The Isimbi Family surrounded us, tumbling down vines playfully in the trees above, swatting their siblings like my own children do on a regular basis, chewing on stalks of bamboo noisily.

Read more

🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown

19. The Upgrade | Weekly – Who Can You Trust? The Trust Matrix Involved In Your Travel Decisions

Travelers,

Wow, I can’t believe there are almost 1,000 people who have decided to subscribe to The Upgrade! In 19 weeks of publishing these weekly articles, I’ve met so many interesting people in the hospitality, reporting, and literary spaces. In the same week, the iconic called out The Upgrade in a Skift article, and Plum Sykes restacked my note and then messaged me on Instagram. Be still, my heart. I’m so thrilled to have found this corner of the internet, filled with fellow hospitality and travel obsessives who love a little bit of luxury and pizzaz.

This week’s Upgrade took me longer than most articles do. I wrote it while waiting for my daughter to get her tonsils out, in the surgical center, then spent the next several days reworking it over and over again. There has been much buzz about the Amanvari controversy, and I realized that I very much wanted to touch on the players involved in people’s reactions, from the industry side, to the UHNW traveler side, and finally, from the point of view of one of the people who reads Reddit more than I should.

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Yours truly, in my happy place, Adare Manor. Don’t I look trustworthy?

In case you missed it:

• Master Key: Takeaways From Virtuoso Travel Week

• The Great Beige-ification of Hotels

• Micro and Macroeconomic Factors Reshaping Travel

• Who Owns Your Hotel

• Why I Write This

The Upgrade

Master Key: Ten years a hotel LP. Numbers say recovery, K1s say otherwise

Master Key is a publication for paid subscribers of The Upgrade, a newsletter that gives you all the insight of a hospitality and travel insider…

Read more

17 days ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · The Upgrade | Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Who Can You Trust?

The recent online and industry discourse around the Amanvari controversy has me thinking a great deal about trust in the travel industry. When we spend money to travel, particularly at the luxury level, there is an element of trust and a social contract involved with the players in the booking matrix.

The typical players in a travel booking are:

· Traveler

· Hotel

In a luxury booking they may be:

· Traveler (and/or assistant or family member)

· Hotel, DMC (destination management company)

· Travel Advisor

On top of that, a traveler may seek input or inspiration from travel industry publications and media, social media videos, OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) like booking.com, online forums like Reddit, AI, and search engines.

The Trust Matrix

· A traveler trusts that an advisor is recommending a hotel in good faith as the right fit for their budget and travel preferences.

· A travel advisor trusts that a client is engaging their services in good faith with the intent to book the trip if the budget and inclusions are met.

· A hotel trusts that a guest will act respectfully to staff and other travelers.

· A guest trusts that a hotel will check them in on time, provide a clean room, accurate billing, prompt service, and a pleasant stay.

This is a relatively straightforward trust matrix.

These individuals have motivations driven outside the matrix of travel trust. YouTubers and reviewers are compensated by clicks and views. The more eyes they attract, the more money they stand to make. In the world of pay for views, controversy and new information sell, but nuance doesn’t.

Moreover, online commenters are difficult to pin down. Some are bots paid to stir discord, some are just bored people craving attention. It’s difficult to take someone seriously when their Reddit account was created mere days ago as if their understanding equals that of an experienced travel professional. Yet Reddit gives all comments equal weight.

Trust in the UHNW community

I’m a luxury travel advisor, but I’m also in the UHNW (Ultra-High Net Worth) community.

I travel the way my clients do, and I know what it takes for people with complex finances to build trusted relationships with financial and tax advisors, family office staff, and other professionals we work with.

At a certain level of wealth, everyone wants your attention. We are asked almost nonstop for charitable donations, meetings to hear startup and investment pitches, meetings to consider switching wealth advisors, volunteer positions, and board seats. Because wealthy individuals are constantly asked for things, we tend to be wary – even suspicious – when asked to place our trust.

As more millionaires are minted in the US than ever before, the luxury travel sector is growing. The internet is increasingly crowded with opinions, making it hard for travelers to know whom to trust. We are thus seeing ever more clients moving away from online search and engaging with luxury travel advisors. It’s difficult to cut through the noise online, and people – particularly at a certain echelon – crave interaction with a real person who has considerable personal travel experience.

This also means we are working with more clients who have never before engaged a travel advisor, and a large part of the onboarding process is now dedicated to education about what a travel advisor does, how we are paid, and what differentiates a professional advisor from a platform like Amex.

We don’t nail this every time. I recently lost a booking because a client was frustrated that I wasn’t able to match a hotel’s promotional flash sale rate for a booking and include Virtuoso or Preferred Partner benefits. I could match the rate, but the hotel was unwilling to include benefits like free breakfast as they were already discounting the rate. For the client, it was the same to book through me or directly with the hotel, except that she arrived at her booking decision only after weeks of my efforts to quote different properties, counsel her about wedding blocks that would affect their stay at certain properties, and reaching out to hotel sales directors and wholesalers to find the best price.

She didn’t see that research as valuable. She saw only that she could get the same rate by booking directly with the hotel or with me, and somehow along the way, she had decided that booking with a professional advisor was supposed to get her an extra discount. That unrealistic expectation broke the implied social contract of reciprocating an advisor’s efforts with a booking.

I had failed to set expectations and clearly explain the difference between BAR (Best Available Rate) and promotions in advance.

To establish trust between an advisor and a new client, education is key. There’s a big difference between booking.com and a benefits and advocacy partner with decades of luxury travel under their belt.

The recent Ryan Walker controversy stirred a lot of discussion about trust in our industry. The situation seemed like a classic David vs. Goliath – Ryan Walker, a YouTube hotel reviewer known for his less-than-stellar review of the Four Seasons Yacht inaugural sailing, had booked a night at the newly opened Amanvari, whose ADR (Average Daily Rate) is $6,000. When he arrived to check in, his driver took him to the employee entrance, where he was turned away and told they didn’t have a reservation for him as his booking had been cancelled. In the video, he discovers a cancellation email from the hotel sent the day before. The hotel gate guard threatened to call the police. People were outraged that he could be turned away in this fashion when he had a confirmed reservation, particularly at that high price point.

Jessica Flint and Sebastian Modak at the Wall Street Journal received a statement from Aman, which addressed the framing and editing of the video and not the actual way the interaction was handled.

Aman said it never called the police and showed the paper an incident report with no mention of law enforcement. (In Walker’s footage, a staff member clearly says she needs to call the police.) Aman also noted that they had sent an email five days earlier, asking Walker to postpone filming for a month during construction. Walker insisted on being treated as a standard guest, and said Aman agreed to work with him on what he could film. The disconnect seems to be whether or not those emails amounted to permission or refusal to honor his scheduled reservation.

This is a clear communication failure, and certainly not a luxury level experience. None of it excuses Aman’s handling of the incident in the moment. Nobody at the gate had the authority to sort things out, and a guest was left standing outside with no explanation.

In online travel forums on Reddit, readers with accounts that were only days old posted conspiracy theories around whether the advisors who run those channels are in the pockets of hotel companies like Aman. The word “shill” was loosely thrown around, and people who had never worked with these agents demanded statements from them. Readers were out for blood, and there was nothing the moderators could say to assuage them.

On one side, the forum moderators didn’t have enough information to issue a statement. This was not their client, they weren’t involved in the reservation, Aman wouldn’t provide public information, and Reddit moderators are not investigative journalists. '

On the other side, readers of those forums wanted to know that these advisors saw the situation the same way they did – a guest, who could be a proxy for their own travel experience, was mistreated by a large hotel brand. They wanted to know that they could trust the moderators and advisors they work with if something similar were to happen to them.

As Flint and Modak put it, “public perception is shaped less by what happened than by who posts first.”²

A Substack writer, , posted an article about the Amanvari fallout, Aman of Few Words. I have to give him credit for the pun; I'm a sucker for puns. John is a General Manager at Boss Hunting/Luxity Media, so not a straight forward member of the travel industry (advisor, hotelier, etc), but seems to be involved in an ancillary manner as a writer. In his article, he wrote “The luxury hotel scene is controlled. All sides of the industry – travel agents, PR firms, luxury media – are cosy. They’re far too willing to trade sales, coverage, or access for honesty.”¹

While this may have raised my hackles a bit, I understand where that comes from. Unless you’re an advisor who has called hotels to task over the 18 years that I have, it’s easy to look in from outside and assume we would rather prioritize our relationship with a hotel brand than with a single client.

However, I don’t think it’s fair to lump all these players together, as all are paid differently, and thus have different incentives. As I have said many times in past Upgrade articles, follow the money. Let’s examine the incentive structures for the members of the travel trust matrix.

The YouTube reviewer or online personality.

Their business revolves around attention. A calm, straightforward hotel review rarely gets the same number of views as a hot take showing you that these expensive experiences may not be all they are cracked up to be, or that they are even more awesome than you imagined. For the population online who may never be able to afford such an experience, that is a nice bit of schadenfreude. Influencer TravelWithLivii rose to Instagram fame not by showing the trips she planned that went smoothly, but by showcasing complex “client requests” (mostly fake interactions), for the entertainment of viewers. She is an actual advisor and does handle clients, but much of what she puts online aren’t real phone calls.

The credit card booking channel.

Amex, Centurion, Bilt, and Chase’s travel portals are all incentivized to keep as many transactions as possible on their portals, but with a client base in the thousands, you are just a number to them. If something goes wrong, you won’t be talking to the person who made your booking. Most likely, you’ll be routed to a call center.

The advisor.

A luxury travel advisor’s motivation is client retention above all else. If my client has a terrible time at a hotel, the trust in our relationship is broken and that client will likely not book with me for a future trip. A hotel that treats my clients badly loses my business for future bookings, because my trust in that hotel has been broken.

I am paid by the hotel after a client travels, but I’m not paid unless that client travels. Advisors are an important channel for hotels because we cost them about 10% in commission, compared to OTAs like booking.com that charge 25%. I also charge planning fees, so I’m paid directly by travelers for FIT business (Free Independent Travel, more complex itineraries than just hotel bookings).

In the attention economy, an online personality may argue that they are driving bookings for hotels, and they may be right, but it’s not as easily measurable as an advisor booking under a trackable IATA (International Air Transport Association) number.

Additionally, advisors are often in the industry for years, where an online personality may gain a following quickly and then the platform changes its algorithm the next year and they become passé.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t recommend hotels based on how strong my relationship is with them, or whether or not I’ve stayed there myself. If I know a sales director is more likely to upgrade my client and make them feel really special during their stay, I’m more likely to recommend that property than one where I don’t know the onsite team and my client may just be another name on a register.

Some of my favorite hotels (e.g., Estelle Manor) have received less than stellar feedback from me in the past, but we’ve worked through it together and they’ve come out stronger as properties thanks to the candid feedback. I now know how to work better with them before my clients arrive to ensure they have the best time possible.

Ultimately, the client matters more than the brand relationship. The brand might change sales directors or ownership, but a client could keep booking for years and refer their friends.

Now, let’s talk about the claim that hotels woo advisors with free stays.

There are FAM trips (familiarization trips) that hotels, rep groups, and DMCs host for advisors. These are usually in off season and run like a press trip, with a packed schedule to show a group of advisors what a hotel offers. We are not allowed to bring friends or family. FAM trips require that advisors pay our own airfare, and usually come with a nominal fee to attend. I saw one poster on Reddit postulate that advisors are flown business class to stay for free in luxury hotels and I almost spat out my coffee. If that were the case, there’d be a lot more advisors. I try to avoid FAM trips. I have a family at home, and don’t need to be out of the office for a week just to come home more exhausted.

Hotels will also occasionally give an advisor a discounted “advisor rate.” These advisor rates are usually bestowed the first time an advisor stays at a property, upon request, and only after they’ve driven volume to that property. A new advisor with little history in the industry will likely not be granted an advisor rate. To be honest, these discounted rates are pretty hit or miss. We don’t get a discounted stay over spring break or in high season. It’s usually for one or two nights midweek in the middle of off season. I tried for an advisor rate today, mid week, in London for a single October night, and was shot down.

The idea behind FAM trips and advisor rates is that advisors who have experienced a property firsthand are more likely to be able to describe it accurately and in worthwhile detail. While some advisors have newsletters, not many of us spend our time writing reports on Substack (except yours truly).

If an advisor has a bad time at a hotel on their personal trip, that hotel loses their future business, both personal and professional, but it’s unlikely they will suffer reputational damage from a widespread online writeup.

Travel writers.

Legacy media are invited on press trips in the same way that advisors/agents go on FAM trips. I’m not a reporter, so I honestly don’t know the cost structure involved in hosting a press trip from the hotel side. I don’t know if the hotel or the publication pays for the reporter’s travel, but I assume the reporter isn’t footing their own bill the same way an advisor does for a FAM trip.

Travel writers are typically going to a hotel opening in good faith to review the property in a favorable light. If a publication pans a property, it’s unlikely their reporters will be invited back to other properties, or that that hotel or brand will pay for ads or awards ceremony tables.

However, if a travel publication appears to be too partial to hotels and writes fluff pieces that aren’t representative of the experience travelers encounter, they will lose credibility with readers. There’s also the matter of journalistic integrity – a code of ethics that traditionally drives reporters.

Trade publications also walk the line between honest representation and making sure they don’t lose ad revenue from a property or brand.

Online Posters.

An anonymous Reddit account can be created the same day it starts publishing claims about a travel advisor, property or brand, with no name, no business, no client history, and no reputation on the line if the claims turn out to be false or misleading. By the logic that made Walker’s video credible, that account should be the least trustworthy voice in the conversation. It has nothing at stake, and it can say anything. Yes, there are some forums that require a certain amount of “karma” before posting, but the two largest travel sub Reddits don’t have that requirement.

Algorithms don’t weigh your credibility when deciding how far a claim travels. Outrage content performs the same whether the source has a track record or was created twenty minutes ago. Sometimes the person with nothing to lose is telling the truth because they have no reason to lie. Sometimes the person with nothing to lose is lying precisely because they have nothing to lose and clicks to gain.

An advisor operates in the opposite way. My name, my business, and every client relationship I have are attached to what I tell you. I can’t disappear and start a new company tomorrow if I’m wrong about a hotel.

The general public, most of the mass-affluent traveler base, builds trust from what’s easily accessible to them online. These sources are reviews, videos on YouTube and IG, price comparisons from AI, forum threads on Reddit, maybe their friends. These are not travelers who may have a travel agent on speed dial.

This group is more likely to encounter conspiracy-flavored claims about properties and advisors online, since they don’t yet have a track record with one to weigh those claims against.

High-net-worth clients are usually somewhere in the middle. They’re starting to use advisors seriously, but they still want to understand the math. These new clients are wary of being taken advantage of, they may have had a fraudulent or unhappy booking in the past with something like an Airbnb or booking.com. They are just as likely to book direct, through a credit card portal, or OTA as they are to consider booking with an advisor. These are the clients that argue with me about what ChatGBT says their trip should cost or include.

Ultra-high-net-worth clients operate almost entirely on relationship, personal referrals, and track record.

While they may read Reddit threads about a hotel controversy for entertainment, they certainly aren’t taking the posts of anonymous accounts at face value. They’ll call me directly and ask whether they should still go, what I’ve heard from the hotel, and my professional opinion.

If you are working with an advisor and something viral like the Ryan Walker situation causes you concern, call your advisor. Ask for their opinion, what they’ve heard from the brand. I’ve told my clients when I don’t think a hotel is ready (the Amanvari is not ready), but that’s always my rule of thumb – don’t send people to a property too soon after opening. There are so many kinks a hotel has to work out in those first few months.

I also offer my opinion on how a hotel should have handled a situation differently.

In this case, Amanvari should have:

1) Called the client instead of assuming they read an email the day before

2) Made it very clear the client’s reservation had been cancelled when the filming discussion came up, not left the door open for them to film with restrictions

3) Let the guest through the gate, and bring in the GM to explain in person, with the option to stay if he skips filming.

4) If staying wasn’t workable, walked him to a comparable property and handled the logistics, refund included.

5) Responded within days after the issue by calling the guest.

