Designing Desire: Why Experience Curators Will Shape the Future
In conversation with Lukas Cabalka, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director of Something New Creative
“Experience” is everywhere. It’s one of the most wildly overused terms in modern hospitality, used to describe everything from hair salons to hotel bedrooms. As a result, it’s easy for executives to feel lost when guests ask for “experience-led” travel – and, to cope, many default to renovation, restaurants, and retail makeovers in an attempt to match the demand.
The problem is that experience is too often equated with the material – amenities, mattresses, or furniture. But guests looking for experiences in luxury hospitality aren’t asking for higher thread counts. At this level, they already expect that as a baseline. They’re asking for moments that make them feel.
The most powerful strategist of tomorrow isn’t the CFO who focuses on amenities budgets. It’s the executive turned experience curator, the one who knows that emotions aren’t a nice-to-have but a hard business strategy. The future of hospitality won’t be led by who has a bigger budget or the best marble; it’ll be led by those who know how to use emotions as a core business driver.
We’re entering a new era where the business edge lies not in management, but in orchestration – in shaping how moments unfold, how emotions build, and how memory forms. Desire, in this context, isn’t luck. It’s choreography.
As Lukas Cabalka, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director of Something New Creative, puts it, Experience has become a word everyone uses, so the meaning of it has become lost. True experiences aren’t based around amenities or the material; they’re based around intangibles – the interplay of emotions and memory
. His work focuses on bringing emotional architecture into hospitality, treating feeling as the foundation of design.
The End of Passive Luxury
For decades, hotels and resorts have built their identities around consistency: the same lighting palettes, scent programs, and a familiar, safe sophistication across properties. Predictability became the ultimate marker of professionalism.
It also became boring. Sameness, even when beautiful, dulls emotion – it’s not exciting for guests to walk into the same white-and-beige lobby. Ordering from a generic espresso menu in the in-lobby cafe doesn’t spark joy. When every luxury property feels identical, guests stop feeling altogether.
The new generation of travelers doesn’t want to be impressed – they want to be moved. They’re seeking brands that design for anticipation, curiosity, and emotion. That’s a profound shift for executives relying on operational metrics, because it means the foundation of loyalty is no longer operational excellence. It’s emotional engagement.
That’s where the experience curator comes in.
The Rise of the Experience Curator
The experience curator doesn’t manage processes – they design emotion. Rather than thinking in checklists or operational KPIs, they think in emotional arcs: where does a guest’s excitement peak? Where does calm fall? What’s the emotional rhythm of a stay, dinner, or walk through the lobby?
In doing so, the experience curator can shape emotional moments in the same way that television writers do. Audiences are set up to laugh, cry, or connect with characters, using everything from music and sound to an actor’s visual mannerisms onscreen. Emotional moments aren’t accidental; they’re strategically designed and choreographed.
Done right, hospitality can work the same way. The experience curator walks the guests through emotional moments, engaging them through emotional touchpoints like soundscapes, scents, and service points – all carefully choreographed to align with the brand narrative and storytelling. The guest isn’t emotionally engaged for just one moment of strong service; they’re engaged for the entirety of their stay.
According to Cabalka, The most powerful, unforgettable guest experiences aren’t usually related to a hotel’s thread count or how expensive the chandeliers are. The moments people will remember are the ones that made them feel something.
His perspective reflects a growing shift in the industry: away from visual uniformity, toward the intentional design of feeling.
Drawing from a background in theatre and film, Cabalka often compares the guest experience to live performance. Every gesture, scent, and sound becomes part of a larger narrative arc, building tension and release, intimacy and surprise. Hospitality, in that sense, becomes emotional dramaturgy – not a checklist of touchpoints, but a carefully directed story.
This philosophy echoes through a new generation of creative studios and hotel innovators working to restore emotional depth to hospitality. Their work demonstrates that emotion is not a soft metric – it’s structural. When design and storytelling are built around emotional clarity, hotels see measurable results: longer dwell times, higher guest satisfaction, and stronger brand loyalty.
Desire as Strategy
For years, desire was treated as something brands stumbled upon – a lucky byproduct of good design or a memorable stay. But in reality, desire can be designed, and doing so is one of the most strategic decisions a brand can make.
The experience curator’s job is to turn curiosity into connection. To engineer that intangible moment when a guest feels compelled to return, share, and belong. Emotions aren’t accidental, and memory doesn’t have to be a nice-to-have accident; they can, and should, be choreographed. In the age of experience travel, failing to do so isn’t just leaving money on the table. It’s brand suicide.
As Cabalka notes, Hospitality has always been about emotion – many have just stopped designing for it.
His argument reframes feeling as a system, not sentiment: a measurable, repeatable framework for loyalty.
Hospitality has always been about emotion, but now, emotion is the business model. The future will belong to those who treat feeling as strategy and storytelling as structure. To those who don’t just operate spaces, but curate them.
