“Service from the heart is a practice, not a slogan!”

Shruti Shibulal, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at Tamara Leisure Experiences, strives to create thoughtful business models that harmonise people, planet and profit. Under her value-driven leadership, TLE has grown to become synonymous with responsible tourism. Between 2008 and 2018, she served as Director, and subsequently as CEO and Director from 2018 to 2025. During this period, she led a 10x growth of the organisation as well as the design and institutionalisation of Tamara’s comprehensive sustainability policies.

The organisation’s ecosystem of sustainable initiatives closely integrates climate-resilient policies including green building practices, wildlife preservation, and optimised use of resources, among other factors. Tamara’s culture and operations also combine to address three key arenas that stand especially close to Shibulal’s personal vision: gender parity, human capital building and meaningful job creation to uplift local economies. TLE operates three distinct hotel brands in South India as well as independent business hotels in Germany.

Growing up, was hospitality something you consciously gravitated toward, or did it reveal itself gradually?

I always had a deep appreciation for the hospitality industry – the culinary arts, service design, and curated spaces. There is such an incredible level of craft and detail that goes into creating memorable experiences that bring people together. That conjunction of operational excellence and human-centric offerings makes hospitality both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Coming from a family associated with entrepreneurship and technology, what drew you specifically to hospitality as a medium of impact?

I was very fortunate to grow up around the advent of information technology, particularly in an entrepreneurial environment. I witnessed the discipline and thoughtfulness it took to build systems that serve millions of people, consistently and seamlessly.

In technology, inefficiencies sit quietly in code. In hospitality, inefficiencies are felt immediately by a human being. In part, it was this tension—between the meticulous construction of vast invisible systems and the creation of tangible, meaningful human interactions—that drew me towards hospitality.

What were your first hands-on experiences at Tamara like when you joined in 2012?

It was a unique test of vision and leadership. Hospitality looks intuitive from the outside; internally, it is structured discipline – margin management, hiring philosophy, process design, and relentless consistency.

From the outset, we were keen to build a purpose-driven hospitality group – one that harmonises people, planet and profit without compromising on exceptional service. Beginning from scratch gave us the freedom to design processes intentionally: embedding sustainability into operations, empowering teams as change agents, and ensuring that impact was not peripheral, but foundational.

Those early years taught me something enduring: vision is only sustainable if it is adopted by your teams and reinforced by systems that carry it forward.

What aspects of hotel operations fascinated you most – people, design, guest experience, or systems?

Systems – because systems determine whether people can thrive. Guest experience is the visible layer. But beneath that are SOPs, training frameworks, data flows, staffing models, multilingual coordination, cost structures. If those layers are fragmented, service suffers.

Over time, I became deeply interested in how operational architecture shapes trust and patronage. That line of thinking ultimately led to Anticipatory (which is a practical AI platform built for hospitality teams) because many of the inefficiencies we observed were not about effort, but about fragmented information.

Tamara operates across brands and geographies. How do you balance identity with efficiency?

It is about balancing infrastructure with agility and selectiveness with scale. Brand identity sits in design language, cultural nuance, and experiential philosophy. But procurement discipline, governance frameworks, sustainability protocols, and technology backbone operate at group level.

This allows us to remain distinct across brands and authentic across geographies while sustaining a unified level of service quality and scaling the portfolio without diluting identity.

What levers contributed most to Tamara’s 10x growth?

Growth is rarely a single lever outcome. We were able to catalogue significant pace as well as performance because we remained very selective about our definition of success.

Rather than observing numbers alone (whether number of properties, occupancy rates or revenues), we embedded growth strategies with vision-aligned criteria including governance metrics and qualitative non-negotiables. This allowed us to codify a culture of growth that was both streamlined and sustainable.

All decisions, no matter how quickly they needed to be made or the variables involved in assessing them, were deeply aligned with long-term goals. We never expanded faster than our systems could absorb. That discipline showed exceptional results.

What were the hardest leadership trade-offs between 2018 and 2025?

Between 2018 and 2025, the hardest leadership decisions were not about choosing sustainability over financial performance — but about defining financial performance over the long term.