6) Made a statement that wasn’t so nebulous. Waiting a week to make a public statement hands the story to whoever posted first.

Finally, I want to discuss filming rights, which are an increasingly hot topic in the industry as we see more influencers interrupting the experience of other guests.

A reviewer doesn’t have an inherent right to film and publish inside a hotel for commercial consumption. This line has gotten blurred as online celebrities and YouTubers position themselves as “just another guest,” but the fact is they aren’t normal guests. They are making money from what they post, potentially disrupting the experience of other guests, and not necessarily posting accurate – let alone contextualized – information.

A property is private property, and it can set terms around photography and filming the same way it sets terms around anything else that happens on site, such as dress codes, pool hours, and which spaces stay closed to outside vendors. Reviewers and advisors alike operate on a property at the owner’s discretion when it comes to content creation, paid stay or not.

Before I post a review of a hotel I’ve stayed at in The Upgrade, I always email the hotel’s sales director to make sure that the information in my article is accurate. Yes, my experience is my personal experience, but I can certainly get details wrong. A perfect example of this is that I stated that Estelle Manor didn’t have food options available between breakfast and noon because we had been unable to find a restaurant open to feed our kids in that time frame. The sales director corrected my article, noting that there were grab-and-go options available in the potting shed coffee shop. I just hadn’t found them.

In this era of online personalities, “post truth media,” Reddit forums, AI optimized search, and so much noise – whom you place your trust in is more important than ever.

Remember, a YouTube reviewer and a travel advisor do not have the same incentives. Your aunt’s friend who stayed at a hotel a few years back, or an online forum’s random poster do not have the same professional experience as a seasoned advisor. Seek information, sure, but seek it with a discerning eye for the incentive structure motivating that source.

Sources:

¹ John McMahon, “Aman of few words,” SexyStays, August 12, 2026. ²

Jessica Flint and Sebastian Modak, “A New Luxury Hotel Canceled a YouTuber’s $4,663 Stay. Then Came the Viral Feud,” The Wall Street Journal, August 2026. ³

🗝️ The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• There are more buyers than there are good rooms. Virtuoso’s average nightly rate hit $1,983 in June, double what it was before 2020, with fall bookings running 69% ahead of last year and trips over $100,000 up 49%.

• Americans took 24 million trips to Europe last year. More than half the country holds a passport now against fewer than 5% in 1990, which is the entire reason a hotel that had space three weeks out in 2018 now wants nine months.

• Boomers are paying for a lot of it. US boomers hold roughly $93 trillion in assets, 64% of adults over 50 expect to travel this year, and they are planning an average of 3.9 trips each.

• Europe’s rivers are too low to cruise on. The Danube hit a 30-year low and a Viking ship ran aground in Bulgaria with 238 people aboard, so check that your policy names high and low water, because standard trip interruption will not pay for a shallow river.

• The Hawaiian Council bought Sea Life Park. The sale from Herschend closed August 11 and CEO Kūhiō Lewis is moving the park toward Native Hawaiian culture and marine science, with existing passes honored and no layoffs planned. This may seem insignificant to you, but I grew up going here. This is a big deal to me!

• Qatar’s emir reportedly flew a $400 million 747 to Mallorca for 96 seconds of eclipse. Doha does not get another total eclipse until 2081, so the 3,000-mile flight and the $500 million yacht waiting offshore were arguably proportionate.

• Samsonite is buying BÉIS. 85% of the equity for $178.5 million on a $210 million valuation, with Shay Mitchell keeping 15% and staying on as head of creative, eight years after she launched it.

  Upgrade to a paid subscription to receive my travel dispatches from my own travels and client itineraries I’ve planned, hotel history from the archives of my dad’s newsletter, and Master Key - your hospitality MBA

Hello Upgrade Readers and Fellow Travelers -

I just spent five nights in Las Vegas for Virtuoso Travel Week with around 4,800 other people in the hospitality and travel industry. This year, I qualified for the executive registration, so my experience looked a bit different than it did ten years ago when I last attended.

Virtuoso Travel Week is a commitment. It’s an utterly exhausting series of meetings, coffees, lunches, cocktail parties, dinners, and suite invitations spread between the Bellagio, Aria, and Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. I have managed to avoid going for the past few years, but with the rapid growth of our new agency, Alpengow Travel, I thought it was time to make a return trip to the air conditioned halls of the Bellagio.

Travel advisors typically spend a few hours each day participating in “tracks,” which are a series of 8-10 minute long speed dating appointments with hotel sales directors, DMCs (destination management companies), wholesalers, representative groups, and tourism boards.

In between, we are invited to hosted events by hotels and suppliers that we hustle to, regretting wearing heels and wondering when we will have time to actually answer our clients’ emails in between it all. My days began with coffee meetings at 7am and ended with hosted dinners around 11pm.

Why do we put ourselves through this?

The short answer is that industry is changing.

We have advisors widely adopting AI, and some that are eschewing it completely. We have clients utilizing AI, agencies using it for booking support, general concern about whether it will impact our careers in a negative way, host agencies developing their own technology, and new entrants to our tech stack every day.

We are seeing the rise of a new class of celebrity advisor, with those running Reddit forums and growing massive social media platforms on TikTok and Instagram, like TravelWithLivii, outpacing legacy advisors and driving sales volume the industry has never seen before.

We have disrupters like Fora adding thousands of new advisors to the mix at a record pace, a travel economy that is driving rates to the moon, and capital structures that are changing the mix of what makes sense for a new hotel.

The conversations that take place over the week of VTW events are where we can gain a grasp of how hotels, advisors, and executives are thinking about what comes next.

Additionally, there is also absolutely no shortage of new hotels (and old ones) that I want to learn about. Being a hospitality obsessive, I feel like a kid in a candy store collecting a rolodex of hotels to add to my list. I geek out over planned renovations, new openings, and offers to share.

This week, I’m sharing my takeaways from the discussions shaping the luxury travel industry, what we are concerned about, what we are seeing, as well as hotels I have on my list of places I need to visit.

The luxury travel industry shows no sign of slowing down. Virtuoso reports sales pacing 20%+ higher YoY, hotel rates climbing, and forward bookings surging one to two years out.

People are wondering where the price ceiling is. According to Doug Gollan from Forbes reporting on the conference, hotel rates now average over $1,600/night per Virtuoso data, up 37% YoY for $1,500+ nightly bookings, with 47% growth in future bookings by clients spending $50,000+ per trip. (forbes.com/sites/douggo…)

Travelers still think pricing is the same as 2019.

$20,000 is now table stakes for a four-star week for two in most European cities. $2,000 is the new entry level room ADR for luxury hotels. However, we are still receiving requests for a five star trip at a 3 star budget.

Read more

18. The Upgrade | Weekly – The Great Beige-ification of Hotels

Travelers,

I am writing this week’s The Upgrade from the air-conditioned conference rooms of the Bellagio hotel, where I am consuming copious cups of mediocre coffee, getting the latest news from hotel partners around the world, and not sleeping enough.

Nothing other than Virtuoso Travel Week - one of the largest conferences in the travel industry - could send me to Las Vegas in the middle of August.

Sanchita has written about When Minimalism Becomes Boring and whether you can Scale Individuality. I am decidedly not a minimalist. Give me a castle with threadbare furniture in Ireland, a ranch house where you can still smell the sap in the pine walls in Colorado, a chateau filled with antique plates and tapestries.

As we are seeing this boom of historic hotel renovations, I have been wondering what is driving the tale of a split hotel development trend - on one side, we have these opulent, gorgeous restorations of old palaces. On the other, we have the mass market consolidation of the Marriotts and Hiltons that have become completely indistinguishable from each other the world over.

My guest for this piece is , who has sourced furniture for hotels that have won awards around the world. As usual, check out the Lobby Bar section for some hospitality gossip and travel industry news.

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Your truly, a maximalist, in Paris with my daughter

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Great Beige-ification of Hotels

As a rejection of my mother’s opulent 90s house, filled with trinkets, framed photos and stuff, I developed a modern/organic millennial taste in interior decorating for a hot minute. My kitchen renovation took place at this time, when I was watching Studio McGee and Chip and Johanna Gaines transform homes into modern farmhouse castles of emptiness. Ah, to have a clear, white cabinet, a clean wall, a perfectly placed tree branch in a handmade pot!

My kitchen is now all white and has a shiplap wall (I can feel my future self cringing when I sell the place). The rest of my house did not undergo the same transformation, as my mother died shortly thereafter, and I inherited her house full of stuff.

My mom, the OG maximalist

Faced with her absence and 11,000 square feet filled with things she cherished, I looked more carefully at the craftsmanship of her “fragile things,” the detail of her framed floral prints, the quality of her Waterford Crystal and Spode China. I began filling my house with memories of her, and slowly, my white home grew more maximalist, more eclectic, more … her and me.

I believe this is why my taste in hotels has evolved in my 30s and now 40s. When I posted about historic hotel renovations on Reddit, many younger readers commented that they prefer modern decor to opulence. Perhaps they will experience the same renaissance of taste that transformed my home.

We’ve entered the great hotel beige-ification era.

You walk into a lobby in Hong Kong, New York, or London. White walls, linen-tone furniture, a piece of abstract art in a muted frame. Velvet pillows rest on a modern sofa, curving like a semicolon as if to say, “We are edgy!”

I stayed at the newly renovated Delano Miami recently, a temple of modern, white furniture. It reopened in 2026 after a complete renovation by Elastic Architects, Ennismore’s go-to firm. They also designed Delano Dubai. The “Delano-white” aesthetic harkens back to the white curtains and pale minimalism that were Philippe Starck’s creative vision. I found it a bit soulless.

Like all things, beige-ification comes down to money. Roughly 65% of luxury hotels worldwide are now run by global chains like Hilton and Marriott ¹. At that scale, replicating design details is as much cost control as brand consistency.

The hotel industry runs on FF&E (Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment) procurement. Selections are standardized so every property reflects brand identity while minimizing sourcing, design, and shipping costs.

Let’s take a look at the players in this FF&E value chain.

FF&E Procurement

FF&E procurement companies buy and coordinate delivery of everything that goes inside a hotel room and public spaces. Think beds, chairs, lighting, art, casegoods, linens. They are engaged by hotel owners, and negotiate with approved vendors to hit brand standards, budget, and opening deadlines.

Benjamin West, the world’s largest FF&E purchasing firm, spends roughly $1.5 million per day on behalf of its hospitality clients and serves over 1,000 Marriott-flagged hotels and 350 Hilton properties ². It also works for IHG, Hyatt, and Four Seasons, sourcing from overlapping approved vendor pools. If you have ever renovated a house, you know what decision fatigue feels like. Imagine that on an astronomical scale - and you can start to understand why a hotel might outsource this decision making process to these guys.

Manufacturing

The furniture comes from an equally concentrated supplier base. Kimball Hospitality, owned by HNI Corporation since its $485 million 2023 acquisition, has supplied hotels since 1985 and counts Marriott, Hilton, MGM, and IHG among its clients ³. Chinese manufacturer SUNSGOODS operates 12 automated production lines with over 3,000 in-stock styles and serves clients in 80+ countries.

At the luxury European end, three dominant Italian manufacturers, Poliform Contract, Molteni&C, and B&B Italia, supply many brands. Poliform has furnished the Mandarin Oriental Milan, Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormina, and Hotel Lutetia in Paris. Molteni&C’s portfolio includes Four Seasons Hotel at the Surf Club Miami, 45 Park Lane in London, Aman Canal Grande in Venice, and the Waldorf Astoria New York.

B&B Italia’s list spans Bulgari, Mandarin Oriental, Aman, Grand Hyatt, Peninsula, W Hotels, Kempinski, The Connaught, The Berkeley, and Four Seasons. Its 25-year relationship with Bulgari alone spans properties in Milan, London, Beijing, Shanghai, and Paris ⁴. Pieces at this level are custom-specified, preserving some distinctiveness.

In sum, the supply chain is narrow.

Design firms decide what the hotel should look like in terms of concept, layout, color palette, material choices, custom furniture specs, while FF&E procurement firms execute that vision by sourcing and purchasing everything from those designs.

HBA has ranked first in the hospitality category of Interior Design’s Top 100 Giants list for over 25 consecutive years, with a client list spanning Four Seasons, Kempinski, Shangri-La, Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, Hyatt, and JW Marriott ⁵. Yabu Pushelberg’s roster adds St. Regis, W Hotels, Park Hyatt, Mandarin Oriental, and Peninsula Hotels. AvroKO topped the most admired list in 2025.

To paraphrase Churchill, never have so many hotel interiors looked so alike thanks to so few major designers, all constrained by brand standards.

In business school, everyone learns about vertical integration, which means a company owning or controlling links in its supply chain over outside vendors. Instead of buying furniture from an independent factory and hiring an independent design firm, a vertically integrated hotel company owns factory, FF&E procurement company, and design firm, (or any combination thereof).

• Backward integration moves toward suppliers. Example: a coffee shop chain owning a coffee plantation.

• Forward integration moves toward customers, such as a shoe manufacturer operating its own stores.

The point is control and increasing margin by reducing dependence on outside vendors, capturing their profits, and coordinating links in the chain. The tradeoffs of consolidation are capital intensity, less flexibility, and the risk of getting locked into your own supply chain despite better outside options. And there are pesky antitrust laws to think about as well.

HNI’s acquisition of Kimball International created a combined company with roughly $3 billion in revenue, further entrenching North America’s largest hospitality furniture supplier in brand-standard contracts ³. In interior design, HBA was acquired in 2020 by Suzhou Gold Mantis Construction Decoration Company, one of China’s largest interior decoration conglomerates, deeply tied to the manufacturing supply chain that produces HBA-specified furniture ¹⁰. Everybody is getting in bed together.

Vertical integration and Mckinsey-style operational efficiency aside, why would a hotel opt for beige-ifciation? Outside of the public spaces, neutral interiors are easier to clean.

For bedding and towels, white/near-white linens can be washed hotter and bleached without fading. Washing whites together without color sorting keeps a red towel from ruining a load. Colored linens require separate loads and faster discards because bleach damages dye. This doesn’t work for a hotel turning hundreds of rooms a night.

White and beige also add the illusion of size to small rooms, feeling “light and airy” rather than “heavily opulent.”

Yet, beige and white show marks and dirt more readily. As a parent of young children, I’ve learned white chairs and couches are an absolutely terrible idea.

COVID accelerated the flattening. Laminate flooring replaced carpets and accent rugs, and tile showers pushed bathtubs aside. Both are easier to clean. The design consequence: less texture and warmth.

A hotel arrives at beige thanks to global scale, procurement efficiency, cost control, and risk-averse design committees.

In a 2016 essay for The Verge, writer Kyle Chayka named this phenomenon AirSpace ⁶. He described how an affluent, mobile class moving through spaces linked by technology had spread particular sensibilities till distant places began resembling each other: minimalist furniture, reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, the same aesthetic from Portland to Prague. His 2024 book Filterworld extended the argument to algorithms, which reward the same visual language because it performs consistently in feeds ⁷.

In the Instagram era, social media also influences hotel design. White and beige photograph cleanly and look calm on a small screen. Bold cobalt walls or aggressively patterned fabrics are less universally palatable, and no hotel wants to gamble a seven-year development on a fabric that’s dated by opening day.

Hotel design timelines are lengthy. A new luxury hotel, from land acquisition to opening day, typically takes four to seven years.

FF&E procurement starts 12 to 18 months before opening, with custom casegoods (hard furniture) requiring 16 to 22 weeks in production. FF&E represents 12 to 15% of total development budget, and poor procurement management causes nearly 60% of project delays ⁸.

Custom orders mean delayed timelines. For hotels, every opening delay hemorrhages money.

The mechanism that produces identical rooms across a portfolio is called the room matrix. Procurement platforms source from approved vendor lists. A 20-week lead time punishes all who deviate from that room matrix. While owners wanting a custom piece from an Oaxaca artisan may miss an opening date, incurring a cost overrun, owners ordering from approved catalogs open on time.

Beige is also a safe bet that cuts soft refurbishment costs.

