Anseline tells this story the way people tell the stories that changed them. Quietly. Without preamble.
At 25, he started at the bottom of the Oberoi Hotels & Resorts operation in Balaclava, then crossed to New Delhi for the group's centre of learning and development — a demanding school for future executives of Indian luxury hospitality. He went on to the Taj Hotels, then the Mövenpick and Sofitel here in Mauritius, spending a decade in kitchens and dining rooms learning what international standards actually require: rigour as a foundation, never as a destination.
In 2014 he joined The Lux Collective, and never really left. Twelve years, several properties — Grand Gaube, Tamassa Bel Ombre, the Île des Deux Cocos — punctuated by loops rather than breaks. Since September 2025 he runs LUX* Grand Baie, the group's most recent flagship. In a sector where careers are built on lateral jumps, his reads more like a slow accumulation: each layer informing the next.
That accumulation shows in how he talks about leadership. He doesn't speak the language of KPIs and service standards, or at least not first. He speaks about mentors — exceptional ones, who gave him their time and challenged him — and about less positive experiences too, managers whose arrogance created distance, who reminded him of what he didn't want to become. "A leader should never assume their title automatically makes them right," he says. He means it.
His philosophy, if it can be summed up, places people before marble. Luxury, in his view, lives neither in design nor equipment but in the emotion you manage to create — something that can only happen when the team feels as cared for as the guest. Excellence, he insists, is not a standard to enforce but a culture to build, day by day, through example. "When everyone understands that mission and feels personally responsible for it," he says, "excellence becomes something else entirely."
The hotels that will thrive tomorrow, he believes, won't be those with the finest infrastructure or the most advanced technology. They'll be the ones that know how to develop their people — and make them want to stay.
The rest, as he sees it, is just marble.