Darshana Jariwala of Bridgeton on Connecting the Dots Between Brand, Product, and Experience

Most hotel companies separate brand from operations, marketing from product, and strategy from execution. Bridgeton is trying to close all of those gaps at once, and the vehicle for doing that is a function Darshana Jariwala built from scratch: the Center of Excellence. Jariwala, who leads the Center of Excellence for Bridgeton Hospitality, sat down with Adam Mogelonsky to explain what that function actually is, why it is not a department, and how a career spent connecting dots across consumer packaged goods giants like PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate gave her the framework to apply the same thinking to one of the most complex and human-centered industries in the world.

The conversation covers the Gujarati hospitality roots that gave Bridgeton its founding philosophy, the Walker Hotels brand and what it means to create neighborhood-rooted identity at scale, the Dawn Ranch property in Guerneville and its Green Key certification, the design and community programming underway at Marram in Montauk, the ROI logic behind brand partnerships and experiential activations, a frank take on sustainability as a business strategy rather than a badge, and a closing perspective on where hospitality is heading and why the answer might be simpler than the industry expects.

What is Bridgeton?

Bridgeton is the umbrella institution above Bridgeton Hospitality, a New York City-based company with a portfolio spanning boutique lifestyle hotels, franchise properties, and a growing pipeline of experiential destinations. The hotels Jariwala focuses on include Walker Hotel Tribeca and Walker Hotel Greenwich Village in Manhattan; Marram in Montauk; Journey in East Hampton; Dawn Ranch in Guerneville, Sonoma; and a Sheraton franchise property in Miami. Additional properties operate across New Jersey and the Midwest, with the portfolio continuing to expand.

Where it started: Gujarat, Missouri, and Atithi Devobhava

The Bridgeton story begins not in New York but in a small city in Missouri, near the St. Louis airport, where the family's first hotels were franchise properties serving travelers on the road. But to understand why those hotels succeeded, Jariwala reaches further back, to the state of Gujarat in western India, from which the founding generation of the family emigrated.

"Gujaratis are known to be a very hospitable community," she says. "A lot of them came to the US and found a roadside opportunity in the motel world. And one of the key things that made everybody successful, whether over 10 years or 20 years, is a saying called Atithi Devobhava: we honor our guests. Everybody who comes through our door, we honor them, we respect them, whether it's five AM or eleven PM."

What strikes Jariwala about that founding generation is not the business acumen but the human quality underneath it. "They came with nothing. Some not educated at all, zero English, but somehow they became very successful. And one common thing you can find is they were always hustlers, but they also knew how to treat people." That culture of hospitality, she argues, is not incidental to Bridgeton's success but it is the foundation of it. "It came super easy. It wasn't hard. It came from the world of franchise hotels. But then we also noticed there is room for creating something special and something different."

That recognition — that the same instinct for hospitality that ran through the franchise business could be elevated into something more deliberately crafted — is what drove the pivot toward boutique. "The boutique hospitality side wasn't a big deal in the '70s and '80s when our parents' generation was there. But then as we grew, this became a stronger version of what we already knew how to offer."

The Center of Excellence: a strategy, not a department

Jariwala is precise about what the Center of Excellence is and is not. "It is not a department," she says. "It is a strategy and a vehicle to drive the connection and the directives that can continue to grow beyond selling rooms."

The distinction matters because the problem she is solving is structural. In most hotel companies, brand, marketing, sales, revenue management, operations, and product development exist in separate lanes, with limited integration between them. The result is that brand strategy becomes an afterthought of product decisions, marketing operates independently of revenue management, and partnerships are treated as nice-to-haves rather than must-haves. The Center of Excellence is the function that connects all of those lanes, not to create sameness across the portfolio, but to ensure that the thinking behind each decision is coherent from the very beginning.

"Brand and marketing coming in as an afterthought of building the product, and that's what we need to change," Jariwala says. "My focus goes all the way to the definition of brand strategy, but brand strategy based on what we are building. Design is not about graphic design or beautifying a space. Design is in everything , whether it's the strategy, whether it's what we are envisioning when a customer is coming in."

The CPG background is central to how she thinks about this. Working across 14 to 15 departments on the journey of a single product from concept to shelf — touching regulatory, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, supply chain, and agencies — gave her a model for how to hold complexity together without losing coherence. "Connecting the dots between all of this really taught me how to look at — or at least had the pleasure to learn from that experience — how to apply that to any industry," she says.

Walker Hotels: neighborhood, chance, and two very different sisters

Walker Hotel is Bridgeton's flagship lifestyle brand, and it began not as Walker but as Jade, a property on 13th Street in Greenwich Village that was rooted, from the start, in the neighborhood it occupied. "The experience and the design were the pillars in how that brand was created," Jariwala says.

When Bridgeton opened a second Walker in Tribeca in 2019, the question was how to hold two very different properties together under one brand identity without forcing them into sameness. The answer, as Jariwala tells it, was not brand consistency in the conventional sense but brand coherence — a shared set of pillars expressed differently in each location. "One of them is an English sister, and one of them is this very modern and feisty New York sister," she says. "Both have different personalities, but we continue to do the same thing everywhere: have its own roots, take chances, and create something that feels alive."

Those brand pillars — neighborhood, chance, atmosphere — evolved naturally rather than through deliberate repositioning. "It was very natural how we came about where we are today," Jariwala says. "I always thought Walker was all about design, like visual design. But as we continue to evolve, it's about the neighborhood, the chance we take, and the atmosphere we create." Walker Greenwich Village does Fashion Week programming directly on the street adjacent to the hotel. Walker Tribeca takes its chances differently, shaped by its own neighborhood's character. The logic scales: a Walker in Atlanta or San Francisco would have its own personality, rooted in its own place, but it would still be Walker.

