Leader Spotlight: Rethinking luxury through emotion-driven CX, with Mauricio Prado
Mauricio Prado most recently served as Vice President of Digital Technology at Wynn Las Vegas, where he led digital product, data, and engineering teams responsible for high-impact experiences across ecommerce, CX, and omnichannel platforms.. With over 20 years of experience, he has driven digital transformation in luxury hospitality, founded KAD Labs, and held senior technology roles at Oracle and PeopleSoft, overseeing enterprise-scale digital initiatives.
In our conversation, Mauricio shares how great customer experience is rooted in recognition, not price. He explains how brands, luxury or not, can deliver VIP-level moments through emotion, personalization, and thoughtful digital design.
Foundations of luxury CX and digital transformation
You’ve led digital experience at the premier name in luxury hospitality. What are the foundational principles of delivering a best-in-class, luxury-grade CX through digital channels?
Luxury digital experiences succeed when they deliver precision, empathy, and orchestration. You’re not just designing for usability; you’re designing for anticipation. That means moving beyond “customer journeys” and into “guest readiness”: understanding who’s arriving today, what matters most to them, and which staff, systems, or signals need to come alive at that moment.
But too many companies stop at VIP arrival reports. True luxury CX builds a framework that fuses recognition, trust, intelligence, and communication into the key “moments that matter.” The aim isn’t only to deliver “the right offer at the right time,” but to ensure the right service reaches the right guest at exactly the right moment. Luxury, in essence, is about giving guests exactly what they want, when and how they want it. In luxury, that means designing for the convergence of commerce and service, giving high-value guests access not only to the best amenities but to personalized, anticipatory service that makes them feel both seen and valued. That requires more than dashboards. It demands real-time data, permission-aware personalization, and deep orchestration across departments, systems, and roles.
In short, people tend to over-index on technology when they talk about transformation. But in luxury, the true differentiator is how well your digital products and tools support people. So, the foundational principles for luxury CX aren’t just technical; they’re human. It’s about designing every experience around three users at once: the guest, the staff member, and the brand.
What is the key to a luxury experience? Why is it so hard to get right at scale, even with all the data companies have access to?
The key isn’t just collecting more data; it’s designing an experience platform for employees and front-line staff that enables transformational guest experiences. Guests don’t remember your tech stack; they remember the host who greeted them by name or the concierge who knew they preferred a quiet table by the window.
Scaling that requires empathy. Most front-line teams are already operating at full capacity. Handing them a dashboard or overwhelming them with notifications isn’t the answer. The mantra needs to be: the right information, to the right employee, at the right time, through the right channel. In practice, that means three things:
Prioritizing information — Not every data point matters; arrival lists should surface only what’s actionable
Curating context — Tailoring what an employee sees based on the guest’s reason for visiting
Timing the delivery — Making sure insights show up precisely when they’re needed, not hours later
Luxury isn’t hard to scale because we lack data; it’s hard because most systems aren’t designed around the realities of human attention. At scale, luxury isn’t about more data; it’s about the discipline of delivering less, but with greater impact.
Misconceptions and challenges in luxury CX
From your perspective, what’s the biggest misconception companies have about luxury CX or DX, and how does that misunderstanding show up in product decisions?
The biggest misconception is thinking that luxury CX stops at a VIP list or a marketing-mapped “customer journey.” Too often, companies design those journeys from the lens of the marketing or the front-line team, instead of from the lived experience of the guest. Luxury isn’t about what the company wants to deliver; it’s about how the guest wants to feel in the moment.
Context is everything. For example, an anniversary stay deserves a completely different cadence of service than a midweek business trip. But most digital products aren’t built to recognize or adapt to that context; they treat every journey the same. That’s not luxury; that’s operational efficiency dressed up as personalization.
Another common blind spot is separating commerce and service. In practice, the magic comes when the two converge. Knowing a guest’s wine preference and offering a rare vintage at dinner isn’t just a cross-sell; it’s an act of recognition. It feels like serendipity, but it’s actually orchestration. When you focus only on selling or only on service, you miss the intersection where the most memorable moments are created.
Luxury digital transformation succeeds when it stitches together context, recognition, and orchestration. Without that, you’re left with a dashboard of names instead of an experience that feels deeply personal.
You’ve said that every company has a “luxury layer” if they think about how they treat their most valuable customers. What advice would you give CX leaders in high-volume environments who want to elevate their VIP experience without overhauling their entire platform?
The first step is a mindset shift: move from rewards to recognition. Discounts and free drinks are fine, but the next level of customer experience is showing people that you see them. Recognition creates emotional loyalty in a way that points never can.
The good news is you don’t necessarily need a new platform to do this. Start by identifying the key “moments that matter” in your guest journey where recognition will resonate. For some brands, that’s a personal welcome message. For others, it could be a handwritten note on a to‑go coffee cup.
It’s not about building a massive loyalty engine; it’s about embedding small moments of surprise and delight, powered by context, into the flow of your existing operation. In high‑volume environments, those touch scales because they’re tied to recognition, not cost.
