India, Oct. 31 -- Can a hotel be very large and still be luxurious? Yes it can. The country's most famous hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, is huge. But can a hotel be very small and still be luxurious? I was talking about this to Laurent Gardinier, who owns Domaine Les Crayeres in the champagne town of Reims. Les Crayeres is small (20 rooms) and is famous for its restaurant (two Michelin stars). I was blown away when I stayed there. Gardinier is now president of Relais & Chateaux, an organisation of independent, small hotels around the world. Many of them are family-owned and managed. For instance, not only is the best small luxury hotel in India a member of Relais & Chateaux but its owners helped put the organisation on the map in our country. One of them, Jaisal Singh, was global vice-president of the organisation and helped turn it around when it was in a bit of a hole. I wrote about Sujan Jawai Camp (owned and run by Jaisal and his brilliant wife Anjali Singh) four years ago, though I focused more on the wildlife aspect in that column. Jawai is in leopard country (somewhere between Jodhpur and Udaipur) and it's one of the few places where you are more or less guaranteed a sighting of the leopards. (I saw four on a two-hour safari last week.) I would go back to Jawai like a shot even if I never see a leopard again because the hotel part of the operation is so well run. It has 137 employees for only ten luxury tents (a tent is where boy scouts sleep while camping; a luxury tent is a glamorous villa with a tented roof) and outstanding food and truly personalised service. We had a large 'tent' with a swimming pool that looked out into the bush, and a safari jeep on standby. At the Jawai camp, Anjali and Jaisal have acquired hundreds of acres of land around the camp and rewilded the area. The leopards are not part of a park but roam wild in the hills and rocks. It's a completely different experience from the mad scramble at tiger parks. Last week, after a day of sightings, we were about to head back to the camp when we noticed a leopard sitting quietly a short distance away from the side of our jeep. We stared silently at each other until the leopard departed. Anjali and Jaisal have a camp in Jaisalmer and two others in Africa. Though wildlife has been their specialty, given how good they are at running small exclusive camps it is only a matter of time before Sujan opens small luxury hotels elsewhere in India and abroad. The Singhs came to luxury hospitality as outsiders who channelled their vast global travel experience into a hotel company. But even veteran hoteliers are embracing the idea of small, personalised luxury experiences. Deepak Ohri, one of the best known hoteliers in the Far East, has launched a company that takes luxury to a new level. Deepak's idea is to offer travellers exclusive experiences. In Bangkok, a typical experience involves collecting guests from their hotels and taking them for breakfast on the riverside at the Peninsula hotel. Then a helicopter takes them to Khao Yai, a destination favoured by affluent Thais but largely unknown to foreigners. At Khao Yai National park, the guests see hundreds of species of birds and herds of wild elephants. The trip continues with visits to vanilla and agarwood plantations. Guests are shown how oudh is extracted from agarwood trees. Khao Yai is the centre of Thailand's wine industry, so guests also get a tour of the vineyards before taking the chopper back to Bangkok, and boarding a private yacht for a wine tasting cruise. There are around 21 options. Guests travel by private planes, helicopters and yachts and the meals are at top restaurants like Gaggan, which has won awards for being the best hotel in the world. None of this is cheap but Deepak understands luxury, having founded two restaurants which now have two Michelin stars each and having employed such chefs as the Suhring twins (whose restaurant, a member of Relais & Chateaux, has three stars) in their early years. His view is that guests want different experiences, far from the madding crowd, tailored to their interests and enjoyed in total luxury. It's a new concept of luxury but one that is becoming increasingly popular as guests no longer want the usual tourist experiences but something special and more luxurious....