Dawn Ranch: sense of place, Green Key, and the business case for sustainability

Dawn Ranch in Guerneville, in the heart of Sonoma County, is the property in the Bridgeton portfolio that most directly embodies the direction Jariwala sees the industry heading. Set in a redwood forest environment in Northern California, it is a property built around what she describes as the invitation to find yourself; not a wellness brand in the programmatic sense, but a place where the environment and the pace do the work. "The point is not to say disconnect from everything," she says. "The point is to say find yourself when you're on our grounds."

The property recently achieved Green Key certification, a meaningful distinction in California, where regulatory requirements are already demanding and travelers' expectations around sustainability run higher than in most other markets. Jariwala is direct about the dual logic behind pursuing it. "It is not always about doing the right thing," she says. "I believe in sustainability very highly and I'm one of the big champions of that, but I'm also the champion of where you're doing sustainability, how you're doing it, who you're doing it for, and what's the feasibility of doing it. Because at the end of the day you're in the business of running something."

The data she cites supports the strategy: approximately 56% of travelers in California (at the time the research was conducted) indicated that eco-friendliness is a factor in their hotel choice. That statistic, filtered through the lens of Dawn Ranch's target guest profile, made the business case for certification clear. "It made sense that we can not only make an impact, but we are now also going to be able to use this as part of our marketing and the brand," she says. Transient traffic to the property has increased since certification, alongside the group and events business that had been the property's commercial backbone.

Marram and the culture of community

At Marram in Montauk, the Center of Excellence is putting a different idea into practice: building a genuine culture of community around the property, not as a marketing exercise but as a long-term asset.

The current activation is a series of 10 to 12 intimate sessions hosted for the architecture and interior design community in New York, developed in partnership with an agency that works across that world. What emerged from those sessions, in Jariwala's telling, was a recognition of a gap. "A beautiful thing I heard from one of the architects was that the design community in New York has big speaking engagements, a lot of things happening. But what's not happening is sitting in a laid-back, still super nice environment, just having a conversation and post-conversation, having a three-hour dinner with a bunch of strangers who become not-strangers." The culture of community around design does not exist in New York in a genuine, non-transactional form. Marram is trying to create it.

The key, for Jariwala, is that this is not a replicable format. It is a replicable approach. "What I'm doing at Marram, I will not do the same version of at Dawn Ranch," she says. "I'm replicating the idea, but not the same thing." Dawn Ranch will have its own version, shaped by its own audience, geography, and product. The Center of Excellence is the mechanism that ensures the approach travels across the portfolio even when the execution does not.

Partnerships and activations: thinking beyond the transaction

The conventional hotel approach to brand partnerships and experiential activations is transactional: a brand pays for access to the property for two or three days, gets an experience, and leaves. Jariwala is pushing Bridgeton toward something more durable.

"When you are inviting a brand to be part of our space, I really would like to see what impact that brand walked away with and what did they achieve while they were there," she says. The financial return matters, but it is not sufficient on its own. The deeper opportunity, which she describes as one of the items on her longer-term wish list, is building partnerships that evolve into something structural: long-term relationships with major brands, potentially including theater and film, that create recurring experiences rather than one-off activations.

The Center of Excellence is the infrastructure that makes this scalable. Because the approach is consistent across the portfolio, a partnership model that works at one property can be adapted for another without having to be rebuilt from scratch. "The approach stays the same. The way we think stays the same. What we do from one hotel to another is not the same but if this has worked here in New York City or at Marram, there is no reason we cannot do the same somewhere else."

AI: people first, then tools

Jariwala raises AI herself in the closing section of the conversation, and her framing is deliberately measured. "I am not one of those people who is all about applying AI to everything," she says. "But I am one of the people within Bridgeton who is constantly speaking about AI."

Her concern is not with AI adoption but with the sequencing of it. The industry's current focus is heavily operational (reservations, accounting, efficiency gains) and she does not dispute the value of that. But she argues that the larger opportunity, which most companies are not yet reaching, lies in how AI can bring experiential ideas to life and surface insights that shape the guest journey. "AI is not just about bringing efficiencies within your operations. It's also about bringing some of these experiences and things to light."

The prerequisite, in her view, is getting the basics right first. "Unless and until we don't have our basics down and what it is we are trying to achieve and do, including the experience for the customer, none of the AI is gonna do a good job." The other thing the industry tends to skip, she adds, is understanding how people are doing things today before handing them a new way to do it through AI. "Something we often miss is: before implementation, understand what our team members are doing and how they are doing it versus giving them a way of doing it through AI."

What's next: back to basics, and forward into farming

Asked about the trends she finds most compelling, Jariwala offers two perspectives that sit at seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum but are connected by the same underlying shift.

The first is a return to basics. "People are going back to what you expect when you are on somebody's ground," she says. "We as hoteliers have quite a bit walked away from that, and I can see that the way we behave and operate is going to shift back a little bit to what the traditional way of experiencing hospitality is." The focus returns to the smallest felt things: not grand programming statements, but what guests carry with them after they leave.

The second is a move toward agricultural and community-rooted hospitality: hotels that are not merely located in a place but are embedded in it, where farming, food production, and the rhythms of a working community are part of the experience. "People are going to see more of a desire to experience farming. Not farm-to-table specifically, but desire to experience how something is being created as a whole community, living and going in that space." She points to the proliferation of destination properties in upstate New York as an early signal of where this is heading: places that are reachable from a major city, embedded in a specific local world, and offer something that cannot be found in an urban hotel.

"At the end of the day," she says, "this business is about people. We have to focus on that."