For the past 26 years, I have been part of the hospitality industry where the entire focus of my career has been squarely on the commercial side of the business.
I worked for hotels in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. My first five placements were with Ritz-Carlton, then I moved from luxury to 5-star with Grand Hyatt. I then managed a portfolio of resorts under Banyan Tree and then had a large portfolio of Radisson Hotels across three continents.
In the past nine years, I founded a training company that focuses only on hotels and only within the commercial domain of this beautiful industry. In this time, my team and I have trained close to 20,000 professionals in more than 1,000 hotels on all the continents of this Earth. We have listened to these teams, talked to operators, owners and stakeholders constantly. This macro-overview of the hotel industry has given me a unique perspective to be able to share this article and hopefully allow you to learn something useful. And the one thing that I wish to drill down on is change.
This change can affect a wide range of factors that affect a hotel’s performance. Variations such as: supply, demand, hotel condition, market perception, brand affiliation, key feeder markets, traveler expectations, labor restrictions, energy and other operating costs, along with many more factors of course.
I am not going to look at change factors from 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. I will keep this simple, highly relevant and recent.
In late March 2025, while working with teams in Jakarta, Indonesia — a city that does not have any significant leisure or incentive business — I stumbled upon a state of panic as the government had just rolled out a massive cost-cutting initiative which diminished their spending for delegations, government events and conferences at hotels. This has left many properties with many empty large suites and huge meeting venues with no one in them.
During the recovery stage from COVID-19, all the hype was about "workations," work from home, videoconferencing needs and shared working spaces. This led to many being designed and built during this period to factor in such needs. And just four years later, all this is old news.
Back from 2010 to 2015, Bangkok had an influx of Chinese business where most of the travelers were coming through tour series groups, and it seemed like every single hotel in the city did not have enough twin rooms. Many were scrambling to buy extra beds and new mattresses to capture share but still had major difficulties with room layouts and furniture design.
In 2000, the definition of luxury was huge wooden wardrobes, four-piece bathrooms, monster TV cabinets and wallpaper. Then a brand was created to reimagine luxury through bathrooms with glass walls, bathtubs in plain sight of the bed and swings in the rooms with the younger more affluent audience as the main demographic.
But trends changed and more extreme variations rose to attract that same audience, which left the original trendsetters with many assets hunting down alternate segments, such as business travelers; meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions travelers; and families with young children. Unfortunately, many of the same design aesthetics that made them succeed for the first 10 years are a hindrance today. Newer hotels from this brand had to adapt right from the start while older ones either had very costly renovations or are battling inherent barriers to success.
None of us can see into the future. TVs could roll out from behind a wall, laptops might change so that a typical working desk may not be needed anymore and car ownership models may alter the need to own or even drive vehicles. Traveler taste and desires will also develop but some things will remain constant, at least for the foreseeable outlook.
A versatile and resilient property must be able to handle seasonal changes, segmentation shifts and demand disruptions while being built with flexible room integration options for easier operations and more reasonable refurbishment costs when needed.
Rooms that connect are king! It really is just a couple of doors in place of a wall. Hotels need to have as many of these as possible. And not just rooms connecting to rooms. But also suites that can connect to rooms at multiple locations, allowing the flexibility to create family-oriented rooms two-, three- or even four-bedroom suites when needed. With aging populations in many developed countries, larger family travel will most certainly be a significant future trend.
Also, a small hint: Suites don’t even need to be suites all the time! I stayed in a hotel in Hong Kong last month where a suite was two connected rooms with ingenious transforming furniture that turns a bedroom into a living room — simply brilliant.
Beds will play a big role as well. Ideally, every single room in a hotel must be designed with flexible bedside tables and lighting fixtures that allow every single king-bedded room to be turned into a twin with minimal operational fuss — and visa versa, of course. This can allow a hotel to maximize not only room revenues, but also food and beverage by maximizing the guest count in the building. In New York City, many hotels are filled with business travelers on weekdays who all want king beds and leisure guests on the weekend who may want twins.
People will always need to eat. A notable brand that was created to focus on extended stay has been trying to raise rates and justify to their ownership groups the value that they can bring to the table. However, yielding can become challenging when markets get saturated with increasing rents and the pressure from Airbnb and other OTAs.
The only path to higher rates is to go after shorter stays with corporate, leisure and government guests. However, due to the lack of a single outlet, no proper kitchen space and no ability to service meals, this has proven to be largely unsuccessful with new assets and is only possible with new builds.
Lastly, function space — a hotel's other major space gobbler — needs to be utterly versatile, allowing one large space to be used as multiple smaller ones. This isn’t new to any of you, but what needs to be considered is the sound insulation, allowance for pre-function or break foyer space along with sufficient and multiple restroom locations to once again allow for a seamless operation by a minimally manned banqueting team. Because one more thing is certain for the future: Labor costs will skyrocket and attracting talent will become more difficult than ever in all departments.
Environmental matters will remain and grow in significance. Every new hotel room should come with a tap for clean and filtered water — that is a must. And all hotels in metropolitan centers need to have appropriate air filtration systems along with every energy saving technology currently available. These parameters will not only make the building more economical to run but will also provide the operator with massive value-selling features that will help them to outperform their competitors.
To sum up, I cannot advise you how to make a hotel room or what the building should look like, what inventory it needs to have or how big its rooms can be. That will always be location and brand standards specific and, of course, be restricted according to the available investment funds.
All I am saying is to make every possible space, room and facility as flexible as possible. This will allow the teams who are running these assets to pivot when needed and exceed the operational and physical limitations that most of the currently operating hotels around the world possess. Let’s design the future with the mindset of adaptability and versatility and not get stuck into a rigid platform that impedes excellence.
But beyond all the design considerations, there’s one constant that must not be underestimated: human interaction. No matter how beautifully designed or technologically advanced a hotel is, its true essence is in how people experience it and interact with each other within it. As we future-proof our hotels, we must remember that guests still crave meaningful, warm and authentic interactions. The hotel lobby, for example, should not just be a passageway but a space that invites connection between guests as well as to enhance communication lines between guests and staff.
Communal areas should inspire conversation, collaboration or even quiet companionship. Flexible design isn’t just about room configurations, it’s also about enabling human moments, whether it’s a casual chat over coffee, a shared experience during a live cooking demo or a healthy competition at the gym. Regardless of trends, people will always remember how a place made them feel. And it’s the people, not just the paint or the pillows, that make memories last.
Tareq Bagaeen is founder of aQedina.com and a veteran hotelier with more than two and a half decades in the business. He previously worked for five different Ritz-Carlton properties, then with with Hyatt, Banyan Tree Hotels and The Rezidor Hotel Group, all in senior property and corporate leadership roles covering Asia, The Middle East & Europe.
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