Someone said to me recently that Filipinos are the most hospitable people in the world. Living in the UAE, where Arabian hospitality is so deeply embedded in cultural identity, it made me pause. Not because I disagreed, but because it raised a question I hadn’t properly considered before.

What does “most hospitable” even mean?

Because hospitality is not universal. It is cultural. In my experience, in Manila it often feels emotional and intensely relational, the impulse to give everything you have to a guest, whether you can afford to or not. In the Gulf, it carries honour and ritual. In Japan, it shows up as precision and quiet anticipation. In Britain, and I say this as a Brit, it often manifests as restraint and the making of a decent cup of tea.

Each of these is a different answer to the same fundamental question: how do we treat a stranger?

For the last four decades, global hotel brands built extraordinary businesses by standardising that answer. Companies like Hilton, Marriott and Accor created trust through consistency. A guest could arrive anywhere in the world and know exactly what to expect. That model drove growth, reduced risk, and scaled brilliantly. But it also, gradually and almost imperceptibly, flattened difference. Rooms began to look similar. Service scripts became global. Luxury became, in a word, predictable.

For a time, predictability was the goal. Today, it is not enough.

Affluent travellers have seen everything. They are no longer looking for reassurance, they are looking for meaning. They want to feel somewhere rather than simply be somewhere. Which is why the rise of the so-called “collection” brands is worth paying attention to. Marriott’s Autograph Collection, Hilton’s Curio Collection, IHG’s Vignette Collection and Radisson Individuals all represent a genuine shift in thinking. The global systems and loyalty platforms remain, but properties are given permission to express local personality. A global backbone with local soul, if you like.

What we are seeing in Saudi Arabia goes further still. Developers like Red Sea Global and Diriyah Company are not simply importing international brands and asking them to add a few local flourishes. They are asking much harder questions. What does Najdi hospitality actually look like in a contemporary luxury context? How does the majlis translate spatially? What does generosity feel like as a service behaviour, not just as an interior design reference? The expectation is increasingly non-negotiable: it must feel of place, not dropped in from elsewhere.

This is not aesthetic localisation. It is cultural reassertion. And there is an important distinction between the two.

The risk, and I think it is a real one, is that local authenticity becomes decorative rather than genuine. Arabic patterns on walls. Local art in corridors. Traditional coffee at check-in. These things are not wrong, but on their own, they are insufficient. If the service language, the decision-making structures and the operational logic all remain imported, then authenticity is surface deep regardless of how the lobby looks.

But here is the question I find myself increasingly curious about, and one I don’t think the industry has properly grappled with yet. The conversation so far has largely focused on global brands learning to localise. What happens when you reverse the journey entirely?

What happens when a brand built on a specific and genuine cultural identity tries to export that identity somewhere else?

Anantara is an interesting case to consider. Its DNA is deeply Southeast Asian. The service philosophy, the wellness sensibility, and the aesthetic language all draw from Southeast Asian heritage. It carries a real cultural point of view, not a manufactured one. When it enters the Gulf, it faces a question that no amount of operational excellence can fully resolve. Does the identity travel intact? Does it hold firm and trust that its distinctiveness is precisely why guests will seek it out? Or does it flex to acknowledge and honour the culture it has arrived in, and if so, how far can it flex before it starts to lose the very thing that made it compelling in the first place?

I suspect the most thoughtful answer is neither pure rigidity nor pure accommodation. A culturally rooted brand can hold its identity firmly while remaining genuinely open and curious about where it has landed. It doesn’t have to choose between being true to itself and being receptive to the world around it. The best brands manage to do both simultaneously.

Jumeirah has navigated the opposite journey, and it is worth acknowledging what that has required. Born in Dubai, it carries an Emirati identity into London, Mallorca, the Maldives and beyond. In doing so it has achieved something genuinely rare. It has made Arab luxury legible and desirable to an international audience that had no prior framework for it. That took real confidence. The belief that a cultural identity rooted in the Gulf was not merely a regional story but a universal one, told from a specific and distinctive place. In many ways, Jumeirah has written the first chapter of what Gulf luxury can mean on a global stage.

The next chapter is still being written, and this is where it gets genuinely fascinating.

Saudi has always had its own story. A deep rootedness. Najdi heritage. The particular weight that comes from being custodian of something far older than commerce. The majlis not as a design reference but as a living social institution that has shaped how generations of Saudis understand generosity, conversation and the obligations of a host. What has changed is not the story itself, but the decision to open the door and share it with the world, on its own terms.

For most international audiences, the distinction between Emirati and Saudi luxury will not be immediately obvious. Both carry associations of the Gulf: generosity, scale, desert landscape, Islamic heritage. The risk for any emerging Saudi luxury brand is that the category gets defined before it even arrives.

But the differences are profound, for those with the curiosity to look. Dubai’s identity was shaped by trade, by openness, by the extraordinary energy of constant arrival and exchange. Jumeirah reflects that perfectly, cosmopolitan, outward-facing, internationally fluent. Saudi’s story was shaped by different forces entirely, and that story is distinct enough to stand alongside, rather than simply behind, what has already been established.

Neither is richer or more meaningful than the other. They are simply different answers to that same question: how does a culture express care? The world has begun to understand and value the Emirati answer. It has yet to fully encounter the Saudi one.

That, it seems to me, is an extraordinary opportunity. But only if the cultural clarity is built in from the very beginning, in the brief, the concept, the service philosophy and the operational logic, rather than applied at the end as a final layer of polish.

Every culture has always had its story. The question is not whether those stories exist; it is whether the industry is brave enough and patient enough to actually tell them. Or whether the pull of the familiar, the safe, and the globally consistent will win again.

I’m genuinely curious to see who rises to that challenge.