Reimagining a sporting getaway

Rather than a traditional tournament or sports retreat, the Secret Serve Party blends padel with island exploration, hospitality, wellness, adventure and meaningful connection.

As Krishan Anand puts it: “Padel was the natural choice for this edition for a reason that goes beyond the sport itself. Padel rewards partnership. You cannot play alone. You cannot win alone. The best rallies happen between people who have started to understand each other. That dynamic maps directly onto what we are building in the room. The sport brings the group together in the same way skiing does on a mountain. The island does the rest.”

The Serve Party is curated differently. It is organised around a room—specifically, who is in it and what unfolds between people once the structured programme ends.

“But the room begins before anyone arrives. The night before the island, all thirty guests are invited to Club Jolie’s, one of Mumbai’s most coveted private members' clubs. Before the flight, a drink. Before the first serve, a conversation. By the time we reach the Seychelles, we already have our first stories.”

The experience begins long before departure. Before guests even pack, a luggage tag engraved with their initials—crafted by a brand stocked at Harrods—arrives at their doorstep, followed by a custom-made passport holder. Courtwear is taken care of too: guests select their preferred looks and sizes from home, and their outfits are ready before the journey begins. Each travel kit includes a dewy lip balm and face mist to keep skin refreshed through the long-haul flight. By the time guests board the plane, Secret has already begun.

Then, on the island, as the unmistakable thwock of a padel ball echoes through the warm morning air, a community of remarkable people begins to take shape. By sundown, strangers have become fast friends. “The future of travel is no longer just about where you go, but who you experience it with,” says Anand.

An ideal setting for party

Club Med Seychelles emerged as the ideal setting for the Secret Serve Party. Krishan Anand explains, “The brief I set myself was simple: find a place where the pursuit and the setting are inseparable. Not a hotel with a padel court attached, but a destination where the entire geography makes the experience feel inevitable. Saint Anne Island was that place. It is a private island—no day visitors, no passing traffic, no sense of the outside world interrupting what we are building. The court is just steps from where you sleep. Your Bili Hu coffee doesn’t get cold on the walk there. I flew to the Seychelles specifically to check that detail. It didn’t.”

For Anand, Club Med’s approach to hospitality is equally important. “Their operation on the island understands something many hospitality providers miss: the best hosting is invisible. The infrastructure is there. The quality is there. Then it quietly steps back. That sense of restraint is something I look for in every setting I choose.”

On the island, the rhythm is deliberate

The rhythm of the Serve Party is intentionally designed. Mornings begin with padel rallies against the backdrop of the Indian Ocean, while afternoons give way to snorkelling through crystal-clear, fish-filled waters. Evenings unfold over sunset cocktails, bathed in the kind of golden light that makes every conversation feel a little more electric.

As Krishan Anand describes it: “Mornings begin on the court, with two daily padel sessions led by Chifumi Sato, Asia’s No. 5 ranked padel player, and Fernando Lacasa Muñoz, one of Spain’s finest coaches, in collaboration with Serve Society Mumbai. Alongside the court each morning are tortoise encounters, yoga, mobility sessions, and the particular silence of a Seychelles morning before the day has fully awakened. Afternoons belong to the sea—snorkelling along the reef, a sunset cruise, and sailing when the wind allows. The evenings are unhurried yet intentionally designed: the opening night unfolds on the terrace, dressed in white; dinner at Turtle Cove is set in warm tones and soft golds; and the closing night brings everyone together for a blue-and-white beach dinner beneath the stars, with a live DJ carrying the evening into something else entirely. Lobster on the beach, champagne on a yacht, cocktails in the pool, and conversations that stretch into the morning.”

The guest list is equally considered. This edition brings together a Harvard graduate who leads one of India's most influential cultural institutions alongside a Columbia graduate who has spent years shaping how art is collected and experienced at the highest level. An Ivy League-educated promoter from one of India's leading industrial groups joins a Carnegie Mellon alumnus and former senior technology consultant based in New Jersey.

Among the guests are Suveer Bajaj, co-founder of FoxyMoron and Zoo Media; Vinita Surana, Executive Director of Surana Group, Wharton MBA and former Chairperson of FICCI YFLO; and Saaransh Goila, co-founder of Goila Butter Chicken, television personality and active investor.

The room also includes members of India’s most respected private members’ clubs, alongside founders, operators, investors and creators—gathered not because of what they have built, but because of what they bring to a room.

A community-led gathering

Secret was founded by Krishan Anand in 2016 on the belief that great travel is shaped as much by the people you meet as the places you visit.

The community first gained recognition through the Secret Ski Party in Gulmarg—an invitation-only gathering of 30-40 guests for four nights and five days on one of the world’s highest ski terrains. Hosted across multiple editions each season between January and March, the experience combines guided skiing with a traditional Wazwan feast, Sufi music evenings and altitude-staged dining in collaboration with partners including INJA and ZLB23.

As Anand recalls, “We served sushi at 14,000 feet above sea level, and we built Asia’s highest pickleball court in Gulmarg in collaboration with Serve Society Mumbai.”

The Secret Serve Party in the Seychelles marks the next chapter in the community’s evolution. The third experience, The Secret Charter Project, is set to launch in September 2026 in Sonamarg, Jammu & Kashmir, in partnership with The Charter. “It is built explicitly as the anti-conference: a gathering of founders, investors and operators for three days of riverside lunches, hikes through pine forests to glaciers, and mountain biking across terrain that most of these people will have never encountered.”

The inspiration behind Secret predates any business plan. Anand’s family has called Jammu & Kashmir home for six generations. His great-great-grandfather was among the first to be granted state subject status by the Maharaja. His great-grandfather's home in Ram Munshi Bagh, Srinagar, was never a hotel, but it became an unofficial residence for distinguished visitors to Kashmir—hosting royalty from across the subcontinent, industrialists, European dignitaries and even John D. Rockefeller, who chose to stay with the family rather than elsewhere.

Hospitality, for the Anands, was never transactional. Anand’s grandfather handwrote dinner menus and spent his travels collecting cutlery—from Uzbekistan, Russia, Pondicherry and Rajasthan—not as a business exercise, but as a lifelong passion. That philosophy of thoughtful, deeply personal hosting continues to shape Secret today.

Building for the moment

Having spent several years in strategy consulting, where he hosted large-scale CEO gatherings attended by some of the most influential names in Indian business, Anand came away with a clear conviction. “I watched those rooms produce almost nothing of lasting value. The format was wrong. Networking is not a relationship.” That observation—that the conventional gathering format was broken—became the founding insight behind everything Secret does.

Secret emerged at the intersection of three forces: a family legacy of exceptional hosting, a professional frustration with how rooms are traditionally designed, and the belief that India deserved a new kind of experience—one built from the inside out, rooted in a sense of place, and created for people who had already been everywhere else.

“The old luxury question was: where are we going? The new luxury question is: who is in the room, what are we doing there, and why is this worth my time? Most of the hospitality industry is still answering the first question, competing on destinations, design, and food and beverage. All of those things matter, but they are no longer the frontier. The frontier is context: the feeling of being genuinely considered before you arrive, the quality of the people you will spend four days with, and the sense that what happens in that room could not have happened anywhere else or with anyone else.”

He concludes: “This is not a generational shift. It cuts across ages. More precisely, it is a post-checklist phenomenon. It happens to people who have travelled enough to understand that the destination is not the point. That group is growing in India faster than ever before, as a generation of founders, operators, professionals and investors arrives at that realisation simultaneously. Secret is built for that moment. And that moment, as far as I can tell, is now.”