Luxury hotels run soft refurbishments every three to five years and hard refurbishments every seven to ten. A hotel that opened in 2018 with an interior conceived in 2015 is running on a decade-old design vision. For a brand managing hundreds of properties that cannot refresh rooms every four years, it’s an asset-management strategy as much as an aesthetic one.

One emerging counterforce is tariffs. Section 232 tariffs imposed in late 2025 put a 25% duty on upholstered wooden furniture from China, and anti-dumping duties on Chinese wooden bedroom furniture now exceed 200% ⁹. Vietnam and India are growing alternative sources. Whether this produces more design variety or simply shifts the neutral catalog to different factories remains to be seen.

Back to the money. , Nadine Choe, one of the hospitality industry’s most quoted critics, spent years structuring $7 billion in development capital for hotel projects before founding The Stanza. In a July 2026 Beyond Luxury interview, she argued that the reason so many hotels feel interchangeable results predictably from how their capital is structured ¹². Investment committees outsource taste to architects and consultants because they never developed their own. The proven template clears, quarterly reporting rewards repetition, and that’s why you can’t tell properties in Milan, New York, and Doha apart.

Her counterexample is Passalacqua on Lake Como, self-funded over 50 years by the De Santis family on patient capital with no time pressure for returns ¹³. That freedom shows up in the details: Murano glass in every room, a full set of Dyson tools in each bathroom. To her, such details reflect a hotel that thinks about guests before they arrive. Patient capital buys the freedom to notice what guests might want.

Despite the consultant-driven efficiencies of consolidation and value chain collapse, we are seeing an incipient, commercially driven distancing from beige. Properties commissioning local artisans, sourcing regional materials, and letting the destination shape the design report better guest satisfaction and longer stays. Research from DLR Group links authentic-design storytelling with higher guest satisfaction scores, and Preferred Hotels & Resorts has identified the rejection of neutral sameness as a defining movement in luxury travel ¹⁵.

The architects doing hospitality’s most interesting work, including Gathy, Kerry Hill Architects, Kengo Kuma, AvroKO, and Rockwell Group, all share creative autonomy. They are building to a philosophy, working outside the catalog.

My take - the beige hotels that allow for good unit economics across consolidated brands like Marriott and Hilton are going to become the de facto, non-risky choice for the upper middle and lower upper class travelers. They may stretch for a Four Seasons on occasion, but they will exercise their loyalty to predictably neutral hotels. The luxury and ultra luxury hotel brands are going to have to really focus on true differentiation as the wealthy traveler seeks a departure from the semblance of ubiquity, and craves storytelling in their hotel choice.

In Africa, hotels often have a social contract with local tribes to hire tribal members and use their art and decor when possible. This leads to a positive externality that creates truly unique camps with a true sense of place. I’d like to see more ultra luxury properties embrace antiques, storytelling, and the incorporation of local artisans in a similar fashion.

🗝️ Industry Insider Interview: Carolina Ramirez Herrera

I believe we’ll see character and maximalism returning to both boutique and super-luxury historic hotels (like the ones taking over old palaces, though the Danieli Four Seasons opened recently with disappointingly beige rooms, at least their public spaces are gorgeous). is one of my Substack friends who agreed to lend her insider expertise to my article.

What is your background and current role sourcing furniture for hotels

For over a decade, I’ve consulted across brand, marketing, PR and development for luxury hotels primarily in Africa and the Middle East and co-founded Happy Go Lucky, a hospitality design studio specializing in concept development, interiors, and FF&E sourcing and procurement with a knack for giving spaces soul and “making magic happen” - their words, not ours.

What have you seen change in the last 5-8 years in the world of hotel FF&E?

COVID was a huge reality check for the industry. One of my clients had furniture and materials stuck in China and Mexico as supply chains completely froze, forcing hotels to rethink their reliance on a small number of global suppliers. It accelerated a shift toward sourcing locally and working with regional makers and artisans—which, honestly, is how it should be. Beyond being more resilient, local sourcing gives a hotel a much stronger sense of place and makes the guest experience feel far less generic.

Have you seen consolidation amongst large hotel chains or luxury level properties on the FF&E and design side?

I tend to work with smaller, independent hotels, so I haven’t experienced that consolidation firsthand. But from the outside, you can definitely see more of the same suppliers, designers and pieces being used across different properties. It might make sense from an efficiency and cost perspective, but it’s also why so many hotels are starting to look and feel the same. (please no more millennial pink…)

What is something you wish people knew about decorating and sourcing for hotels?

This is really for ownership groups and the people controlling the budgets and timelines: if you want the character and craftsmanship that comes from working with artists and artisans, the budget and schedule have to respect their process. You can’t ask for something handmade, one-of-a-kind and steeped in history, then expect 25 identical pieces to arrive yesterday at an Amazon price and speed.

On one project in Morocco, we found an artisan with these incredible vintage doors he had collected and hand-painted over many years. The client loved them, but then wanted 25 immediately. That disconnect between the creative vision and the realities of producing it caused so many unnecessary issues. You either value the artisan process or you don’t; you can’t have it both ways.

I also wish people understood how much research (and how many missions!) sit behind a single object. Once you pull off one impossible project, word travels quickly, and in 2021 we were brought into Habitas AlUla as essentially the special-ops team, with only eight weeks until opening. Saudi had only recently opened to tourism, and this was the first luxury hotel in AlUla. We took around 25 flights across the country in those eight weeks, searching for artists, artisans and makers who could help us bring the property to life.

One of those missions took our all-women team to Dammam and then Al-Ahsa to find a specific potter whose family had kept these vessels for generations. His jaw dropped when we said we wanted his entire stock. My business partner and I just looked at each other like, “I can’t believe this is our real life.”

And yet, guests now see a terracotta pot at the entrance; they don’t see the mission behind it.

Where do you see industry trends going in terms of how hotels appear? More minimalist? More maximalist? Something else?

Maximalism is definitely making a comeback, but I think the larger shift is toward specificity. You hit the nail on the head, people want to feel like they are somewhere, not in the same beige lobby transplanted between Milan, New York and Doha.

The Middle East has always understood this because more is more, and I love it. Raffles Doha is a great example: it’s theatrical, opulent and completely over the top. I literally gasped when I walked in because it was so unapologetic and fing cool.

In Africa, hotels often have to source locally because of budget, timing and logistical constraints, but that necessity produces some of the most beautiful craftsmanship. Batoka’s Zambezi Sands in Victoria Falls features incredible locally made baskets, while Gorgeous George, a Design Hotels™ property in Cape Town designed by Tristan du Plessis, was a true labor of local love from the tiles and furniture to the art. Those properties couldn’t simply be dropped into another city, and that’s exactly what makes them memorable.

What are your top three favorite hotels?

Oof, hit me where it hurts! My top three are constantly changing, but right now I’d say Bvlgari Hotel Roma, The Imperial New Delhi and Rosewood Hong Kong. Bvlgari Roma is still one of the most beautifully designed hotels I’ve ever visited, from the monogrammed Nespresso machine to the chic but incredibly thoughtful gym. The Imperial is the perfect example of preserving a hotel’s history while updating it with modern luxuries; hello, Dyson vanity! And Rosewood Hong Kong? I had quite literally no notes.

🗝️ Industry Insider Interview: Emily Mattucci

This week, we are lucky enough to hear from two industry insiders who operate in this space.

What is your background and current role sourcing furniture for hotels

I’ve spent the last several years in the commercial furniture industry, and today I work with RH Contract, partnering with hospitality designers, purchasing firms, developers and ownership groups to source and specify furniture for hotels and other commercial projects.

What have you seen change in the last 5–8 years in the world of hotel FF&E?

There’s been a much bigger focus on creating spaces that feel residential and welcoming rather than traditionally “hotel.” At the same time, clients are under more pressure around budgets, lead times and durability, so there’s a constant balance between creating something distinctive and finding products that can actually meet the practical demands of a hospitality project.

Have you seen consolidation amongst large hotel chains or luxury-level properties on the FF&E and design side?

Yes. We’re seeing more centralized decision-making, particularly with larger ownership and management groups, and more emphasis on preferred vendors, purchasing partners and repeatable standards. There are obvious efficiencies to that approach, but I think the challenge is maintaining enough flexibility for each property to still feel specific to its location and guest experience rather than overly standardized.

What is something you wish people knew about decorating and sourcing for hotels?

How many competing factors go into selecting a single piece of furniture. It isn’t just about what looks good- you’re considering durability, cleanability, lead times, inventory, budget, code requirements, scale and how the product will perform with hundreds of different guests using it. The best hotel spaces make all of those decisions feel invisible.

Where do you see industry trends going in terms of how hotels appear? More minimalist? More maximalist? Something else?

I think we’re moving away from both generic minimalism and maximalism for the sake of maximalism. Guests want spaces with personality, warmth and a sense of place. I’m seeing more layered materials, natural woods, texture, warmer colors and residential influences, but paired with pieces that feel intentional rather than overly decorated. The most interesting hotels feel collected and specific to where they are.

What are your top three favorite hotels?

I love the bunkhouse group! I used to work with them in Austin before they were purchased by Hyatt.

🗝️ Room Report

If you prefer hotels with character, these are some maximalist properties that are eclectically decorated.

I recently stayed in London with my kids at Firmdale’s Covent Garden Hotel. The building dates to the 1890s, originally a French hospital whose bones remain visible in the brickwork. Kit Kemp, who cofounded Firmdale with her husband Tim in 1985 and has personally designed all eleven of their hotels, filled it with rich patterned textiles, a collision of modern and traditional art, and furniture that appears chosen by someone with actual opinions ¹¹.

Le Négresco, Nice. A 1912 Belle Époque landmark on the Promenade des Anglais, Le Négresco remains independently owned. Jeanne Augier ran it for over five decades and refused every chain offer. When she died in 2019, she left the hotel to the animal-welfare foundation that runs it today. The interiors reflect her lifetime of taste, with over 6,000 pieces of art across five centuries.

Inn at the Five Graces, Santa Fe. Ira and Sylvia Seret spent decades in Central Asia and the Himalayas, collecting textiles, tiles, and antique doors. They built interiors around what they found. Each of the 24 suites combines Rajasthani mosaics, Tibetan rugs, Turkish tiles, and Southwestern adobe.

The Fife Arms, Braemar, Scotland. This Hauser & Wirth hotel features tartan carpets, taxidermy, actual Picassos and Freuds on the walls, and a stag-skull chandelier by Louise Bourgeois. Probably today’s most aggressively maximalist luxury hotel.

Blakes Hotel, London. Anouska Hempel opened Blakes in 1978, and it remains the reference point for personality-driven hotel design. Rooms have individual themes. White linen drapes the Corfu Room, deep red fills the Cardinal Room.

Palazzo Margherita, Bernalda, Italy. A 19th-century Jacques Grange-designed property in Basilicata, the hometown of Francis Ford Coppola’s family. Its nine rooms, all different, have hand-restored frescoed ceilings.

Suján Rajmahal Palace, Jaipur. A maharaja’s former residence restored by Adil Ahmad, its rooms feature peacock wallpapers, pink and turquoise saturation, and hand-painted murals.

Hotel Costes and L’Hotel, Paris. Jacques Garcia designed both properties, and both are drenched in deep red velvet, gold, and brocade. This hotel is the opposite end of the aesthetic scale from Delano-white. L’Hotel has the added distinction of being where Oscar Wilde died.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar - — Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• Oops - A superyacht crushed a WWII wreck off the south of France. The 220-meter Orient Express Corinthian dropped anchor in Les Lecques Bay in mid-July and destroyed a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter resting 38 meters below, prompting French authorities to open an investigation and push for permanent mooring buoys at protected wreck sites.

• The Peninsula is putting $268M into Hong Kong and Tokyo. Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels committed HK$2.1 billion to renovate both flagships, a signal that luxury demand in Asia is holding up and a heads-up to plan 2027 and 2028 Asia itineraries around construction phasing.

• Russian hackers are targeting hotel Wi-Fi. Microsoft warned that state-backed actors are running credential theft campaigns at hotels, airports, and conference venues using fake login pages and phony update pop-ups, so use a VPN and treat every hotel network notification as hostile.

• Utah shut down the drinking water at Sorrel River Ranch. A Tier 1 “Do Not Use” order took effect July 31 after inspectors found an uncertified operator, failed chemical pumps, and staff washing dishes with pool water.

• Amanyara may be deflagged from Aman. Mortimer Sackler's CR Hotel Ltd. has told Amanyara villa owners it plans to terminate Aman's management contract over Vlad Doronin's decision to build an adjacent Janu-branded resort, with the split potentially taking effect as early as September or extending to April 2027 to protect the $19,000-a-night high-season bookings.

• Paul Gauguin and Ponant are running a $1,000 shipboard credit on French Polynesia sailings. My clients get up to $1,000 per stateroom on any 2026 or 2027 departure aboard the m/s Paul Gauguin, plus select Le Jacques Cartier voyages that reach the remote Gambier and Austral archipelagos on top of the usual Society Islands, Tuamotus, and Marquesas, for new bookings deposited between August 1 and October 31.

• The Six Bells is offering murder weekends. August, November, and December, a miniatures workshop retreat September 23-25, and buzzer trivia every Thursday night.

• Collegio alla Querce in Florence has three offers on the table right now. Book connecting rooms and get 50% off the second through the end of 2026, book three nights and get the fourth free through September, or book two nights and get the third free through December 18

  ---

  Sources

1. Bloomberg, on the share of luxury hotels operated by global chains.

2. Benjamin West company data on daily FF&E procurement spend and brand-property counts.

3. HNI Corporation press release, 2023 acquisition of Kimball International for $485 million.

4. Poliform Contract, Molteni&C, and B&B Italia hospitality client portfolios (company references).

5. Interior Design magazine, Top 100 Giants list, Hospitality category rankings.

6. Kyle Chayka, “Welcome to AirSpace,” The Verge, August 2016.

7. Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Doubleday, 2024.

8. Hospitality Net and industry procurement data on FF&E timelines, budget share, and delay causes.

9. U.S. Department of Commerce, Section 232 tariffs on wooden furniture from China, 2025.

10. Suzhou Gold Mantis Construction Decoration Company, acquisition of HBA, 2020.

11. Firmdale Hotels company biography, Kit Kemp design portfolio.

12. Nadine Choe interview, Beyond Luxury, July 2026.

13. Passalacqua, Lake Como, De Santis family ownership history.

14. Cain International and Saudi Public Investment Fund investment in Aman Group, $900 million financing round.

15. DLR Group research on authentic design and guest satisfaction; Preferred Hotels & Resorts trend reporting.

Matt is one of the smartest people I know - that’s why I married him. We’ve been together since 2004, and have known each other since we were 9 and 12, when we were neighbors. He has a lifetime of investing experience, and was previously a managing director at Oppenheimer Funds. When our daughter was born, we made the decision for him to leave his finance career and start managing an investment fund we set up - Colorado Ohana Ventures. We primarily invest in real estate, hotels, VC, and PE. After our hospitality sub asset class did not perform over the past ten years as we hoped, I asked him to write this article about what he thinks happened. - Anne Marie

I’ve spent over two decades in the investment industry, moving from distribution, to buy-side equities and fixed income, to covering private investments and more recently concentrating on 1031 exchanges. Around 10 years ago, Anne Marie and I carved out a portion of our own money that we would use to focus on real estate investments and private investments overall. It’s been a wild ride. We’ve been able to rotate through some decent sub-asset classes and invest with great partners along the way. Sometimes we’ve hit strong macro tailwinds, and sometimes headwinds.

Anne Marie asked me to write an article on our experience being an LP (limited partner) in the hospitality sub-asset class and document some lessons from the last decade. This is my attempt to summarize those.

Top line numbers seem good. Hotel RevPAR (revenue per available room) and ADRs (average daily rates) hit record highs in 2024. Last year’s occupancy rate is softer than posted records in 2019, but certainly up from the lows during covid. NCREIF, a basic indicator for real estate investment performance, has posted a 7.2% annualized performance for the last 5 years. Pretty weak when compared to the equity markets, but nothing to complain about.