If you get this right, you don’t just reward your best customers, you make them feel like insiders. And that’s the heart of a luxury layer.
Experience platforms vs. traditional systems
Can you talk about the emergence of experience platforms and how they differ from CDPs and CRMs?
Think of it this way: CDPs and CRMs are about knowing the customer. Experience platforms are about acting on that knowledge at the moment.
A CDP can tell you that a guest prefers sparkling water over still. A CRM can track its history of spa visits. An experience platform ensures that sparkling water is already waiting in their room upon arrival and that the spa has placed their favorite aromatherapy fragrance in the treatment room, so the guest feels recognized without ever having to ask.
The simplest way to understand it: a CDP organizes the data, a CRM manages the relationship, and an experience platform orchestrates the experience itself. It’s the connective tissue that turns static insights into real-time, anticipatory action.
Why are experience platforms especially critical in high-touch industries like hospitality, sports, and entertainment?
Imagine a sports arena. A CDP knows you’re a suite owner. A CRM might know the names of your invited guests, but it’s the experience platform that can enable personal recognition upon arrival, which makes your walk to the suite feel seamless and elevated, while curated amenities, like your preferred beverages, a personalized welcome for your guests, or a surprise nod to your team tradition are waiting inside. That’s not just logistics, that’s recognition, designed to make the experience feel special and deeply personal.
This distinction is especially critical in high-touch industries like hospitality, sports, and entertainment, where expectations are sky-high and moments to impress are fleeting. You don’t get many chances to recognize a VIP when they walk through the door of a resort, a stadium, or a club. The experience platform ensures recognition, timing, and service align seamlessly, without the guest ever seeing the complexity behind it.
In short, CRMs and CDPs tell you who the guest is. The experience platform ensures your people, processes, and systems deliver on that knowledge in ways that feel effortless and unforgettable.
Orchestrating consistency across touchpoints
When orchestrating real-time experiences, how do you ensure consistency across every human touchpoint (such as staff, vendors, partners) when not all of them are using the same tools or systems?
The short answer is that you don’t need everyone on the same system; you need everyone working from the same signals.
In practice, that means building an experience platform that pushes the right context into the channels staff and partners are already using. By aggregating context from the CDP and feeding it into those systems, you create true omnichannel, not just across guest-facing channels like web, mobile, or SMS, but across the operational tools that run the business.
So, when a host opens a restaurant reservation in their existing booking system, they see the right information, at the right time, on the right channel. The goal isn’t to standardize every tool; it’s to orchestrate every touchpoint, to enrich and augment them. That requires designing for interoperability — lightweight APIs, permission-aware data flows, and curated signals ensure that no matter which tool someone is using, they’re equipped to act in ways that feel natural, yet personalized.
At its core, true consistency in luxury isn’t about one platform; it’s about one guest story, delivered seamlessly across every touchpoint.
The future of luxury CX and consultancy
As you launch your boutique consultancy, what kinds of problems are you most excited to help solve, and what types of companies are the best fit for that kind of luxury-focused strategy?
What excites me most is helping organizations transform both the employee and customer experience into one cohesive journey: from booking to arrival, to in‑stay experiences, to departure. The most exciting work is with luxury brands managing multiple businesses and touchpoints, orchestrating CX across complex landscapes.
The best fits are companies where experience is the brand promise, but delivery is fragmented across systems, departments, or partners. Think of a premier resort group, a sports franchise managing suite‑holder experiences, or even software platforms seeking to elevate their products to meet luxury‑grade expectations. In all of these cases, the challenge is the same: aligning people, processes, and platforms so employees have the context they need to deliver exceptional service, without asking the guest for more effort.
Delivering luxury‑grade service at scale requires more than training; it requires giving staff the right tools. That might mean a digital concierge that surfaces actionable insights in the flow of work, or orchestration that ensures the right signal reaches the right employee. The technology isn’t there to replace human connection — it’s there to amplify it.
For digital leaders navigating transformation in industries like travel, healthcare, or entertainment, what questions should they be asking about their CX maturity but often aren’t?
Most leaders focus on “What channels are we covering?” or “Do we have the right data?” Those are important, but they’re table stakes. The real questions start one layer deeper. Are we designing our digital products through the lens of the guest or through the lens of our own operations? Have we built an experience layer that can adapt and orchestrate in real time, or are we still retrofitting static systems to chase dynamic needs?
But the question leaders rarely ask, but should, is: do our experiences feel anticipatory? That could mean a hotel extending late checkout because the system knows their flight is later in the day. Or a suite owner arriving at a stadium to find their preferred beverage and a personalized welcome for their guests already waiting. Or ensuring a luxury resident’s apartment is set to their preferred temperature and lighting, the moment they walk in.
Maturity in CX isn’t about how much data you collect; it’s about how gracefully you turn that data into recognition, trust, and service. In high‑touch industries, that’s what separates the brands that impress once from those that become unforgettable.
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