Niemeijer opened with the commercial truth behind emotional design. Hotels once competed on location, then service, then design. Today, he said, they increasingly compete on experience.
As the discussion unfolded, the panel repeatedly returned to a simple but powerful idea often attributed to Maya Angelou: people may forget what you said or what you did, but they rarely forget how you made them feel. Increasingly, hospitality design is being measured by exactly that standard.
“What guests remember is what they will review, what they will share, and ultimately why they return to your property,” Niemeijer said.
That line set the tone for a conversation that moved beyond beautiful spaces and into the harder question: how do hotels design memory?
Dashti argued that memorable hospitality begins when designers look beyond aesthetics and focus on human-centered experience. In a world of endless scrolling and visual overload, he said, guests are not simply looking for more stimulation. They are looking for spaces that help them feel something.
“Guests remember how they felt in a space rather than what it looked like,” Dashti said.
He pointed to storytelling, sense of place, neuro-aesthetics, and biophilic design as tools that help create calmer, more personal environments. Natural forms, fractal patterns, and blurred boundaries between indoors and outdoors can help reduce stress and create emotional comfort.
For Baxter, lighting is one of the most powerful and misunderstood tools in the hospitality experience. It is not just equipment, he said, and it should never be treated as decoration added at the end.
“Lighting is not just material objects,” Baxter said. “The equipment is just a tool to deliver an emotional response.”
Then came one of the session’s sharpest observations.
“You can’t actually see light. You only see the surfaces that light touches."
"The darkness needs to be right, too,” Baxter said.
In hospitality, he noted, designers often feel pressure to illuminate every expensive material. The result can be a space with no visual hierarchy and no emotional focus. Great lighting, he argued, is not about making everything visible. It is about guiding attention, shaping mood, and allowing certain moments to breathe.
Baxter also connected lighting directly to revenue. In restaurants and bars, lighting scenes can shift through the evening to influence dwell time, encourage guests to stay longer, order a second bottle of wine, or move toward the bar for one last cocktail.
In other words, atmosphere sells.
Cockayne brought the room back to operational reality. As a hotel general manager, she said she often sits between brand vision, design ambition, owner expectations, and the daily realities of running a property.
“As GM, I sit in the middle position, quite often having to choose between: do I want it to look nice, or do I want it to work?” Cockayne said.
That tension became one of the panel’s strongest themes. Great design must work not only for guests, but also for staff. Guests are half the people in the hotel, Cockayne noted, while colleagues are the other half.
If the space does not support both, friction follows.
She gave a vivid example from hotel operations: a beautiful restaurant with ambient lighting and music disrupted by the noise of stewarding trolleys passing the terrace because the back-of-house route had not worked in practice. The design was beautiful, but the operation exposed the flaw.
“Hotels are often designed to look wonderful and create memories,” Cockayne said, “but they are not necessarily designed to be full.”
That comment landed because every hotelier in the room understood the truth behind it. A lobby may look perfect in a rendering. Breakfast at 95% occupancy tells a different story.
The panel also explored how design decisions change once real guests arrive. Lighting programs may work on opening night, but sunset times change, happy hour shifts, and restaurants evolve. Baxter argued that lighting teams should return after opening to review how the property is actually being used.
“The way a project operates on the day it opens is very different from two months later,” he said.
Dashti agreed that flow, guest behavior, and operational needs must be considered from the beginning. A plan may look flawless on paper, he said, but the true test comes when sunlight shifts, spaces fill, and “400 people” move through the property.
“It is not just a photo opportunity for a magazine,” Dashti said. “It has to be practical and comfortable as well.”
Cockayne was especially clear on where design matters most to guests: the room.
Design may attract guests through photography, social media, and brand identity, but once they check in, comfort becomes non-negotiable. A restaurant can be skipped. A pool can be avoided. A badly designed bedroom cannot.
“People stay in hotels to get a good night’s sleep,” Cockayne said. “If they do not get a good night’s sleep, that is the critical number one problem.”
The discussion closed with questions on value engineering and return on investment. When budgets are cut, Baxter argued, the answer should not be to let contractors strip out the emotional quality of a lighting scheme without understanding its purpose. If a budget is halved, the project should be rethought, not simply cheapened.
As the session drew to a close, the conversation left the audience with a clear message: the future of hospitality design is no longer simply about aesthetics, trends, or Instagram-worthy spaces. Increasingly, it is about shaping human emotion, influencing behavior, supporting operations, and creating experiences guests genuinely remember.
From lighting and acoustics to guest flow, sleep quality, and even the placement of a stewarding corridor, the panel demonstrated that hospitality’s smallest details often leave the deepest impressions. Beautiful design may attract guests, but emotional connection is what brings them back.
That broader spirit could be felt throughout the entire two-day conference that successfully created the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue the hospitality industry increasingly needs as design, technology, revenue strategy, and guest experience become more interconnected than ever.