I think the first thing that is important to know when comparing two things is the makeup of those two things being compared. Primarily, the NCREIF is a benchmark of stabilized, operating investment properties that are unlevered. Unlevered means they don’t have debt (a mortgage) and are stabilized (not in lease-up or in post construction marketing phase). Therefore, this is a pretty bad comparison to how a hotel developer (or any real estate developer) would operate. It might be helpful to walk through the development structure and timeline.

I’m going to over simplify this as much as possible, so first off, there are generally two investment groups and a lender, the General Partner and the Limited Partners (GP/LP).

The lender will finance anywhere from 50-80% of a deal, but usually sit around 70%. The GP is the one putting the deal together, they will find a site and work with lawyers to get permits. They will contract with a design team and find a general contractor to build the project. They will find financing from a bank or other lender. And ultimately they find other investors to join in, the LPs. For all this work, they are usually compensated on the backend by taking a greater percentage of the sale or refinance. Usually they put up 10% of the equity (so 3-5% of the whole deal), but often they can get anywhere from 20-50% from a sale or refinancing. The LPs get the majority, but they also contribute most of the equity. Along the way they also accrue 6-8% per year as a ‘hurdle’ or ‘pref’ rate.

Read more

17. The Upgrade | Weekly – Macro and Micro Economics Driving Shifts in the Luxury Travel Market

Travelers,

I’ve spent the last few weeks putting my MBA hat back on and reading a bunch of wonky economics articles. I’ve been searching for what is driving my client behavior, which has shifted dramatically from five years ago. I’ve been in the luxury travel industry for over 18 years now, and I’m trying to understand why this year feels so different.

After a week in the French Riviera and watching many of the places like Le Geurite just print money, I read Nadine’s The Stanza article on the economics of Euro Summer and wondered how the larger economic trends – macro and micro – are shifting luxury travel behavior.

The US stock market has been on a tear, minting new millionaires by the thousands. Where are these travelers going? How are the luxury markets absorbing their travel?

Wealth concentration, a bifurcated hospitality market, global politics, an $84 trillion wealth transfer, fuel volatility from the Iran conflict, and a booking window that keeps shrinking have all reshaped what luxury travel looks like in 2026.

Read on for my economics report and what it means for hospitality professionals, travel advisors, and luxury travelers.

This week's Lobby Bar covers the Four Seasons Danieli's Venice opening, why luxury is the only chain scale really running hot, the fading World Cup bump, hotel brands redrawing status and fees, Hyatt's bigger India expansion plans, Marriott's nine-hotel Egypt deal, and Mexico's $115 million sargassum plan.

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Yours truly at Il Sereno, in Lake Como, with my husband,

because what says luxury travel more than this background?

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Forces Reshaping Luxury Travel: A Macro and Micro Economic Look

I co-own Alpenglow Travel, one of the top luxury travel agencies hosted under Coastline Travel. The past five years in luxury travel include two distinct chapters: a post-pandemic surge built on pent-up demand and emotional spending, followed by a structural reset driven by wealth concentration, supply constraints, and a fundamental shift in what affluent travelers are searching for.

Wealth Concentration

The most important macro factor is that the wealthy have become significantly wealthier, and their travel spend has kept rising.

The net worth of America’s top 1% reached a record share of nearly 32% of total US wealth in Q3 2025.¹ In 2024 alone, the US added over 379,000 new millionaires, bringing the total to 23.8 million and representing roughly 40% of global millionaires.^4,5

That means that the number of millionaires in the US is roughly half the size of Spain’s entire population – ortwo out of every five millionaires on the planet!

Moody’s Analytics found that spending by the top 10% of US households grew 62% between Q3 2020 and Q3 2025, far outpacing every other income group.² The top 10% of US earners accounted for nearly half of all US consumer spending in 2025, a historic high.²

Where are these newly minted millionaires spending their travel budgets?

Let’s say your net worth is $3-5M, and your annual travel spend is $60 - $100k. You want to blow it out with a $30k trip to the French Riviera. There are only so many luxury hotels in the French Riviera, and you want to stay at Airelles. The remainder goes to beach clubs, dining, and incidentals.

The French Riviera – let alone Airelles – can only absorb so many of these new millionaires, so hotels and beach clubs raise prices. Booking windows become longer. It’s no longer about having the money, it’s about connections and waitlists. In other words, luxury today = access.

The K-Shaped Economy Is Structural

Everyone is talking about the K-Shaped Economy, a decades-long pattern of uneven economic trends showing a downward pattern in wealth for the lower middle class and an upward growth trend for the wealthy.³ This is particularly visible in the bifurcation of the hospitality industry, where hotels targeting the middle class are seeing lower occupancy, but the luxury and ultra-luxury sector seems to see no softening of demand, despite increasingly sky-high ADRs (average daily rates).¹¹

Through August 2025, the luxury hotel segment posted year-to-date RevPAR (revenue per available room) growth of 5.3%, while the economy segment shrank 1.8%. Luxury and upper-upscale were the only two chain scales to post positive RevPAR growth, with ADR up 5.0% year over year.¹¹

The K-shape is also playing out within the luxury hospitality sector itself. Suites are selling out at record rates while opening categories sit empty. Properties are responding by converting smaller rooms into suites to follow where the money is concentrated.¹²

My experiences tell me that this is likely a reflection of more families traveling together with their children and childcare providers, needing larger rooms or connecting suite configurations. The new signal of wealth is no longer taking the ultra-expensive anniversary trip, it’s bringing your children and nanny along with you for a three-month Euro summer.

Airlines are capitalizing on this trend, converting cabins to make space for more business class passengers. Delta’s main cabin sales dropped 7% in 2025 while business and first-class rose 9%, with premium tickets surpassing economy sales for the first time ever.¹³

Intergenerational Wealth Transfer Is Accelerating Demand

The other figure I’m seeing thrown around is the $84 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer to the millennials in the US.⁹ Multi-generational travel has grown significantly in the past two years, and many of my millennial clients are paying for their boomer and Gen X parents to travel with them.

Bain and Altagamma identified the rise of “inheritourism,” in which wealthy families travel together and Gen Z adopts the (expensive) travel preferences of their parents.^7,8

Properties with multi-bedroom configurations, private pools, and flexible programming are capturing that demand. My clients are requesting more suites and staffed villas, but eschewing Airbnb, which they view as no longer a trusted source of luxury home rentals. Distrust and scams are driving more people to work with trusted advisors.

Goods vs. Experiences: A Structural Reordering

Bain and Altagamma’s annual Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study found a persistent global shift favoring experiential spend over conspicuous consumption as the new marker of status.⁶

My millennial clients don’t want a Birkin. They want a week at Hotel Du Cap-Eden Roc, reservations at Le Guerite, and a day-charter yacht.

Among top 1% travelers, 54% now prioritize private tours and immersive activities over hotel upgrades or fine dining.⁸

The number of my clients sending me a very specific ask or Instagram link to a private forager in Umbria, a particular beach club seating, a recommended guide in the Maasai Mara, etc. has been growing.

International Inbound: A Headwind for US Hotels

The United States is projected to have lost $12.5 billion in international traveler spending in 2025, a 6.6% drop from 2024, driven in part by perceptions of the current US political environment.¹⁶ Canadian visitation fell 23.7% year-to-date through June 2025.¹⁷

U.S luxury properties that depend heavily on European or Canadian guests are absorbing that directly as their occupancy rates plummet.

However, my US clients are also changing their travel patterns. Many of them are steering clear of Mexico following the Puerto Vallarta cartel incident this past spring and opting for Hawaii or Europe instead. I’m also seeing a large increase in requests for Japan, which is seen as politically neutral and safe for Americans.

Destination Patterns

Overtourism, crowds, and heatwaves across Europe are changing where people go. LHW (Leading Hotels of the World) bookings for “coolcation” destinations, including Patagonia and UK and Irish countryside, grew nearly 40% over two years. Nordic bookings are up 45% year over year; Alpine bookings up 15%.¹⁵ In my own pipeline, interest in the Dolomites and broader Alpine region has surged.

Clients are swapping out famous cities for lesser-known ones in the same region. For example, clients heading to Greece are no longer requesting Santorini and Mykonos, but shifting to Paros and Milos. Slovenia, Sardinia, Corsica, Albania, and Montenegro are also trending thanks to social media and the perpetual search for the “next hidden gem.”

Traditional travel media and tourism boards are also launching campaigns to try spreading tourism away from the most popular locations and toward lesser-known places.

Booking Windows Are Compressing

Clients are booking closer to travel dates as they watch the news for anything that might affect their travel plans. In May, I received close-in requests for parts of Spain, Ireland, Scotland, and the South of France - trips that previously would have been booked six months in advance. A reservation at Le Guerite in Cannes for the 3 pm seating is just not possible with a three-week lead time. This has been a stressful shift for me as a travel advisor.

This shorter booking window is also creating pressure on availability at top properties, which are often sold out ever-further in advance. My relationship with sales directors has become even more valuable. Knowing which properties hold space, which have waitlists that adjust, and which release inventory according to a specific cycle is becoming the mark of an expert advisor, separating the veterans from the less experienced.

My advice for luxury travelers is to fight the urge to book close in. The surge in wealthy travelers means less availability at the places you hope to go, so book your Euro summer a year in advance. May 2027 is already too close in. Many places in Lake Como were sold out half a year ago. Why scramble for scraps?

Geopolitical Risk

The Iran Conflict Is Reshaping Routing, Costs, and Risk Tolerance

Geopolitical disruption has always been part of travel planning. Over my career at Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato running experiential travel groups for their membership, I saw cancelled private charter flights due to volcanic ash, Greek austerity riots rerouting a cruise ship, airport closures, pandemics and outbreaks, natural disasters, you name it.

The Iran conflict and the resulting fuel volatility and airspace restrictions are impacting routing, connections, and logistics for many of my clients.’

In terms of routing, the Iran conflict has exposed the vulnerability of Middle Eastern hubs for Gulf carriers. As of mid-2026, EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) has toughened advisories warning airlines to avoid airspace over Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and the Gulf of Oman, with separate extended warnings for Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.²²

For travel to Africa, a connection through London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt feels less exposed to sudden airspace closures than one through a Gulf hub.

The most direct impact of rising fuel costs is on private aviation. Charter quotes absorb higher jet fuel prices, longer routings around restricted airspace, elevated insurance costs, and aircraft-positioning problems when demand suddenly shifts.

Safaris are tied to fuel costs through logistics via bush flights, helicopters, game-drive vehicles, camp generators, and supply deliveries. I am starting to see industry-wide standardized surcharges across African operators as charter companies and DMCs (destination management companies) are now passing those increases through. 2027 rates are starting to incorporate higher transportation costs.

If you want to go to Africa next year, book NOW. Rates will keep climbing.

Yachts are absorbing the same fuel pressure. On most crewed luxury charters, the advertised weekly rate does not include fuel; operating expenses reconcile against the APA (Advanced Provisioning Allowance - APA stands for Advance Provisioning Allowance, deposit around 20-30% of the base charter fee that you pay upfront to cover all the running expenses during your charter) at the end of the charter. OPIS (Oil Price Information Service) reported that marine gas oil in Rotterdam rose by $724 per metric ton between late February and the end of March 2026, virtually doubling to $1,448 per metric ton in just a month!²¹

Clients Want Flexibility

Flexibility itself has become a luxury product. That means flexible air tickets, hotels willing to move dates, operators with strong local logistics, and advisors more frequently called in the middle of the night to help with flight reroutes or cancellations.

I’m seeing more clients purchasing cancel-for-any-reason coverage plans in travel insurance.

Traveler Wants Have Changed

In 2026, luxury clients are prioritizing privacy, wellness, and unique experiences.¹⁹

My clients aren’t satisfied with taking their family to Rome. They want to see all the major sites with private access or early openings, are looking for unique experiences like a golf cart tour (for those older clients or those with mobility issues - would like me to note that golf carts are not recommended for those who can walk easily) that sweeps them through side streets, or a gladiator class (no real swords or tridents!) for their kids. They don’t want city orientation tours but prefer a cooking class in a local home.

Among top 1% travelers, 34% are planning a trip primarily for health and wellness in the next 12 months, up from 23% previously.⁸ Travelers are looking for places that are far enough off the grid to keep them from being reached by email.²⁰

My clients are also moving away from big chains and searching for independently owned boutique hotels with character. The Leading Hotels of the World reported 15% year-over-year revenue growth in early 2025. Independent and boutique luxury properties are capturing disproportionate market share relative to their footprint.¹⁵

The structural conditions in this market favor travelers who know what they want and book with intention at least several months in advance. A one- or two-month booking window isn’t going to cut it for European destinations in the summer.

The aspirational middle of the luxury market is getting squeezed by rate increases and suite conversions. A $1,000-per-night hotel room is now table stakes for a lower-tier five-star hotel; more likely you’ll see $1,200 and above.

Travelers in the luxury market are spending more per trip, booking with more specificity, and choosing properties more carefully. They are seeking flexibility, access, and reassurance.

🗝️ Substack Writers You Should be Reading

In lieu of the Room Report this week, I’m including a list of some of my favorite writers on Substack in the travel, hospitality, and culture space.

These are the writers that you’ll see consistently top the charts - they have significant followings already and for good reason.

Colin Nagy: A writer and brand strategist (Skift, Monocle, FT, Meta) who co-writes Why is this Interesting?, a daily newsletter on culture, design, travel, and the ideas shaping how we live. Colin is a gem, he’s so encouraging and takes the time to highlight other writers. He’s also an excellent writer, and I gobble up all his Skift articles - worth the subscription on Skift alone.

Marissa Klurstein, Happy Hoteling: Marissa writes a lot about Italy, and was kind enough to let me interview her for an article about finding smaller hotels that are not on GDS (global distribution systems). covering the world’s best hotels, destination guides, and the little details that separate a great stay from a forgettable one.

Whitney Haldeman, The Heart of Travel: A luxury travel advisor (Blonde Atlas) sharing an insider’s view of the industry, destination inspiration, and honest advice on how to travel well. I got to meet Whitney in London this summer. There are few travel advisors I admire more in our world than her.

Nadine @ The Stanza: The publication I read absolutely every time it comes out. Nadine offers smart, sharp take on hospitality and culture through a business and investment lens, covering hotels, restaurants, and the brands defining modern taste. Her interviews with hospitality leaders are excellent, and I love her finance-focused articles on such things as the economics of Euro Summer.

RPS by Carson Griffith: Buzzy cultural intelligence on wealth, taste, and status; how elite worlds actually operate. Carson makes me laugh, and she’s an excellent real-world writer with her work consistently in several large publications. This is what I read with my coffee. She was also my source for my article on membership clubs attached to hotels.

Hotel Espresso by Brandon Berkson (HAP): ok, even though Brandon didn’t include The Upgrade on his list of hospitality writers you should read on Substack, I’ll forgive him and acknowledge that The Upgrade is only 17 issues deep - let’s give him time to catch on and maybe I’ll make the next list! In all honesty, Brandon offers sharp takes on boutique hotels, must-know stays, and insider hospitality news.

Leah Nanpei, Imperfect Process: A designer and hospitality brand founder writing an honest, after-hours look at building hotels, with interviews of the developers and architects behind the lodging worth traveling for. If I’m a soft product expert in hotels, Leah is the hard product one.

Emma Näpänkangas, The Philosophy of Hospitality: Positioned as "the internet's first grand hotel," a thoughtful, essayistic take on what hospitality means and how it works. I just adore Emma. I think we would be best friends if we ever met in real life. I’ve quoted several of her articles for EHL on here.

Bean Checks Out: Ryan Bean’s candid, sharp reviews of luxury hotels and hospitality with a critic’s eye, tagline “luxury hospitality, under review.”

Emily @ Elevate Hospitality: A newsletter on retreat strategy, wellness programming, and experiential hospitality for people building the next generation of resorts and hotels.

Hotel History Podcast, The CHECK-IN: Stories behind legendary properties, from ancient inns to the Mayflower.

Luxe Ledger: Jacques Ledbetter’s trade-focused newsletter for luxury travel professionals, offering candor, context, and industry analysis on advisors, hotels, and market trends.

Tricia @ Global Travel, The Literary Itinerary: Pairs destinations with the books worth reading before you go, for readers with “more time, better taste, and less patience for bad travel.”

