The best place for growth is in one's own backyard, Capella Hotel Group CEO Nicholas Clayton said.

In a video interview with Hotel News Now, Clayton said the company's namesake ultra luxury boutique brand, Capella, is named after a binary star in the sky.

"It's actually a true story about a binary star that's in orbit with one another," he said. "These two stars, there's a small and a large star, and this is reminiscent to us of a relationship with our customers."

The company has strength in the Asia-Pacific region given that it's headquartered in Singapore, and has plans to grow its Capella and Patina brands throughout the region.

The flagship Capella brand has been operating in the region for 18 years, and has six hotels in operation and about 12 under development, he said.

The Capella brand remains well-positioned for growth in the Asia Pacific, Clayton said. The next regions on the list for growing the brand would be the Americas and Europe, and Capella has "also made some forays into the Middle East," he said.

Capella Hotel Group's Patina is a lifestyle brand that serves as a younger sister to Capella. It launched May 18 with a property in the Maldives.

"In the next five years, an Asia play for Patina would be most logical," he said. "This is where we would probably create the foundations of the Patina brand and eventually grow into the Americas and Europe as well."

He added that Capella Hotel Group is a leisure company, and both brands cater to the luxury leisure traveler.

"Both of these brands serve all types of customers, but our general focus as a company is to focus on the leisure customer, because they are in control of their spend, they want great value for money. It's a more demanding customer, but we think it's a more valuable customer," he said.

Before taking on the role of CEO at Capella in 2015, Clayton worked for other luxury brands, including Ritz Carlton, Mandarin Oriental, Four Seasons, Jumeirah Group and Viceroy Hotel Group.

Over his three-decade career, Clayton said he has seen "mega shifts" in the luxury space, particularly among travelers in the upper luxury segment.

These travelers have seen the "obvious destinations" and are looking for deeper, richer experiences, he said. That may mean traveling to more difficult to access destinations to find experiences they are looking for.

There's also been a rise in Chinese travelers over the years, he said. They have become the most predominant outbound traveler, and they have also been traveling more domestically during the pandemic.

Capella had to adjust its offerings a bit throughout the pandemic to capture business from domestic travelers in those markets, he said. This required reengineering products and services to entertain and make stays memorable.

• Read more from Clayton on the importance of guest entertainment in the luxury space

As the global industry struggles with a labor shortage, Clayton said the issues with talent, recruitment and retention have always been top of mind for the company.

The pandemic "has exacerbated the shortages of manpower that we see in certain markets, because some countries have closed borders and you do not see the cross-fertilization. So in some cases, they've made the labor shortage more acute because of the pandemic," he said.

Capella was built on service delivery to customers on a moment's notice, so leadership understands the importance of hotel roles and "the power of decision-making at the grassroots," he said.

To attract and retain talent, Clayton said the company works to create an environment where employees know their roles, they know other peoples' roles and departments, "they feel well-informed, fairly compensated" and are incentivized.

He said Capella has human resources practices in place to meet these requirements under an initiative called "Project BIC," which stands for best in class.

"What we're doing is obviously always looking at our recruitment efforts, how to be effective," he said. "When we make a mistake and we have a recruitment that does not work out, we want to investigate and understand why and get to the root cause of that."

Capella Hotel Group also prides itself on having a diverse leadership team.

Given the company's international presence, Clayton believes that "the diversity of the people and where they are coming from helps us to have a better strategy overall."

"I mentioned the importance of the Chinese traveler. Well, we need good representation of the China market on our team. Because that customer is very important to us," he said.

He said Capella's director of revenue management is from Indonesia, which helps colleagues in Bali "feel like they are talking to a fellow countryman, and there's just a little more connection there."

"From time to time, we're in a fortunate position where we have colleagues that are from the countries in which we're moving into," he said. "And it just gives us a little bit more expertise, a little bit more insight and gives us more credibility."

Watch the video above to hear more from Clayton on the changing luxury segment, navigating the pandemic and more.