over as the CEO in 2006, 20 years ago. But you were not new to Hyatt, right? You were earlier running the Pritzker family office. And from there then you moved on. And that was even before Hyatt got listed. And you took Hyatt into the public markets much before asset-light became the industry shorthand. Looking back, what was the hardest mindset shift in transforming Hyatt into today's global platform?
So before I begin, I just do want to say thank you to Vikram Batra, the general manager of this hotel and his team. I think they've done a superb job. This is a great operation. And to anybody who's a Taj alum or a current Taj person, my hats off to you. So I think first of all, the company has gone through so many changes. And of course, the scale of the company is very different than it was before. And I think when I came into the industry, there were only two things that people on Wall Street cared about. One was size. Apparently, size was the only thing that mattered. And the second became asset-light. As Gaurav, I think at the last session, artfully explained, real estate is not the enemy of brands. It's a part of our business and we have to really appreciate that. I think the heroes of the Indian hotel industry are the owners and the developers who have lived through more hardship than success in the last 20 years. And I've been coming to India several times a year for 20 years in a row. So I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's been very tough. I've been a big bull on India for that entire time and you know, it took me 18 years during that 20-year period to be right. Now I feel like we're justified. I think the biggest mindset shift is as you grow, the risk is that you revert to a lowest common denominator approach to how you operate. And I think that's a mistake. It's sometimes attractive to think that if you could regularize or standardize, that that would be the best thing because it's efficient. I think that's the death knell. So we have been described as the smallest of the major brands. I actually think of ourselves as the largest of the differentiated platforms. And there's a big difference between those two descriptions. And I think what that requires mindset-wise, which is really the key question you asked, which is a great question, is a growth mindset. You have to constantly be thinking about the challenges that you see, the opportunities that you see, and instead of reverting to a set of rules that you're trying to apply to everything, the questions you should ask are how might we and what would it take in order for us to be able to do that? That's how you put yourself in a growth mindset. And I think that's been the key in terms of how we've progressed the company.
And in that journey, Mark, is there anything that you have to unlearn?
Many things. I think first of all, there's a general premise that I have in life, which is that averages lie. And so much of our industry has metrics that are averages. So people talk about RevPAR and RevPFOR index without bothering to ask a few other questions like who is in the comp set. And by the way, at least in Asia, rooms revenue is about half of our total revenue base. So what about the other half? I mean, the last panel talked about the importance of food and beverage and events. So I think there are some things that have become sort of like autonomic for the hotel industry and I think too few times are people really asking, okay, does that really make sense and how might we think differently and how is success truly defined and staying focused on outcomes instead of outputs. So instead of thinking about the task at hand, think about the impact that you're trying to generate, the change in behavior that you're trying to generate and have that be the first thing in your mind. So instead of being task-oriented, be outcome-oriented. And I think that's an unlearning because so much of the industry is execution-focused, like this is how you do things, this is how we get things done. God forbid you're picking up the SOPs, your standard operating procedures, and checking what that should be. That's also a death knell. So I believe in unleashing the good judgment of really good people and letting them ask different questions about how you do things.
Mark, you've added platforms like lifestyle collectives and curated luxury more than the traditional hotel brands. Are we really watching hotel companies becoming more experiential than a room-driven business purely?
I think so. Although you have to be careful about what it really means at the end of the day. I think we feel strongly that experiences matter a lot. Part of it is the experiences that you're creating on property, but part of it is experiences in the environment of the destination. So in many places, we engage local artists, we engage local chefs, and I think many people have understood the power of that because it really roots you in a location. But here, even here in India, like at the Alila Fort Bishangarh, there's a really great Rajasthani cooking experience that you can go to. Stephen mentioned food and beverage and we are redoubling down on all of our food and beverage efforts to really elevate it and also bring some more an elevated level of authenticity into what we're doing. So, we have in Kochi, which we were just talking about backstage, it's Malabar-to-table cuisine, and it's a really great way to introduce people to the local ingredients that are available and the local cooking methods. So, I think it's not just throwing a bunch of experiences at people. It's really being very deliberate about what you do and how you do it and first and foremost being authentic about it and secondly making it meaningful so that when people experience it, it really has an impact on them. And so back to Rajasthani cooking for a second, I've been anxious to go to the Alila and have that experience but my daughter spent one full year living in Udaipur and came back able to cook so many Rajasthani dishes. So, I'm now like living in heaven at home since she gets to cook up some really great meals.
You know, since we're talking about food and beverage, I have to say 1982, the first Hyatt hotel opened in New Delhi and what was it known for?
I was just going to make that point. India had never seen food and beverage of that kind. Not only in terms of variety but the way it was presented. I can remember that there used to be, we had to put queue managers outside, you know, the promenade for people to get inside. So that was really, really remarkable and of course, Hyatt, the restaurants in that hotel still remain very, very iconic.