Kay Walten: A hospitality veteran with 35+ years in tourism (much of it in Mexico), sharing memoir-style stories about the leaps, life changes, and adventures behind a life built abroad.

The Elevated Escape: Courtney Brown’s take on luxury travel, with hotel “Checking In” reviews (Blackberry Farm, Montage Los Cabos, Southall) and destination guides done properly.

The World According to Stacey Ray: Stacey Ray, founder of a global community for solo women travelers, delivering no-BS insights on destinations, culture, and how to actually travel the world.

John @ Affordable Travel: John B’s newsletter on adventure, budget, and group travel, focused on food, culture, and connecting with people over polish.

Architecture Atlas: Mary’s illustrated newsletter on real places that feel like fantasy. Her drawings are extraordinary. This is not a talent I have.

Eva Ducruezet, And So What: Personal essays on travel, food, and lifestyle with a casual, self-aware voice.

Very Bonjour: Literary travel done right; explores the real destinations behind the books she loves. Set Jetting as a substack.

Sara Hildreth, Fiction Matters: Sara and I went to college together at Colorado College and were in several English classes together. She was a teacher for a while before starting Fiction Matters and Novel Pairings, her newsletter and podcast. I’m a huge book nerd, but she blows me away with how much she reads and her thought comp-lit comparisons. If you love to read, this should be a paid subscription.

A. Natasha Joukovsky, Quite Useless: Deep thoughts on art, desire, and superficiality; smart and approachable writing on aesthetics and culture. Natasha and I met when I was at business school at UVA, and I think she’s one of the smartest people I know. When she’s not a high-powered, badass consultant, she is casually writing bestselling novels such as Portrait of a Mirror and Medium Rare. Her prose is gorgeous and complex, and I could talk to her over a beer at the Virginian for hours. She’s also hilarious.

*If I have not listed your substack in this list, please don’t take offense, I will be including these highlight lists frequently, and I’m already out of word count…

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

• Four Seasons opened the Danieli in Venice on July 30, converting the 200-year-old former Marriott Luxury Collection property near St. Mark’s Square. The hotel spans three buildings dating to the 14th and 19th centuries and will grow from 120 to 176 keys by 2027, with a rooftop restaurant, the lobby’s Bar Dandolo, and a spa with sauna and hammam. Rooms start around $2,700 a night. (Upgraded Points

• It’s earnings season, and luxury is the only chain scale really running hot right now. Marriott’s Q2 luxury RevPAR grew more than 9% against a 3.4% systemwide number, and Hyatt and Hilton both pointed to luxury and upper upscale as their strongest segments. (Hotel Dive, Hospitality Net)

• The World Cup bump is fading fast. Hyatt’s host cities saw group RevPAR up more than 13% in June, and Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt all cited the tournament as a driver of Q2 strength, but Marriott’s CFO is already flagging a small negative hit in Q4 tied to the midterms. (Hotel Dive)

• Hotel brands are shaking up fee structures. Hilton is cutting owner-side fees even as its own management and franchise fees rose 6.4% year over year, and Marriott is building an airline-style upsell system where elite members now bid for suites they used to get free. (Skift, Upgraded Points)

• Hyatt’s expansion plans in India just got a lot bigger. The company is targeting a roughly fivefold increase over the next five years, up from 56 hotels across nine brands today and a 100-property pipeline already in motion. (Skift)

• Marriott signed a deal for 9 hotels and branded residences across Egypt, over 1,500 keys spanning Ritz-Carlton, Luxury Collection, and Autograph Collection projects on the North Coast, in Cairo, and at Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea. (Upgraded Points)

• Mexico is spending $115 million to fight record sargassum levels in Quintana Roo, funding specialized collection vessels, offshore barriers, and monitoring systems meant to intercept the algae before it reaches shore. Hotels have already cut rates by up to 40% this summer. (Skift)

  If you enjoy the Upgrade, consider booking your travel with Alpenglow Travel - AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com

Sources

¹ Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts. “Shares of Wealth by Wealth Percentile Groups.” Q3 2025. federalreserve.gov

² Moody’s Analytics. “The Concentration Conundrum.” Reported via The Washington Post, January 2026.

³ U.S. Bank Economics Research Group. “The K-Economy in 2026: Same Story, New Amplifiers.” usbank.com, July 2026.

⁴ Grand View Research. “U.S. Luxury Travel Market Report.” 2025. grandviewresearch.com

⁵ UBS Global Wealth Report. Cited in AltexSoft, “Luxury Travel Market: Key Trends, Players, Destinations,” November 2025.

⁶ Bain & Company and Altagamma. “Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study.” Annual report, cited in CNBC, June 2026.

⁷ CNBC / Robert Frank. “Luxury Spending Now Driven by Experiences and Inheritourism.” June 25, 2026. cnbc.com

⁸ StyleRave. “Experience Ultimate Luxury: How Indulgence Changed in 2026.” July 2026. stylerave.com

⁹ Cerulli Associates. “U.S. High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Markets Report.” 2024. cerulli.com

¹⁰ Hawaii Tourism Authority / DBEDT. “Visitor Statistics: Japanese Market Recovery.” 2025. hawaiitourismauthority.org

¹¹ STR / CoStar. Cited in PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2026. pwc.com

¹² JLL Research and STR/CoStar. Cited in Travel Weekly. “Luxury Hotels and the K-Shaped Economy.” January 13, 2026. travelweekly.com

¹³ Morning Brew. “The K-Shaped Economy Is Trippin’.” May 24, 2026. morningbrew.com. Citing CNN and Delta Q4 2025 earnings.

¹⁴ China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. “China Outbound Travel Recovery Report.” Cited via Skift Research, 2026.

¹⁵ The Leading Hotels of the World. “The Luxe Report.” April 2025. lhw.com.

¹⁶ World Travel and Tourism Council. “Economic Impact Report.” May 2025. Cited in PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2026.

¹⁷ Tourism Economics. “International Arrivals Forecast.” June 2025. Cited in PwC Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2026.

¹⁸ Ministry of Tourism, Government of India. “India Tourism Statistics: Departures and HNWI Travel Intent.” 2024. Cited in Skift Research 2026.

¹⁹ Deloitte. “2026 Travel Industry Outlook.” deloitte.com

²⁰ Emma Ponsonby, CEO, Satopia Travel. Quoted in StyleRave, July 2026. stylerave.com

²¹ OPIS. Marine Gas Oil Rotterdam Price Data. March 31, 2026.

²² EASA. Safety Information Bulletin, Middle East Airspace. July 2026.

²³ Reuters. “Syria Records 12,000 Aircraft Transits in May as Gulf Airspace Rerouting Continues.” June 2026.

²⁴ Mastercard Economics Institute. “Travel Industry Trends: GCC Traveler Spend.” 2025. mastercard.com

²⁵ Skyscanner and GCC Board of Tourism. “GCC Outbound Travel Forecast 2024-2034.” 2024.

Watch the interview to learn what succession actually looks like (not the TV show), and the sorts of things we millennials consider as we step into leadership roles in our family businesses.

Check out this week’s The Upgrade | Weekly for my full interview with Ian Swain II, as well as highlights of other millennials taking leadership positions in their family hospitality companies around the world.

Issue 16 · Succession: The Millennial Heirs in Hospitality Families Stepping up the Plate

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – An interview with Ian Swain II on taking over his parent’s company, Swain Destinations. Other millennials taking the helm.

2. The Room Report – Naviva, Four Seasons Punta Mita

3. The Lobby Bar – This week: Hoshinoya opens inside a 1908 prison in Nara, Fouquet's plants its first flag outside France on Paraga Beach in Mykonos, and Explora Journeys becomes the first luxury cruise line to join Hilton Honors. Also - a list of 2026 luxury hotel openings

By Anne Marie Brown | Alpenglow Travel

Travelers,

Luxury hospitality is built on legacy. Our own family successfully passed the hotel company my grandfather founded, Outrigger Hotels, to my father and his sisters, then to my brother-in-law and my half siblings, before we sold the company in 2016 to private equity firm KSL.

The properties with the most devoted guests tend to be family-owned, with ownership structures that take a stewardship view rather than a transactional one. Right now, the generation tasked with inheriting those foundations has moved into the chair, and I’m watching my millennial peers that I grew up with step into leadership roles at their family companies.

Across luxury hotels, safari companies, and high-end travel brands, millennial leaders are running businesses their parents or grandparents built.

In The Upgrade this week, I sit down with my friend and new CEO of Swain Destinations, my go-to tour operator for Alpenglow Travel clients in New Zealand and Australia. As soon as I saw his announcement on LinkedIn, I reached out to interview him.

Yours truly, a millennial, via ChatGBT. There are some things AI is good for.

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Millenial Succession:

A Conversation with

Ian Swain II of Swain Destinations

Ian Swain II

Ian Swain and I grew up in parallel corners of the travel industry. His parents built Swain Destinations, a luxury FIT (free independent travel) tour operator for Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and the Middle East. My dad ran Outrigger Hotels. The two of them were friends, part of a generation of founders who launched international leisure travel for Americans. They sat on the board at WTTC (the World Travel and Tourism Council) together, and Ian and Linda flew out to attend my father’s funeral when he passed away. Ian II and I are the same age, and both come from large families with a veritable basket of other siblings. We could probably field a soccer team.

Ian II and I talked about family succession, the pressure of a founder’s shadow, what luxury means to our generation, and the legacy we hope to pass to our own kids.

Ian: Swain Destinations is a luxury FIT tour operator. We build itineraries customized for North Americans to Australia, New Zealand, Africa and the Middle East. The company is about forty years old, started by my parents. My father is Australian; my mother is American. They met, fell in love, and decided the path forward was to bring Americans to my father’s homeland. They have been selling travel and building it ever since. I am one of six kids in a big family.

Ian: As a kid, you look up to your parents, especially when they’re building a company. The dinner time conversations are often about the business. It is a different dynamic than most children are exposed to because you are hearing about growth problems and strategic decisions being made as if it is a normal family conversation. Maybe that’s where it started.

Even before I worked here, just traveling with the family, I’d watch my mother and father go to Australia or New Zealand, and they already knew people everywhere. That’s this industry. You build colleagues and friends all over the world, so anywhere you are, there’s someone to say hi to. The industry itself is what drew me in.

As I got older, I realized how impactful travel is. It changes your world and how you see things. Being part of a company that does that is inspiring. Now I get to help steer where it goes next, and doing that alongside this team is what I love.

Ian: My siblings all have their own lives and careers. I was the one actively pursuing it. It was a private conversation between my parents and me. I approached them and we talked it through over a few months. Once it started to feel real, we moved down the path as best we could. When it was announced, all my siblings were genuinely excited and happy for me. I’ve been with the business the longest, and only a couple of the others have worked at Swain. It was organic in a way, but it was something I went after.

Ian: : I am very fortunate to live close to my father, and our relationship has a large business component, which I like. Between working for the company and traveling with him for years, he’d been preparing me without either of us realizing it, or at least I didn’t.

The best thing he did was build such a great team. We have some industry legends at Swain, people who’ve been here for decades and know everything. Coming back after a few years in other industries, I’ve leaned on them constantly. Some of them have known me since I was a kid, so there’s a real familial feel here.

He’s all still here supporting through the transition. We talk business every day, and we have complementary skill sets. A forty-year-old company has a lot of ways it works and flows that take time to learn, even having been here before. Building the right team and keeping them is absolutely the best thing he’s done.

Ian: Stop waiting. If you’re holding yourself back and there’s a path, pursue it. If you want it, go after it.

If it’s not time yet, don’t sit still. Build your skills, inside or outside the brand, and keep a pulse on the business. And when you are ready, and they are ready, make sure you really want it. Emotion is a huge part of this. Everything is personal, and no matter how objective you think you are being, it hits you emotionally. You must be ready to weather that.

Ultimately, go for it. There’s so much opportunity in being the child of a founder, so much to learn and build. Not everybody gets that. Take advantage of it..

Ian: The hardest part back then was proving myself. Being the second Ian Swain to an Ian Swain founder, you carry a self-imposed pressure to show people you’ve earned your place and you’re not just there because of the name. In a strange way, that pressure helped. It built my work ethic and my focus on executing, because I wanted to prove I could do it myself.

After you execute enough, you get more confident and you stop worrying about what people assume. As you get older, you have your family, your team, your clients, and everything else becomes noise. If someone questioned whether I belonged here today, I’d say okay and move on. There’s enough real work to focus on. When I was younger, that pressure created the work that got me where I am, so I don’t resent it at all. It pushed me to grow.

Ian: I left for some time to work outside the company . Before I did, I did not realize how valuable it would be. Going outside and back gives you a completely different perspective, and was one of the most valuable educations I’ve had.

Ian: Australia and New Zealand are where it all started. I truly believe our travel consultants are the most knowledgeable about our destinations and the most invested in the trips they plan. They have traveled there or lived there, and it’s personal to us. Every trip matters to everyone on the team. We try to create something effortless that takes care of you the whole way through.

The knowledge runs deep. We have product team members who’ve been with us for decades and been a part of the change of the industry. As a family company, we care about our travelers and advisor partners, without question.

Swain sauce is a funny term, but it’s referenced a lot. My parents are outgoing and they love traveling, networking, and relationship building, and all of that is part of the Swain sauce. How do we get past the client relationship to a friendship, where we’re helping you see the world a little differently? That’s the mindset.

The Swain sauce is staying. I have no intentions of changing the brand. Our focus now is to grow it deliberately, open it up to more people, and keep delivering the same level of service without losing quality. That’s something that can slip in an acquisition, so it is a significant focus of mine.

Ian: The simplest way I describe millennial luxury is experiential. Older generations leaned toward the white glove, the “sir,” the “madam.” I haven’t seen millennials value that as much. They want the unique tour, the speakeasy down the alley, or that sunset view you can only see if you know the right person. Rare experiences and stories they can’t wait to tell people about. That is the millennial luxury, the undiscovered place or experience.

For me, luxury is being able to take my family somewhere new and not worry about a thing.. Moving seamlessly through the transfers, the flights, the hotels, the experiences, so that my only focus is enjoying the time with my family in these new worlds. That’s luxury to me.

Ian: My kids are the most important things in my life. When my wife and I were deciding whether to buy the company, they were the biggest factor. We knew it would take our time and affect them, that they’d see a different side of us in a business setting.”

I didn’t do this thinking about them taking over. I hope they will share my passion. I hope I can give them the opportunities I was given. If they decide they want to pursue the business, I’ll happily teach them what I can, but they’ll have to earn their spot. We have an incredible team here, and we’ll bring on more incredible people over the years. Maybe one of them takes the baton and leads the brand into the next generation after my time.

I’m not going into this expecting my children to take over or putting pressure on them, because the only pressure I had was self-imposed. I hope they are interested and I hope I grow the business big enough where there is opportunity for them if they want it.

I hope they love travel. I really do.

Ian: Curiosity and a sense of adventure. I hope I can impart that on them. When they travel, I hope they can take in different cultures, and I hope they can bring what they learn back to the people around them. Travel changes you in incredible ways. The world could use a lot more of that. It educates you differently than school does and shows you there is a world outside of your own. I hope I can give them that curiosity. That is all I want.

Ian Swain is the incoming owner of Swain Destinations. If you are planning a trip to Australia, New Zealand, Africa, or the Middle East, reach out to me at AnneMarie@AlpenglowTravel.com and I will connect you.

Other Millennial Successors In Hospitality

The baton is being passed to the next generation of leaders in the luxury travel and hospitality industry. Here are a few other examples of millennial leaders.

Born in 1980, Sonia Cheng grew up inside a Hong Kong dynasty. Her grandfather built the Chow Tai Fook jewelry empire and founded New World Development. Her father runs the family’s real estate and hospitality business.

Sonia went to Harvard, worked at Morgan Stanley, and joined the family business at 28. At the same age, I graduated business school and took a mid-level role at Inspirato. Sonia bought Rosewood in 2011 for $229 million and set out to build the “Four Seasons for millennials,” properties with more character and a stronger sense of place.

