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From a bedroom on the Ryder Cup green to nine million points for a Formula 1 pit lane encounter, Ben George, Hilton’s Senior Vice President & Commercial Director for Asia Pacific, explains why the future of luxury belongs to those who can make the impossible happen
When I sat down with Ben George at the Conrad Singapore during last year’s Formula 1 Grand Prix, McLaren’s papaya-and-black livery was everywhere: on passing engineers, in the hospitality branding that had colonised the corridors. Beyond the windows, the city-state thrummed with the controlled delirium of race week. As Senior Vice President and Commercial Director for Asia Pacific at Hilton, George had no need to set the scene. We were already in it. What stays with me is less the spectacle and more what he said about where all of this is going.
The numbers George opened with were striking. Forty percent of customers Hilton has surveyed say the primary reason for their most recent trip was an event: not a business meeting, not a family obligation, but a concert, a sporting spectacle, a moment they couldn’t experience from home. “It used to be that people would travel within region or their own country,” George explains. “But now people are actually going beyond borders.” Taylor Swift in Singapore last year, Lady Gaga earlier this year, Formula 1 everywhere. These are no longer diversions. They are the architecture around which entire travel itineraries are built.
See also: The future meets the river at the new Waldorf Astoria Qiantan
Above Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri and the McLaren team celebrate after winning the Constructors Championship during the F1 Grand Prix of Singapore at Marina Bay Street Circuit on October 05, 2025 in Singapore (Photo: Andy Hone/LAT Images)
Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri and the McLaren team celebrate after winning the Constructors Championship during the F1 Grand Prix of Singapore at Marina Bay Street Circuit on October 05, 2025 in Singapore (Photo: Andy Hone/LAT Images)
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Formula 1’s growth figures underscore the point. According to George, year-over-year viewership is up approximately 23 percent, and much of that new audience is coming from Asia Pacific, with China leading the charge. “Asia is the engine of growth on almost all verticals,” says George. Bangkok and South Korea are in conversations about potential race additions. The direction of travel is clear.
Hilton’s relationship with McLaren is now in its twentieth year, making Hilton the team’s longest-serving partner, and the timing of our conversation felt apt. McLaren were Constructors’ Champions, having taken the title in both 2024 and 2025, and the papaya energy around the Conrad that weekend was very much that of a team at the top of its game. But George was quick to point out that the partnership’s real value was never contingent on podiums. “We’ve had some years where it hasn’t been as exciting,” he says with a candour that feels earned. “But we’ve never had a conversation about whether this is the right thing.”
What began as a straightforward accommodation arrangement evolved into a platform for what George calls “money can’t buy experiences.” During that Singapore weekend at the Conrad, six Hilton Honors members had the full treatment: race day, the suite, the pit lane walk, face time with drivers. Those tickets had cleared at auction for nine million points, a figure that says everything about demand. Year-on-year, Honors redemptions for McLaren experiences are up 23 percent.
In Shanghai, one member won the chance to participate in pit stop practice, the drill in which crews rehearse the balletic mechanics of a wheel change. Elsewhere, through the Ryder Cup partnership, Hilton built a fully functioning bedroom right on the edge of the green in Rome. You could, if fate and points aligned, watch Europe’s finest compete from your own bed.
The more than 243 million members of Hilton Honors are not a monolith, and the experiences George’s team designs reflect a real shift in what luxury travellers, especially Asian ones, actually want. Pre-pandemic, the aspirational itinerary was predictable: New York, London, Florence, Paris. Now, George tells me, it’s South Africa, Iceland, Greenland, New Zealand. “Maybe not the obvious markets.” And alongside this outward push, a quieter counter-trend: a rediscovery of home. Post-COVID, domestic travel within Asia surged as travellers sought to understand “much more of their own backyard.”
The word that keeps recurring is experiential. Not as a buzzword, but as a genuine description of a behavioural shift. At Conrad Osaka, guests can join sake distillery tours, intimate and hands-on, rooted in Japan’s craft traditions. Elsewhere, through a Japanese property partnership, guests have shared meals with sumo wrestlers mid-training. “You’re not just going in, out, checking off the boxes,” George explains. “You’re actually absorbing that.” The Instagram moment, it seems, has given way to something slower and more considered.
Music runs alongside sport as the other engine of this experiential revolution. Hilton’s Grammy partnership stretches back more than 20 years; there’s a tie-up with the Brit Awards in London too. The Stay In The Music programme delivered some extraordinary evenings: Raye, Stormzy and Jason Derulo each performing to just four or five Hilton Honors members in a hotel suite. In China, collaborations around Jay Chou’s Shanghai concerts have offered similar access. And as official hotel partner of the Singapore Sports Hub, Hilton can put Honors members in front of major live events in ways the general public simply cannot reach.
The pipeline of new hotels is staggering. Hilton is opening two hotels a day globally. In Asia Pacific, it’s one every one-and-a-half days; the region will add approximately 200 hotels this year alone. One in every four branded hotel rooms currently under construction in Asia carries a Hilton flag. Globally, it’s one in five. In China, one in three.
Above Hilton senior vice president and commercial director for Asia Pacific, Ben George
Hilton senior vice president and commercial director for Asia Pacific, Ben George
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The forthcoming openings read like a wish list: Waldorf Astoria Osaka (already open and, by all accounts, magnificent), Waldorf Astoria Tokyo in 2027, Waldorf Astoria and Conrad Kuala Lumpur this year, Waldorf Astoria Sydney in 2027, NoMad Hilton Singapore on Orchard Road this year , Motto Hong Kong, Canopy Shanghai near Legoland, Hilton Resort Hyderabad.
And then there is the partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, some 500 independent boutique properties now bookable by Honors members for both earning and redeeming points. According to George, seventy-five percent of SLH locations were destinations where Hilton had no branded presence. “From a consumer perspective,” George says, “you’ve now got somewhere to go with Hilton where before you had to choose something else.”
The new audience Hilton is building for is younger, more curious and less impressed by scale alone. They want to know the neighbourhood, not just the room category. They want food and beverage with a story. They want to feel like insiders. Seen this way, the McLaren partnership (the pit lane access, the nine million points, the papaya livery dominating a hotel lobby on race weekend) is less a marketing exercise than a proof of concept for what a hotel company can be.
George talks about partnerships with the seriousness of someone who has declined far more than he’s accepted. “I liken it to a marriage,” he says. “It takes a massive amount of effort. There are highs, and there are lows. You’re through it thick and thin.” Twenty years with McLaren, lean seasons and championship ones alike, is his evidence.
The old transactional language of hospitality (rooms, rates, rewards) fails to describe what George is actually building. The sake distillery visit, the pit lane walk, the Raye concert for five people in a hotel suite: these are not amenities. They are the product. The room is just where you sleep between them. For a generation of travellers who would rather stand in a McLaren garage than sit in a first-class lounge, that distinction is everything. And the companies that understand it will define what luxury travel looks like for the next twenty years.