We are deeply committed to responsible hospitality, and we see environmental stewardship and community integration not as moral add-ons, but as foundational to enduring value creation. The real tension was often between short-term acceleration and long-term institutional strength: speed versus sustainable speed, scale versus culturally aligned scale, expansion versus longevity-focused expansion.

Traditional growth models tend to prioritise rapid expansion. But growth without governance, culture, and capability can dilute brand equity and erode long-term returns. There were moments when we deliberately chose to build systems, talent, and community partnerships at a pace that ensured durability — even if that meant deferring immediate gains.

Sustainable growth is not slower growth. It is structured growth — growth designed to compound over decades. It may be quieter in the short term, but it builds resilient institutions, stronger balance sheets, and brands that endure.

How did guest feedback or employee stories shape Tamara’s evolution?

Guest feedback and employee stories were not peripheral to Tamara’s evolution — they were foundational. We have always believed that we are only as good as the service we provide, and the only honest measure of that is the voice of the guest.

Very early on, we set an ambitious benchmark: to achieve over 80% guest feedback penetration across our properties. Feedback was treated like gold — not as a formality, but as operational intelligence. That discipline created a rich data foundation, which eventually informed our ISO processes, quality benchmarks, and continuous improvement systems.

To truly optimise service, we recognised that communication had to be strengthened internally first. We developed a proprietary in-house communication platform that enabled real-time grievance documentation, immediate response loops, and seamless inter-departmental collaboration. Guest preferences, experiences, and concerns were systematically recorded — not only to resolve issues quickly, but to personalise future stays and enhance training.

At the same time, employee stories shaped culture. They reminded us that systems alone do not create excellence — people do. We consciously nurtured a culture of sensitivity, ownership, and accountability, ensuring that operational discipline and emotional intelligence went hand in hand.

“Service from the heart” is not a slogan for us. It is a practice — supported by data, reinforced by systems, and brought to life by empowered teams who understand that every guest interaction shapes who we are.

What does long-term value creation look like to you?

Long-term value is created through an evolving ecosystem anchored by strong core principles, qualitative as well as quantitative metrics.

Financial performance is the engine that keeps an organisation viable. However, profitability in isolation is extremely fragile. If it isn’t backed by credibility—with guests, employees, communities, and partners—it eventually erodes.

Similarly, brand equity cannot be built on storytelling alone. It must be supported by operational strength. Guests return not because of messaging, but because of consistency.

Environmental and social impact also compound sustainably and measurably only if they are integrated into the business model and into organisational culture. Standalone initiatives or campaigns are often costly, labour-intensive and rarely produce lasting change.

Over time, I’ve come to believe that real value creation happens on a structural level when financial discipline, organisational integrity, and social responsibility reinforce one another. Rather than a single rewarding metric, lasting value comes from practices that are embedded, multi-layered and adaptive.

How has your leadership lens evolved across roles?

Each role has taught me something enduring and distinct.

As a Director, I was very close to operations. I learned the mechanics of daily decision making, I was able to observe, test and steer our early direction.

As a CEO, the lens broadens. I went from understanding the system to designing growth, embedding culture and setting up systems that will continue delivering lasting value.

Today, as Executive Vice Chair, my perspective is longer-term. I’m thinking less about quarter-to-quarter performance and more about a global fingerprint, evolution and future-readiness. What does the next decade of hospitality look like and how can we make a meaningful impact on it?

Nearly two decades in hospitality have also given me a clear view of the sector’s recurring challenges: information silos, cognitive overload for teams, and rising guest expectations without corresponding infrastructure. At the same time, they have reinforced something fundamental – hospitality, above all else, is a human-first industry.

My role as Director of Anticipatory is a natural culmination of these learnings. It has informed the development of a hospitality-specific AI platform designed to reduce friction, enhance consistency, and strengthen operational clarity – so that teams can focus on what truly differentiates the industry: human connection.

Every role I’ve held has been different in responsibility and scope, but they have all served the same underlying vision – to build organisations that are resilient, responsible, and intelligently prepared for the future.

What kind of organisation do you want Tamara to be remembered as?

I hope Tamara Leisure Experiences has demonstrated that responsible business and profitability are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I hope we continue to be recognised for proving that conscious operations are the path towards economic growth and resilience.

I would like us to be remembered as innovative in our thinking, disciplined in our growth and responsible in our presence across markets and geographies.