Since then, Rosewood has grown from 19 hotels to 33 across 21 countries, with another 27 in the pipeline. The portfolio includes The Carlyle in New York, Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, and Rosewood Mandarina in Mexico.

Barrière goes back to 1912, when François André opened a luxury resort in Deauville combining hotels, casinos, restaurants, and recreation. The company passed to Diane Barrière in 1990 after her father’s death. A 1995 plane crash critically injured Diane, who remained involved until she died in 2001.

Her children, Alexandre and Joy, are the fourth generation. In 2023, they bought out a 40% outside stake and took full control as co-chairs. Fiscal 2025 revenue hit €1.5 billion across 21 hotels, 33 casinos, and nearly 200 restaurants and bars. Fouquet’s Mykonos opened in 2026.

“They think quarter to quarter. We think generation to generation.”
Alexandre Barrière

The Forte family lost its empire, Trusthouse Forte, to a hostile takeover in 1996. Sir Rocco rebuilt from scratch around local ownership and Italian character. His three children now run large parts of the company. Charles, 32, leads development and plans to double the business in five years. Lydia runs food and beverage. Irene leads spa and founded Irene Forte Skincare, made from ingredients grown at the family’s Verdura Resort in Sicily.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund took a 49% stake, valuing the group at roughly $741 million. All three siblings worked hotel kitchens and housekeeping as teenagers. That sounds like the internship my dad ran for his kids and grandkids at Outrigger, summers rotating through housekeeping, maintenance, bell, and front desk.

In summary – millennials are stepping into leadership roles at family companies across the hospitality and travel industries.

They are bringing a sense of place, intention, and a vision for designing luxury experiences for a generation that values different things than our parents.

What this new generation of leaders will change remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to watching as they reshape and redefine luxury travel.

🗝️ Room Report — Naviva, Four Seasons Punta Mita, Mexico

Every travel advisor keeps a bucket list of hotels. These are properties we want to prioritize visiting in the next few years, the ones that make us scroll endlessly through their online galleries and pitch to our clients like evangelists.

Naviva has been at the top of my list since it opened three years ago. I finally made it down here on an impulse, last-minute trip thanks to my angel in laws who agreed to watch my children the day after returning from Alaska, and a husband who has learned it’s best to indulge me in these flights of fancy.

Designed by the architects at Luxury Frontiers , (who also designed Nayara Tented Camp and King’s Pool Camp in Botswana, two of my favorite properties on earth), Naviva stands for “Naturaleza Viva” or “Living Nature.”

Naviva is the adults-only, tented sister property to Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita. It sits on 48 acres and has only 15 tents or “bungalows.” Guests can walk or shuttle over to the main Four Seasons for restaurants, but your all-inclusive rate doesn’t cover meals over there. You do get a room credit if you book through me, your friendly Four Seasons Preferred Advisor. We blew ours by buying overpriced yoga clothes at their boutique since we forgot ours at home.

The tents

These are basically like luxury safari tents. They have canvas roofs, hardwood floors, freestanding tubs, indoor and outdoor showers, a private deck, and a plunge pool that’s kept at a balmy 85 degrees. There are two categories:

• Luxury Tent: about 1,259 sq ft of combined indoor and outdoor space

• Grand Luxury Tent: 1,604 to 1,722 sq ft, most with better ocean or jungle views and larger outdoor decks

Before you worry, every tent AC.

What’s included in the rate

All-inclusive nightly rates typically run from around $3,500 to $6,000+ per tent, per night depending on season and category. Holiday weeks and Grand Tents can get even pricier, and minimum night stays apply during peak periods.

Naviva runs on an all-inclusive model, and your stay includes:

• All meals and premium beverages (top-shelf spirits, curated wine list)

• One 90-minute spa journey per guest, per stay

• A personal guide assigned to your stay who builds a custom itinerary

• Group experiences: guided hikes, snorkel outings, temazcal ceremonies, agave and raicilla tastings, watercolor workshops, yoga, wine tasting, sound baths, Mexican boxing

• Naviva guests enjoy access to all of the Four Seasons Punta Mita resort’s restaurants, beaches, pools, and facilities.

• Guests receive a USD $130 dining credit per person, per meal at Four Seasons Punta Mita restaurants. This allows guests to enjoy experiences such as breakfast at Dos Catrinas, a poolside lunch at Tamai, beachside dining at Manzanillas, or dinner at Aramara, just to name a few. It’s a wonderful benefit for travelers looking to explore a different ambiance while still enjoying the personalized service and intimacy of Naviva.

• Preferred Partners who book through Alpenglow Travel receive a USD $200 resort credit per bungalow. Guests can apply this credit toward airport transfers, private experiences, additional spa treatments, and more.

• Additionally, many special events, including the Naviva Unplugged Concert Series, are included in the nightly rate and are exclusively available to Naviva guests.

Not included: additional spa treatments beyond the first, private excursions, and the Naviva Unplugged concert series (capped at 30 guests, ticketed separately).

Food

I am still getting used to the fact that we can order literally anything here. They don’t have menus, they just tell you the special and you can take it or pick anything else you want out of thin air.

They have one all-day restaurant on property, plus in-tent dining at anytime. We had amazing ceviche by the pool. Beach picnics, cliffside dinners, and jungle breakfasts can all be arranged through your guide at no extra cost.

In terms of activities, we are partaking in the yoga, wine tasting, and temezcal ceremony.

This place is magical. It’s like a safari camp except the animal viewing are little wild pigs and some lizards. The beach feels totally private, and the staff are warm without being stuffy.

There’s an advanced purchase offer through November 30th that offers 15% off, and a $200 resort credit if you book through me. Contact me here: www.alpenglowtravel.com

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

1. Hoshinoya turned a 1908 prison into a hotel in Nara
Hoshinoya opened inside the old Nara prison this month. It’s a red-brick building from 1908, still recognizably a prison from the outside. Architect Rie Azuma knocked down walls between the original cells to make 48 suites, so the century-old masonry sits behind your bed.
Wallpaper*

2. Fouquet’s finally left France
The Parisian brand behind Hôtel Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées just opened on Paraga Beach in Mykonos. Sixty-one suites, three villas, Divercity Architects, and a spa with Dr. Barbara Sturm. It’s their first property outside France.
Wallpaper*

3. Explora Journeys joined Hilton Honors
Announced July 22. Explora is the first luxury ocean cruise line to plug into Hilton’s points program, meaning members can now earn and redeem on sailings.
Lifestyle and Tech

4. LVMH just unveiled a Dinner Yacht concept under the Orient Express brand, another piece of its push to turn luxury into infrastructure rather than just handbags. More on the strategy here: https://www.hotel-online.com/news/lvmh-and-accors-orient-express-sets-its-sights-on-new-tech-billionaire-class

1. Goldener Hirsch Deer Valley is offering a third night free for travel through December 13, 2026.

2. Bishop’s Lodge has a stay longer/stay more promotion on guestrooms, save up to 30% when staying 4 or more nights. Suites offer a 20% savings on select dates.

3. Four Seasons Naviva Advanced Purchase 15% off through Nov 30th.

4. Four Seasons Punta Mita:

   5^th Night Free Promo: Thanksgiving and January - April 2027

   4^th Night Free Promo: Now through middle of December

   SPECIAL DEALS:

   Offering 40% off Best Available Rate for 5 of their Beach Homes/Estates and Villas for stays through the month of May. Please click on the hyperlinks for more details on each of these

   Casa Tesoro - 7 Bedroom Estate

   Casa Tesoro Virtual Tour

   Coral Beach Home

   Arena Beach Home

   Sol Oceanfront Villa

   Luna Ocean Villa

5. FOUR SEASONS NEVIS:

Preferred Partner offers and added values:

• BRAND NEW Island Breakaway package

  • 4 night stays from $3120 including tax, service & transfers

    • Oceanside room (after guaranteed upgrade), plus Preferred Partner benefits

• 4^th Night Free open for Thanksgiving & pre-Festive (until December 26th)

  • With triple Preferred Partner credit

5. Luxury hotel openings in 2026:

   A few of the most-hyped luxury hotel openings in 2026, from restored European palazzos to remote wellness resorts.

   • Orient Express Venezia (Venice, Italy): A 15th-century palazzo in Cannaregio with 47 rooms, gilded ballrooms, and an arrival by canal.

   • Corinthia Rome (Rome, Italy): Corinthia’s first Italian property, in a 1914 landmark on Piazza del Parlamento. 60 rooms and a spa built inside the original Bank of Italy vaults.

   • The Cooper (Charleston, South Carolina): Five-star arrival on Charleston’s harbor, with private yacht charters, a full spa, and an infinity pool over the water.

   • The Huntington Hotel (San Francisco, California): Ken Fulk restored this Nob Hill icon top to bottom. 143 rooms, the Big Four restaurant is back, and there’s a three-level spa.

   • Mandarin Oriental, Desaru Coast (Malaysia): 44 suites and villas on 128 rainforest acres along the South China Sea, most with private plunge pools and yoga pavilions.

   • White Elephant Aspen (Aspen, Colorado): The Nantucket brand’s first mountain resort, opened this summer on Dean Street. 26 rooms and suites, private terraces, art, and Hooch, the restaurant.

   • Faraway Jackson Hole (Jackson, Wyoming): Faraway went west with its first Rockies property, minutes from the ski lifts.

   • Danieli, A Four Seasons Hotel (Venice, Italy): The Danieli reopened this summer under Four Seasons after a full restoration. Gothic landmark on the lagoon, original Sala Duca D’Aosta preserved, and a rebuilt rooftop terrace.

   • Park Hyatt Mexico City (Mexico City, Mexico): Opening in August. 155 rooms in Polanco with Chapultepec views, indoor-outdoor spa, and Park Hyatt’s first Mexico City address.

   • Aman Beverly Hills (Los Angeles, California): Aman’s Beverly Hills debut lands later this year on the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire. 40 rooms and 42 residences.

   • Amanvari (Baja California Sur, Mexico): Aman's Mexico debut, opening this summer inside the Costa Palmas community on Baja's East Cape. 18 pavilions and 21 residences on the Sea of Cortez, with the sensory-restrained Aman treatment applied to a desert-meets-water setting.

     Do you have a friend primed for succession? Send them this article. Millennials unite.

     Share

     If you enjoy The Upgrade | Weekly, consider becoming a paid subscriber to receive Master Key, Hotel History, and Travel Dispatch. If you’d like to book your travel or hotel stay with me, please fill out the contact form at www.AlpenglowTravel.com

My grandfather, Roy Cecil Kelley, (source: Honolulu Star Bulletin)

Gifted Article: Hotel History is a section of The Upgrade, a publication about the world of hospitality and travel, by Anne Marie Brown. Hotel History is typically for paid subscribers. This week’s article is complimentary.

My grandfather, Roy Kelley, arrived in Hawaiʻi on September 13, 1929, four days before Black Thursday collapsed the American economy. He came with a USC architecture degree, a new wife named Estelle, and no particular plan to go into the hotel business. What he built over the next fifty years became the foundation of what is now Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, shaping the landscape of Waikiki profoundly.

I remember him as the guy who used to scoop me up for a giant hug and help me feed the koi fish in his pond. He once told me I talked too much. My dad was always full of stories about my grandfather, and I was never sure how much was family lore and how much was true. Turns out, some of the craziest tales actually took place.

This is the story of how a kid born in a shack in a California orange grove turned a $5,335 corner lot into the largest hotel operation in Waikiki. Some of it comes from the documented record, and a lot of it comes from the stories told in our family, passed down the way family stories are: repeated at dinner tables, with minor variations, until they become the version everyone agrees on.

Roy Cecil Kelley was born on August 31, 1905, in Highlands, California. His father was a masonry and construction worker who had moved the family from Arkansas to California in search of work. They were poor by any measure. “We had no money,” Roy said. “My father just worked by the day and gradually kept something to eat on the table. You couldn’t be any poorer than that.”

He raised rabbits as a kid, selling them to butcher shops to earn spending money. He put himself through USC by working full-time for the Pacific Electric Railway while carrying a full class load. When he graduated in 1927 with a degree in architecture, he earned $15 a week as a draftsman. The background wasn’t glamorous, but it gave him an understanding of what things cost and what people actually needed.

In the years between USC and Hawaiʻi, he picked up architectural work around Southern California, including a project that the family has always connected to Hearst Castle. The story as we have it: Roy designed the pool railings at San Simeon, both the exterior Neptune Pool and the indoor Roman Pool. I have not been able to verify this against the documented record, but it fits the timeline and the work he was doing in those years, and it is the version of the story my family has told for as long as I can remember.

The job offer that brought Roy to Honolulu came from an unexpected direction. Before that happened, though, he had a ringside seat to one of the most sensational crimes in California history.

After graduating from USC and working through a few drafting jobs in Los Angeles, Roy landed work at a real estate development called Capistrano Beach, a subdivision on the coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. The project was owned by Edward L. Doheny Sr., one of the wealthiest oil men in America and a central figure in the Teapot Dome scandal that had rocked the Harding administration. Doheny had turned the Capistrano Beach project over to his son, Edward “Ned” Doheny Jr., to run.

On the night of February 16, 1929, only five months after moving into their newly built Beverly Hills estate, Ned Doheny was found shot to death inside the 55-room Greystone Mansion at age 35. His longtime friend and personal secretary, Hugh Plunkett, was found dead steps away, still gripping the murder weapon. The official account pointed to a murder-suicide, though the actual circumstances have never been fully resolved, and various theories remain debated nearly a century later. The Doheny family was already mired in scandal, Ned’s father was facing consequences from the Teapot Dome affair, and the whole episode was quickly hushed by the family’s considerable power.

My grandfather’s account of it, told fifty years later in a 1986 oral history interview, was characteristically dry. “My boss, Mr. Doheny Jr., went home one day to Beverly Hills to his lovely home, sat down in his office there, and in behind him came his butler with a revolver and shot him dead. So that was the end of my architecture. Mr. Doheny closed the tract down right away and we were all let go.”

Roy moved back to Los Angeles, picked up a month’s work finishing a university dormitory, and was having lunch with friends when one of them mentioned almost offhandedly that an architecture firm in Hawaiʻi was hiring.

Roy had never thought seriously about Hawaiʻi. “I didn’t even know Hawaiʻi was here instead of being down there in the Philippines,” he said. “I had no idea at all.” He was hired sight unseen based on a friend’s recommendation to C.W. Dickey, one of Honolulu’s most prominent architects, and sailed for Hawaiʻi just weeks before the stock market crashed.

He and Estelle moved into the Marigold Apartments on Dewey Way in Waikiki, two blocks from where the Hilton Hawaiian Village stands today. Waikiki in 1929 was barely a resort. “Just a bunch of cottages,” Roy recalled. The only real hotels were the Moana, the Halekulani, and the newly opened Royal Hawaiian, which Roy remembered as having exactly three guests when he first noticed it. The Royal nearly went bankrupt and was sold to Matson Navigation for almost nothing. Tourists arrived entirely by ship, a few thousand a year, spending a few days and sailing home.

Roy joined the Dickey firm and threw himself into work. Over the following years, he contributed to some of Honolulu’s most significant buildings of the era, including the Immigration Station on Ala Moana, Montague Hall at Punahou School, the main building of the original Halekulani Hotel, and the Waikiki Theater. Even as the Depression hollowed out architectural work across the mainland, Honolulu stayed busy enough to keep Roy employed. When Dickey eventually let almost his entire staff go, Roy was the one person he kept.

Roy saved carefully. Estelle took a secretary job in the same building as his firm, and together they lived on her salary while banking his. By 1932, he had enough to buy a 55-by-100-foot corner lot at Seaside and Kuhio Avenues for $5,335, paying cash.

He built a six-unit apartment building on it, living in one unit and renting the others. His approach was practical to the point of being funny: he would rent out his own unit, move into a cheaper room nearby, and pocket the difference. “I made about forty dollars a month and kept repeating that process,” he said. “We became capitalists.” (My grandfather and my father taught me frugality in ways that still show up oddly in my life today. While I’ll happily drop money on travel, I will drive around for far too much time so I don’t have to pay for a parking spot, I freeze leftovers like the apocalypse is impending, and I absolutely refuse to pay for business class seats unless I use points).

