India, April 9 -- What is Asian hospitality? It's a term that became popular in the early years of this century to categorise hotel chains from East Asia that were opening properties in the West and bringing higher and more gracious levels of service to their hotels.

When such chains as Mandarin Oriental and Peninsula (and, to a lesser extent Shangri La) opened luxury hotels in America and Europe their arrival was treated as a revolution because it showed up the take-it-or-leave-it attitudes of the big American chains.

The spread of the Asian chains made guests revise their expectations of luxury hotels. But there was a small irony at the centre of the Asian hospitality concept.

Within Asia it is such countries as Japan, Thailand and I...