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Renowned hotelier on why today’s luxury traveller wants stillness, not spectacle
Soneva and Six Senses founder, Sonu Shivdasani, explains how wellness, nature, and digital detox are shaping the next generation of luxury travel
- PUBLISHED: Thu 5 Feb 2026, 9:00 AM
- By:
- Husain Rizvi
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Sonu Shivdasani has never been interested in building hotels for the sake of hotels. From the very beginning, his work has been driven by the thought of creating a version of luxury that feels disconnected from meaning. Now, as the founder of Soneva and Six Senses formally launches Sosei, his third hospitality brand, his mindset has evolved into something deeper, shaped by survival and a redefinition of success itself.
We caught up with Shivdasani, who was in Dubai last week to develop Sosei’s first projects, with ambitions spanning 12 countries and at least three openings within the next two years. Positioned as a next-generation ultra-luxury hospitality platform rooted in Japanese values, Sosei will focus on longevity, regenerative medicine, deeper healing, and elevated food and beverage, expanding into formats that range from beach and ski resorts with branded residences to urban sanctuaries, ryokans, and discreet city oases. At the heart of every project will be a wellness sanctuary that blends ancient Asian healing traditions with advanced diagnostics and integrative medicine.
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To understand why Sosei feels so personal, you have to go back to the beginning, the '80s, when the Maldives wasn't what it is today.
“Tourism was extremely basic,” he recalls. “Plastic chairs, neon lights, limited food and drink, sewage pumped straight back into the sea. It was mass-market, dominated by tour operators, with little thought for sustainability or quality.”
They loved the destination but felt uneasy supporting a system built entirely around cost-cutting. Hotels operated on low-margin contracts, and nothing felt intentional or refined. After several failed bids, an opportunity finally emerged in 1991 — an abandoned island in the Maldives. That island would eventually become Soneva Fushi, opening in 1995 and redefining what luxury in the Maldives could look like.
“At the time, even the Minister of Tourism laughed at our ideas and pricing,” Shivdasani says. “He told me I needed a tour operator and a bed contract. I said no, I wanted to create something entirely different.”
The Maldives is now synonymous with ultra-luxury and wellness, though Shivdasani admits that success has come with consequences.
His own understanding of success, however, has shifted dramatically. A battle with stage four cancer forced him to reassess everything.
“Earlier in life, success was about achievement and accumulation,” he says. “I was never satisfied. Cancer changed that completely. It made me realise life isn’t about accumulation, it’s about depth.”
Today, success means self-understanding and purpose. He speaks of it as “peeling an onion,” moving closer to one’s true nature. “One of the great tragedies of life is that many people never discover their calling,” he says. “I feel I’m closer to mine now — healing, wellness, and creating beautiful places in nature where people can reconnect with themselves.”
That philosophy shapes how he views luxury, particularly in a city like Dubai.
“Luxury should be rare,” he says plainly. “Marble floors, gold taps, branded restaurants — Dubai does that extremely well. But it’s not rare.”
For Shivdasani, true luxury is about contrast and restraint. “Why dress up and wear shoes on holiday when that’s what you do every day?” he asks. “Walking barefoot for a week, eating food freshly picked from a garden, arriving at dinner by zipline, those are rare experiences.”
He likens hotels to platforms rather than products. “Steve Jobs understood the iPhone wasn’t just a device, it was a platform for experiences. Hotels should be the same.”
That thinking carries into his definition of modern wellness, which he believes has been diluted by trends. “Meaningful wellness impacts longevity,” he says. “Living to 90 is meaningless if you can’t function well at 89.”
At Sosei, wellness will be treated as infrastructure, starting with diagnostics, then personalised nutrition, recovery, and longevity programmes. Guests will journal, practise breathwork, learn from masters steeped in Eastern traditions, and engage with wellness as a way of life rather than a fashionable add-on.
Even younger travellers, he notes, are craving this depth. “Gen Z comes for the same reasons older guests do — stress relief and escape. Digital overload is even worse for them.”
As a pioneer, Shivdasani feels a responsibility to keep pushing forward, even as his ideas are widely copied. What troubles him most is seeing luxury replicated without sustainability. “Especially in the Maldives,” he says. “Lagoons dredged, marine life damaged. Many guests never even see what’s been lost.”
Still, he remains philosophical. “If I hadn’t introduced luxury tourism, someone else would have. What matters now is evolving the model responsibly.”