Roy had no grand vision at that point. He wasn’t planning a hotel empire. He just liked the corner, liked Waikiki, and liked the idea of making money from property. That instinct, repeated over and over across the next fifty years, is what built Outrigger.

As the portfolio grew, so did the methods. The family story about how Roy acquired at least one of his properties involves a trench coat:

He walked down Kalakaua Avenue with the purchase price in cash tucked under his coat. Paid for the hotel on the spot. No wire transfer, no escrow drama. Just Roy, a trench coat, and enough bills to buy a building.

In 1947, after the war had put construction on hold for years, Roy built the Islander Hotel on Seaside Avenue. At five stories and 50 rooms, it was the first new hotel built in Waikiki since the Royal Hawaiian opened twenty years earlier. Rooms started at $7.50 a night, deliberately pitched at middle-income families at a time when Waikiki’s existing hotels catered almost exclusively to wealthy travelers.

The Edgewater Hotel followed in the early 1950s, and it introduced something Waikiki had never seen before: a swimming pool. The decision to put a large pool at the Edgewater was initially seen as questionable, since the ocean was only a block away. It turned out to be one of Roy’s shrewdest calls. The Edgewater was also the first hotel in Waikiki to have an automatic elevator. Growing up, we heard these two facts together so often they became a single sentence: Grandpa put in the first pool and the first hotel elevator in Hawaii.

The Reef Hotel opened in 1955, and by the time the Reef Towers Hotel opened in 1959, Roy had fundamentally changed the shape of Hawaiʻi’s tourism industry by putting the destination within reach of the average traveler.

Roy understood the following: stay close to the front desk, stay close to your guests, and keep prices at a level that keeps rooms full. “I built lots of rooms at reasonable prices and nobody else has done that,” he said. “That’s my claim to fame.” I can still hear his refrain, “Heads in beds, heads in beds.”

When he briefly sold the Edgewater and Reef Hotels to a theater chain in 1969, his buyer went from 100 percent occupancy to 40 percent in less than two years. Roy took the properties back when the buyer died and went on about his business.

My grandmother, Estelle ran reservations from a lanai desk, managing a stack of paper slips and making decisions on who could book by looking at the pile. There were no computers, no yield management software, no systems.

Roy intended to keep it that way. When my father sat down with a computer salesman to discuss moving reservations onto a system, a note arrived mid-meeting. It was from Roy. It said two words:

“NO COMPUTERS.”

My dad proceeded anyway, eventually. He was always the first to adapt new technology, and I remember the giant backpack he carried around with one of the first satellite cell phone models.

My dad and my grandfather

Roy’s son, my father Dr. Richard Kelley, started as a bellboy at the Islander Hotel. Richard eventually shelved a Harvard medical degree to take over the family business full-time when my grandfather had a stroke and my grandmother wanted to take a long cruise.

In 1963, Roy obtained the leasing rights to the former Outrigger Canoe Club site on prime Waikiki beachfront, owned by the Queen Emma Foundation. When the Foundation’s negotiations with Sheraton broke down over a price dispute, they called Roy. The Outrigger Canoe Club relocated to a new site at the base of Diamond Head, and Roy developed what became the flagship Outrigger Waikiki on the leased property. It opened in 1967 on the exact stretch of beach where legendary waterman Duke Kahanamoku had grown up swimming, surfing, and paddling.

Under my father’s leadership, the portfolio grew far beyond Waikiki. Outrigger expanded to Maui, Kauaʻi, and the Big Island, then beyond Hawaiʻi entirely. The company opened its first property outside the United States in 1996 with the Outrigger Marshall Islands Resort. By 2015, Outrigger Enterprises Group operated 40 properties across Hawaiʻi, Asia-Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. The 50-room walkup on Seaside Avenue had become one of the most recognized hotel brands in the Pacific.

When the University of Hawaiʻi interviewers thanked Roy at the end of his oral history session in 1986, he left them with this:

“Just remember, be kind on everybody. Because that’s what I try to be. I try to take care of my business and they take care of theirs, and it’s been very successful.”

This man, who started with nothing, dealt with the fallout of his boss’ scandalous murder, stumbled into Hawaiʻi by accident, and bought a weed lot on a street that didn’t exist yet, built something that became a nearly billion dollar company over three generations. He never counted his money, he said. He just built rooms people could afford, hired people who cared, and stayed at the front desk.

Anne Marie (Kelley) Brown

SOURCES

1. Roy C. Kelley Oral History Interview, April 22 & 25, 1986. Waikiki, 1900-1985: Oral Histories, Volume I. Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawaiʻi-Manoa, June 1985.

2. History of Greystone. City of Beverly Hills. https://www.beverlyhills.org/426/History-of-Greystone

3. Blood and Oil: Murder at Greystone Mansion. Medium, H. Wayne Smith, Ph.D., June 2024. https://medium.com/@h.wayne.smith/blood-and-oil-74b9b65885f1

4. Charles W. Dickey. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Dickey

5. Outrigger Hotels & Resorts. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrigger_Hotels_%26_Resorts

6. History of Outrigger Enterprises, Inc. FundingUniverse. https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/outrigger-enterprises-inc-history/

7. Kelley Family and Outrigger Timeline. Hawaii Business Magazine. https://www.hawaiibusiness.com/kelley-family-and-outrigger-timeline/

8. History of Waikiki Hotels, 1893 to Present. Hawaii Living, March 2023. https://www.hawaiiliving.com/blog/history-waikiki-hotels/

9. Outrigger Hotels and Resorts Celebrates 70 Years of Aloha. TravelAge West, June 2017.

10. Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort First to Celebrate Founders Day. Outrigger Resorts & Hotels Newsroom, September 2015.

🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown

Issue 15 · Why is everyone becoming a travel agent? My take on Fora.

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – My take on controversial tech company/travel agency Fora

2. The Room Report – The newly opened Delano Miami

3. The Lobby Bar – This week’s Lobby Bar covers a LOT this week. Ennismore is heading toward a U.S. IPO at €3.2 billion with an Airbnb partnership as the potential demand story; Aspen Hospitality launched Nell Hotels with The Nell New York opening fall 2027, and The Little Nell closes April 2027 for a full renovation; and sooooo much more

Travelers,

This week’s The Upgrade is a spicy one. If you’ve chatted with me in the last year, you know I have strong opinions about Fora – the latest disrupter in our little corner of the luxury travel industry. I’ve been part of controversial companies in the past, so I’m equally fascinated by and concerned about this one. I also sit on the board of a VC company, so spend a lot of time hearing pitches from tech startups, and so put on my investor hat to look at the SWOT analysis of this one.

This weekend, I also went to the WORLD CUP third place game in Miami, because YOLO. I stayed at the Delano, so the Room Report is my take on this very swanky, very beige and white, newly renovated hotel.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

Yours truly at the World Cup Game in Miami this weekend

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Why is everyone becoming a travel agent? My take on Fora.

I ran into an old colleague last week. We’ve known each other for 18 years, and worked together at Exclusive Resorts, Inspirato, and Coastline, dovetailing each other at the latter two. When I asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m with Fora.” At a recent industry lunch with a sales rep for a new luxury hotel, a fellow attendee said, “This may be controversial, but I’m with Fora.” I received two emails from acquaintances yesterday who are thinking about becoming travel advisors, who both asked, “Should I just sign up with Fora first?”

I’m a luxury travel advisor, (not hosted under Fora), and have built my career first through growing up in a family that owned a hotel company, Outrigger Hotels, and then through helping create the Once in a Lifetime program at Exclusive Resorts and the Journeys and Bespoke programs at Inspirato. I’ve consulted for Airbnb and Under Canvas Adventures (preparing them for sale to KSL), and sit on the board of several hospitality companies. I live and breathe the travel industry.

If you are thinking about becoming an agent, or have recently joined the ranks of Fora, here’s my travel advising 101 guide: Everything You Want To Know About the Travel Advising Industry

Fora is a host agency, meaning it acts as an umbrella organization under which independent travel advisors build their businesses. For those of you wondering how one becomes a travel advisor, there is no official test you must take. An IATA number – a travel company’s registration with the International Air Transport Association – serves as a form of licensing. It is the way that hotels track and pay commission via systems like Onyx.

Getting access to an IATA number used to require letters of recommendation, demonstrated sales volume, and executive background checks. Now it’s as simple as joining a host agency, which handles your commission tracking and payments in exchange for a cut of your commission.

For $299 a year and no sales minimums, anyone can join, complete training, access Fora’s supplier relationships, and start booking travel for commissions.

According to Fora’s statements to Fortune and Forbes (July 2026), and their “About Us” page, 97% of their 15,000 advisors had never sold travel before joining. 86% are women. Co-founder Henley Vazquez, a former Virtuoso agency owner and Travel + Leisure A-Lister, has publicly described the opportunity as “the new real estate” for women looking for a career change or additional income.

The short answer is “yes,” with a caveat. Travel advising is typically an “eat what you kill” job, and for most advisors new to the industry, building a book of business takes time and financial investment.

Commission splits start at 70/30 with Fora taking 30, moving to 80/20 once an advisor hits $300,000 in annual bookings, and 90/10 at $2 million. The $299 annual fee covers access to the platform, training, Fora’s IATA number, and supplier partnerships including Virtuoso, Four Seasons, and Rosewood Elite.

These Preferred Partner programs, as well as Virtuoso, provide clients who book through agency members with benefits, such as upgrades, late check outs, breakfast, and resort credits. Every major host agency has access to these programs. Fora calls them “perks”, Coastline calls them “benefits.” It’s a major selling point of working with one of these agents.

These commission splits mirror those of other major host agencies such as SmartFlyer, TravelEdge, and Coastline. The difference is that you are on your own. You have access to Fora’s training docs and their tech, which is arguably the best I’ve seen in the business, but you don’t have a mentor or senior advisor giving you leads or helping you create relationships with suppliers.

When your commission from a hotel is 10%, and your host agency is taking 30% of that commission, you are making $7,000 annually if you book $100,000 in travel. That’s decent ancillary income to subsidize a travel budget for your average family, but it certainly doesn’t replace a full-time job.

Travel Weekly’s data notes that among advisors who have been in the business two years or less, 74% earn under $25,000 annually. At three to five years, that drops to only 47%.

I remind new sub-ICs (i.e., agents in training) that the learning curve is steep regardless of where you start. I spend most of my year traveling personally, meeting with hotels and destination management companies, and attending industry conferences for training and connections. The advisors who excel at this job, whether they’re at Fora or anywhere else, tend to have put in real time learning, traveling, and researching.

The first group attracted to Fora appears to be social media influencers

Frankly, I should have realized something like Fora was coming. A few years ago, I said that influencers were the next set of travel advisors as they looked to monetize their platforms.

One of the hardest things to solve for in the luxury travel space is the top of the sales funnel, and social media influencers who post about travel already have that piece in place. Being able to earn commission from their content is a logical next step, which is why we see Tik Tok’s new partnership with Booking.com or platforms like Stay22 becoming popular with influencers.

However, a great content creator does not necessarily make a stellar travel advisor – they are distinct skillsets.

The second group is women looking for additional household income

The pandemic shifted work habits, and as companies are now calling people back to the office, many women are saying “Hell no, I won’t go.” Everyone has friends who travel. What if they booked with you and you made some money off that side hustle? Many of these moms are the ones who handle their own family’s travel plans, so planning travel for others looks like a natural outgrowth of that experience.

We are approached weekly by people wanting to work on our team at Alpenglow Travel, and we turn many of them away. To join us, we require a new advisor to have an established network, experience booking travel or experience in a travel or another hospitality role, and the drive to book more than $100,000 annually, which is our breakeven point for carrying the cost of hosting a sub-IC.

Several of the people who approached us about being sub-ICs were already Fora agents. Naturally, I asked about their experience with Fora. The resounding response was that they loved the technology, but with some caveats.

These agents expressed that they felt like they were on their own under Fora. They had access to all this information, but no one to help them navigate it. They also seemed to feel slightly less respected as a Fora agent among other industry professionals.

On the industry side, hotel sales directors I have known for years expressed frustration to me at the flood of Fora advisors requesting FAM trips (familiarization trips that suppliers and hotels put on to show off their services or property to a group of agents), or agent rates, which are discounted rates that hotels offer to travel agents.

I do think they are actively trying to address the issues mentioned above.

With a $1B valuation and 15,000 advisors on its platform, Fora has become hard to ignore. They seemed to have taken the “move fast and break stuff” approach, much like Uber and Airbnb did in their early days, to gain enough volume to strong arm their way into the industry.

The traditional path to becoming a travel advisor is slow by design and is usually something of an apprenticeship model. You come up under a senior agent, spend years learning supplier relationships, build a book of business gradually, and earn your independence over time.

Fora compresses that training timeline significantly, and does not pair new agents with an established travel professional. I am not trying to gatekeep here and if it sounds like I’m a snob about new agents creating their own companies, that’s not my intention. My concern comes from the feeling between Ai platforms and Fora, the agency world is becoming the Wild West of booking.

An experienced advisor’s skill set takes time to develop, and even then, mistakes happen. I made one last week that cost me $3,000. Newer agents just don’t have that kind of financial backing to make it right if they mess up. One point I do find interesting – all Fora advisors are covered under the company’s errors and omissions policy, underwritten by Berkshire Hathaway, with a $10,000 deductible and a $3 million overall limit. The coverage applies to claims brought against Fora in the United States, and advisors must maintain clear Fora affiliation in their marketing to remain eligible. So, if something goes wrong, the claim runs through Fora, not the advisor directly.

However, the policy is explicitly designed not for routine mistakes, but for significant errors or liability exposure. So, my $3,000 error would likely not have been covered. As an affiliate agency hosted under Coastline, we are required to hold our own E&O policy that covers all our sub-ICs.

The proliferation of inexperienced advisors means more errors, more escalations, and more strain on hotel sales teams that are already managing high volume. Henley Vazquez, one of Fora’s co-founders, has addressed this directly. Her counterargument is that suppliers want bookings, and Fora is delivering net new demand that wasn’t previously coming through the trade channel. This sounds suspiciously like the OTAs (online travel agencies, e.g Expedia and Booking.com) argument. I don’t think this approach works in the luxury sector, where higher dollar amounts require higher attention to detail and more experience.

However, Vazquez is correct that the model is working at scale.

For a small boutique hotel, the argument of scale is attractive. Rather than forking over 25% to an OTA like Expedia, a small, independent hotel can have access to a large network of agents via Fora’s plaform for just 10% commission.

The question I have for travelers is: What does it mean to book a $30,000 trip with someone who joined Fora six months ago because they loved planning their own vacations? Do you trust your friend enough to hand over that kind of money to someone with close to zero training or licensing?

In talking with my friend yesterday, it seems that Fora is now trying to take a step back and address some of the original issues I noted above. Are all 15,000 advisors on their platform full-time advisors looking to make a career out of being a travel agent? Hardly likely.

Fora has not publicly released how their sales volume is distributed across their 15,000 advisors. They have disclosed that their top 100 advisors and agencies generated more than $200 million in 2025, with approximately 40 of them booking more than $2 million each (https://www.foratravel.com/newsroom/fora-announces-centum-2026-honorees).

That’s 0.26% doing meaningful booking volume.

In contrast, Coastline, the host agency that we are under, hosts around 450 advisors, and 50 are booking more than $2M annually, which is 11%.

My friend posits there are probably a few hundred Fora agents booking more than $1M annually, which is typically the baseline benchmark in our industry of a decently successful advisor.

However, there are likely thousands booking $100,000 or less in gross sales.

Fora has instituted a tiered system for advisors, defining the tiers as Classic, Pro, and Fora X. This was introduced at some point after Fora’s 2021 founding, likely as a response to industry criticism about inexperienced advisors accessing supplier perks without production requirements.

FAM trips, travel agent rates, individual Virtuoso login, IATA card, and CLIA membership (Cruise Lines International Association) are now all gated behind Fora Pro status, which requires $100,000 in annual commissionable bookings, 10 unique clients, and five client reviews. New advisors do not have access to any of those benefits from day one. Pro tier advisors can only access 3-5 agent rates a year, and no property they haven’t booked before.

