By Dr. Phạm Hà, Founder and CEO, LuxGroup®
Imagine a guest planning a journey through Vietnam. A travel specialist designs the itinerary. A cruise team welcomes the guest aboard. A chef introduces a regional dish. An art expert explains a painting. Each encounter is delivered by people with different skills, working in businesses with different priorities.
To the guest, however, it is one journey. A missed preference at a handover, an inaccurate description of a painting, or a promised experience that cannot be delivered will shape their view of the entire group.
That is the challenge behind LuxGroup’s ambition to become A House of Small Giants. We want specialist businesses in travel, cruises, hospitality, mobility, gastronomy, and the arts to retain the knowledge and initiative that make them distinctive. We also need them to share standards strong enough to make a guest’s journey feel coherent. The question for leadership is where to give each business freedom and where to require collective discipline.
Many groups solve this problem by making every business look and sound alike. Yet a cruise line, a destination management company, and a restaurant earn trust in different ways. A captain’s decisions cannot be reduced to a marketing script. A local guide needs room to respond to the people in front of them. A chef should be able to express the place and season through a menu.
The holding company’s role, as I see it, is to protect those abilities while making clear what every business owes its guests, employees, partners, and fellow companies.
Values become real at the point of decision
At LuxGroup, our purpose is Delivering Happiness®. Our belief is Luxury is Culture®. Our service philosophy is Touching Hearts®. These statements set a direction, but they cannot resolve a guest complaint or decide whether an investment should proceed. For that, people need a way to apply them.
We use HEARTS to describe six values: Humanity, Excellence, Authenticity, Responsibility, Togetherness, and Sustainability. Their usefulness lies in the questions they bring into everyday work.
Humanity asks whether we have understood the person we are serving, including the employee asked to serve them. Excellence asks whether we can deliver consistently. Authenticity asks whether a cultural story is accurate and told with respect for the people to whom it belongs. Responsibility asks who owns a commitment when circumstances change. Togetherness asks whether information will reach the next team in time. Sustainability asks what our decisions mean for the places on which our businesses depend.
Consider an illustrative request for a private anniversary dinner on a cruise. Marketing might describe a romantic evening. The sales adviser needs to explain what “private” means. The onboard team needs to confirm the space, timing, menu, and weather contingency. If any of these remain uncertain, a colleague must have the authority to clarify the promise before the guest pays for it.
The value at work here is responsibility. It requires more than warm language: an accurate product record, a clear handover, and someone empowered to make a decision.
Give specialists room to be specialists
A small giant should be close enough to its customers to notice changes early and respond. A destination management team may learn that families want fewer transfers and longer stays. A cruise team may find that guests value time on board as much as an additional excursion. A restaurant may discover that a conversation about an ingredient is more memorable than a more elaborate presentation.
These observations lose value if every change must travel through several layers of approval. Each business needs authority over its product, service design, and day-to-day decisions within agreed financial and brand boundaries.
Autonomy, though, brings an obligation to make decisions visible. A subsidiary proposing a new experience should be able to explain whom it serves, what it will cost, which cultural claims need verification, and what its team can reliably deliver. Leaders at group level can then challenge the assumptions without taking over the craft.
This is particularly important as founder-led businesses grow. A founder can often resolve a problem by calling the right person. That is useful in an emergency but difficult to scale. The goal is to put enough knowledge and authority where the work happens that good decisions no longer depend on one person being available.
Decide what the group must share
For a House of Small Giants, the strongest shared capabilities may be less visible to guests than a common logo. They include trustworthy product information, financial reporting, guest handovers, safety practices, employee development, and a way to raise concerns.
A specialist brand should have its own voice. It should also be able to trust that a colleague in another LuxGroup business will pass on a guest’s confirmed requirements accurately. When an itinerary changes, the sales adviser needs current information from the operator. When a cultural experience is described, the person responsible for it should be able to check the description. When a service fails, someone should own the response across company boundaries.
The group must also be disciplined about capital. A compelling idea for a vessel, property, or cultural venue still has to answer practical questions: How much cash will it require? When might it generate cash? What capabilities must be built before opening? What happens if demand arrives later than expected? Values help us decide why an opportunity matters; financial discipline helps us judge whether we can pursue it responsibly.
Shared systems should make such decisions clearer. They should allow a business to see its own performance and the group to see where resources are committed. The intention is to support entrepreneurial judgment with reliable information.
Culture travels through behaviour
Luxury is Culture® places a particular responsibility on a Vietnamese hospitality group. Art, food, waterways, and local traditions can enrich a guest’s experience. They also have meaning beyond the transaction. A business that uses them must take care with provenance, permission, compensation, and the accuracy of its stories.
The same principle applies inside the company. Employees learn what a group values from what leaders reward, what they investigate, and what they allow to pass. If we praise an attractive campaign after it created promises the operating team could not fulfil, people will learn that appearance matters more than accuracy. If a colleague can flag that gap early and help fix it, they will learn that responsibility is shared.
This makes culture a governance matter. We need clear decision rights, consistent expectations for conduct, a fair way to address concerns, and room for teams to explain why a standard does or does not fit their work. Leaders must listen closely to that explanation. Sometimes the standard needs improving; sometimes a local practice creates a risk the group cannot accept.
A House of Small Giants will be tested most clearly at these boundaries. Each business should have the freedom to develop its expertise and the confidence to rely on its peers. The group should provide capital discipline, shared capabilities, and values that help people decide what to do when no script covers the situation.
Guests will experience the result long before they see an organisation chart. They will know whether the people serving them understand their needs, speak truthfully, and work well together. That is how a collection of specialist businesses can become one trusted house.