The problem with the gap in training and mentorship is that external, predatory players are trying to fill that role. Every day, there are courses and coaches popping up like mushrooms promising to train these new agents in aggressive sales tactics. Some of them are straightforwardly predatory, structured more like MLMs than professional development programs. When you see a proliferation of courses promising passive income through travel, that’s usually a sign that someone has figured out how to monetize aspiration. Just try posting on a Reddit travel forum and you will be flooded with direct message requests asking if you’d like to work with a travel advisor.

Fora is not in that category. The founders have industry credentials, the supplier relationships are legitimate, and the technology is better than most of what exists in this space. Their AI assistant, Via, handles destination research, itinerary drafting, and proposal generation, which frees up advisors to spend time on the relationship side of the work.

I’m hoping to meet some of the Fora folk at Virtuoso travel week because I’m fascinated by their disruption in the industry.

Putting on my investor hat, here’s my take. They just raised a $60M series D yesterday and, as noted earlier, have a $1B post-money valuation. To put that in perspective, Outrigger sold for roughly the same number after our family spent close to 100 years building the company.

Total funding is now at $138M, backed by Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Forerunner Ventures, Heartcore Capital, Tactile Ventures, and (oddly) Amy Schumer. Their advisors have collectively booked $3 billion in travel since launching in 2021. It took three years to reach the first billion. The third billion took five months.

I’m an investor in a handful of VC funds in the travel space and I sit on the board of Denver Ventures. Am I just slightly jealous that I didn’t think of this concept or invest in it early? Absolutely. Amy Schumer bested me there.

However, I think their business is likely more vulnerable to being replaced by Ai platforms than the traditional host agencies, at least at the lower levels.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, a newbie agent without much experience becomes relatively interchangeable for one of these platforms that a client can self-service, with less risk involved. As an investor and a board member of a VC fund, that would give me pause.

However, Fora is a tech company that operates a travel agency, not a travel agency that happens to have developed good technology. One obvious pivot is for Fora to offer AI-assisted planning directly to the consumer, or to license their tech to other agencies. I think these potential opportunities is what is driving their valuation.

The $1 billion valuation is also partially built on advisor volume and platform growth, which creates pressure to keep the top of the top of the funnel wide, welcoming as many new agents as possible.

The result is an industry with more advisors than ever, significant variance in quality, and travelers who may not know the difference until something goes wrong.

Just like working with an Edward Jones advisor for your investing, it’s hard to go wrong with a straightforward hotel booking. Hotel platforms are relatively ubiquitous across Virtuoso agencies that have developed these skins sitting on top of GDS (global distribution systems) that tie into hotel reservations.

If you’re booking a relatively easy trip, a Fora advisor who specializes in your destination and has a track record of bookings can absolutely deliver. Ask how long they’ve been booking travel, what their volume looks like, and whether they have specific experience with the properties or region you’re considering. A good advisor, at any agency, will have direct answers to those questions.

For complex, high-value itineraries, treat finding your travel advisor the same as you would interviewing financial advisors. Look for someone with years of experience, direct experience traveling at the level you travel at, and supplier relationships they’ve built over time. Interview past clients who aren’t their friends and family.

Are you just booking for yourself and friends and family? If yes, then absolutely join Fora. It’s low cost and their tech is great.

Are you willing to do a lot of your own research for training? Join Fora and sign up for all the trade publications, like Travel Weekly. Become an ASTA (American Society of Travel Advisors) member and take their training courses. Listen to Tique Talks and sign up for their Niche program. Don’t fall for other training courses -- most are a scam and will spew word salad at you without any real understanding of the industry.

If you want to make a serious career out of this, find a host agency and ask them what affiliate agencies are taking on new Sub ICs. Smartflyer and Coastline are probably the largest ones with the newest tech and younger millennial agents who are adapting to the world of AI the fastest.

The industry will eventually respond to the volume of new entrants with some form of standardization or credential requirements. It will take a few years of consumers reporting agents to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), or a handful of lawsuits.

I was asked in an industry publication interview yesterday whether I am anti-Fora.

The answer is no, I do think they have a role that needs to be filled. There is clearly a market for people who want to book travel at the hobbyist level, but don’t want to make a career out of it. Fora is the perfect entrance into that market, letting people get their feet wet before they decide if they want to be a serious advisor. (Yes, I am aware there are some Fora advisors who take the job very seriously and do quite well in their own right, just not the same percentage as you see at other host agencies).

My problem is more with their market positioning, their broad stroke approach to giving people access to book travel for others without much training, and what seems like a lack of support for newer advisors.

🗝️ Room Report — The Delano, Miami Beach

This weekend, my husband and I YOLO’d our way to the World Cup third place game in Miami to watch England and France more goals than I thought possible in a soccer game. When deciding where to stay, naturally I chose the newly-opened Delano, Miami. After watching Nadine @the Stanza’s interview with Jonathan Goldstein of Cain Capital, I wanted to go check out this renovation project myself.

The Delano opened in 1947 on Collins Avenue, designed by Robert Swartburg as an exercise in post-war optimism. For decades it sat alongside the rest of the Art Deco district, which by the 1970s and ‘80s had seen most of its sophisticated clientele migrate to Europe and the Caribbean.

Ian Schrager bought the building in 1995, hired Philippe Starck, and reopened it as something Miami had never seen. Starck designed the interiors as a series of “living rooms” assembled from the furniture and objects of a specific childhood memory, mismatched on purpose and scaled for comfort rather than formality. The billowing white curtains at the entrance became a signature of the hotel, and could be why the entire place is white today. Madonna celebrated her birthday at the Blue Door restaurant, which she co-owned.

The property closed in March 2020. Eldridge Industries acquired it and brought in Ennismore (the hotel collective owned jointly by founder Sharan Pasricha and Accor) to reopen it. Because it’s a Sharan property, there’s a membership club aspect, like Estelle Manor.

The reopened property has 171 rooms across standard categories, poolside Bungalow Suites, and Penthouse Suites. The renovation outlay was roughly $100 million in capex. Elastic Architects restored the original terrazzo floors, hexagonal lobby columns, and the vertical paint banding on the facade.

My take:

I almost never send clients to a hotel in its first year of operation because there are bound to be hiccups. As a hotelier, I fully expected to encounter some during my stay, and I definitely did.

I stayed in an Ocean View King room for $755 per night, and it felt like a bargain for South Beach standards. However, the room did feel small. The first night, our AC wasn’t fully functioning, but they had it fixed the next day. The service elevator was….not in service for the entire weekend. This meant that not only were housekeepers and other staff using the elevators, which meant it took forever to get anywhere, but they also were moving furniture in to the higher level suites and penthouse units over the weekend, so moving crews were hauling boxes through those same elevators. I would probably have rescheduled that move if I were the GM.

I did spot Sharan walking around with other executives – they were there for the World Cup. That was an exciting moment for me as I wore my Estelle Manor cap all weekend.

The pool and restaurant spaces are lovely and feel more like a Pasricha property than the rest of the hotel. The all-white décor in the penthouse units I found felt a little soulless, (and I’m working on an article about the beige-ification of hotels as suppliers source all their FF&E from the same companies), but it could just not be my vibe. I’m more maximalist British mansion than “Clean Girl” aesthetic any day.

I will take a moment to acknowledge the staff, who were exceptionally warm and every single person went out of their way to ask how our stay was. We befriended the French bartender and met up with him at the World Cup Game. The concierge, Jelena, was a delight and took time to show me the penthouse and the rest of the property on one of her busiest days.

Ennismore is actively expanding the brand globally, with Delano Dubai open since October 2024 and Maison Delano Paris since April 2023.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

• Ennismore is heading toward a U.S. IPO at a valuation of roughly €3.2 billion, the floor of the analyst range, because investors are pricing it as a hotel collection rather than a demand platform; Rafat Ali argues in Skift that a distribution deal with Airbnb is the move that closes the gap, and if it happens, it changes how properties like The Hoxton, Mondrian, and 25hours reach travelers.

• Aspen Hospitality has launched Nell Hotels as a standalone brand, with The Nell New York opening fall 2027 inside Rockefeller Center as a Relais & Châteaux property; more immediately, The Little Nell closes April 2027 for a full renovation and will not reopen until the 2027/28 ski season, per the Aspen Times.

• Aman and OKO Group are in permit review for an 81-room hotel at the base of Aspen Mountain, part of a 320,000-square-foot Lift One corridor redevelopment that city officials call potentially the most complex build in Aspen history, with no groundbreaking date confirmed, per Aspen Journalism.

• Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew acquired River Valley Ranch Golf Course in Carbondale in partnership with Major Food Group and 8K Capital, with plans to add MFG dining and cultural programming to the 187-acre course roughly 30 miles down-valley from Aspen, per the Aspen Times.

• W South Beach closes August 20 and reopens late 2027 as Waldorf Astoria Miami Beach, with Reuben Brothers converting all 348 suites, the pool deck, spa, and food and beverage program after paying over $400 million for the property in 2024, per Hotel Dive.

• Aman appointed Victor Clavell as Chief Operating Officer, a scale hire with a resume spanning Ritz-Carlton, Bulgari, EDITION, W, and Rosewood, timed to Amanvari opening in East Cape Mexico next spring and Aman Dubai targeting 2027, per Hospitality Net.

• Delta’s premium cabin out-earned economy for the first time, with first class and premium tickets generating $6.92 billion against the main cabin’s $6.85 billion in Q2 2026, part of a record $17.67 billion quarter, per CNBC.

• The World Cup did not lift international arrivals to the U.S. in June, with overseas visitors down 1.8% year-over-year despite match-driven surges from the UK, Ecuador, and Colombia, while Germany, Argentina, South Korea, and Canada all fell by double digits, per Skift.

• The DOT officially restored the 2011 standard on airline fee disclosure, rolling back the 2024 rule that required upfront transparency on baggage and seat fees after the Fifth Circuit vacated it earlier this year, per ASTA.

• Patina Osaka scored a rare 100/100 to take the top spot in this year’s Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards, with Castiglion del Bosco winning best hotel in Italy and The Fifth Avenue Hotel taking best in New York City, per SmartFlyer.

  Thanks for reading The Upgrade ! If you have a friend who is thinking of joining Fora, send them this article.

  Share

I grew up in a family that used a travel agent. I was fascinated with our near seamless trips, glossy branded luggage tags, and detailed itineraries in which we were whisked around in private transfers and stayed in incredible hotels in Ireland or New Zealand.

When I pitched the idea of a travel agency that sat within Inspirato, I stayed late in the office creating the business case behind it, running the numbers like I was back in graduate school. Inspirato had what every single luxury advisor wanted – a dedicated membership group who loved to travel. They just weren’t capturing that travel spend outside of the small group experiences I ran and the homes members stayed in. I called the concept ‘Bespoke.’

The executive team was hesitant. “Aren’t travel agents kind of…extinct?” They asked. “How much will this cost to launch?” “How will you vet suppliers?” “Can you handle the volume without hiring anyone?” I showed my staffing model, and explained what DMCs (destination management companies) were. I proposed that we could sell $1M in travel bookings in the first year without hiring additional people. They gave me green light, and just like that, I built my first travel agency.

I knew the group travel world intimately after running small group trips and chartered cruises for 8 years between my time Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato. Beyond that, I had a lot to learn about the travel agency world. Today, I own a travel agency, Alpenglow Travel, that is quickly rising through the ranks of Coastline’s “Top Talent.”

If the term “travel agent” conjures images of a lady in her 70’s named Maude hammering away at a keyboard in DOS code to book your flight while smoking a cigarette at her kitchen table, you aren’t alone. With the advent of OTA’s (online travel agencies) such as Booking.com and Expedia in the early 2000’s, major publications sounded the death knell for travel advisors, postulating that they would go the way of the Dodo bird. However, as with most things that enter the mass market, there has been a backlash to plethora of fake reviews and the sheer, unnavigable volume of information out there.

Newly minted millionaires are traveling like never before, and they want a trusted advisor to help them wade through the fluff and give them actual advice.

The travel agent industry has had one of the more remarkable comebacks in recent business history. After a 40% collapse in global bookings in 2020 during the pandemic, agencies recovered fast and blew past their previous highs. U.S. travel agency gross bookings surged 102% in 2022, followed by another 28% gain in 2023, reaching $109.7 billion, a record at the time.^[1] Agency sales rose an additional 9% in both 2024 and 2025, with leisure travel accounting for 65% of that growth.^[1] The overall travel industry recovered to about 136% of 2019 sales by mid-2024. Travel agencies, as a category, tracked at more than double that pace.^[2]

Read more

Master Key is a publication for paid subscribers of The Upgrade | Weekly. It features deep dives into the world of hospitality, typically from a financial standpoint.

Have you ever returned home from a vacation with your children in need of another vacation? I often joke that traveling with my kids is just parenting in a different time zone with fewer resources.

All jokes aside, I’m in on an ongoing hunt for luxury family-friendly hotels. I’m not talking about the all-inclusive Mexico experience – I’m talking about a real luxury hotel where by some miracle, I won’t worry about my children disturbing the peace or breaking something priceless in the lobby.

Many readers of The Upgrade are savvy hospitality professionals or travelers who know the typical categories of hotels – select service, lifestyle, resort, boutique, all inclusive, etc, but Family Hotels or Kinder Hotels are their own category, typically specific to Europe.

There is a certification program, primarily in the German-speaking Alpine markets of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy’s South Tyrol. Hotels are rated on a point system across categories like:

1) Kids’ club programming and hours

2) Baby and toddler equipment

3) Family room configurations

4) Childproofing

5) Dining (kids’ menus, meal timing, allergy awareness)

6) Outdoor play space

7) Staff training for children

The Upgrade this week featured an interview with one of the owners of Sonnwies, a luxury Kinder Hotel in Italy’s Dolomites.

How do Kinder Hotels operate differently from other hotels or all-inclusive resorts?

The Kinder Hotel model focuses on one big area - childcare. The childcare is integral to the experience. Happy parents, happy children = returning guests. The Capex spend for maintaining top talent in the childcare arena is high, which is why many Kinder Hotels are being sold as younger generations no longer wish to maintain ownership of such a difficult business model.

However, the hotels that are getting it right are capturing families that return year after year with the promise of a real vacation for parents and children. There is something about parenting abroad with other parents around you in the same situation. I’ve found that many hotels that promise all-inclusive experiences don’t really deliver on the luxury side (Grand Velas is a “nice” option but still feels a little expensive to me for the experience they provide), or they are adults-only like Naviva.

Let’s take a look at the model of Kinder Hotels through the lens of Sonnwies.

Read more

🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown.

Issue 14 · Sonnwies and What Family Hotels Do Differently

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – Sonnwies, an interview with owner Anna Hinteregger, and Kinder Hotels

2. The Room Report – Merged with Pre-Departure - Sonnwies

3. The Lobby Bar – This week's Lobby Bar covers Hilton's new points partnership with Explora Journeys, Oetker Collection's US debut at The Vineta in Palm Beach, the opening of Hotel Palacio Bellas Artes in San Sebastián, the Winter 2026 debut of Lily of the Valley Courchevel, and Skift's read on the "barbell" hotel market where ultra-luxury and extended-stay pull ahead while the middle stalls.

   ---

Travelers,

This week, Pre-Departure and the Room Report will be rolled into one – a deep dive on Sonnwies.

I have long been fascinated by family hotels in the Swiss/Austrian/Italian Alps. When I was a child, my family spent two summers in Gstaad, where we hiked through Sound of Music scenery to high-altitude playgrounds, ate fondu, and made flower crowns. Gstaad in the early 1990s was a bit different from the glitzy destination it is now, but it lives in my memories as it used to be. I wanted to give my own children a similar experience and came across Sonnwies in Italy’s Dolomites.

As a luxury traveler and co-founder of a travel agency, I’m constantly on the hunt for hotels that provide a true luxury family experience. I’m not talking about hotels that might have a nice kids’ club, colored pencils on check in, and child-sized robes, but then not allow kids in the pool for most of the day. I’m thinking of hotels where families not only feel welcome at the luxury level, but where the hotel also eases – not exacerbates – the stress of traveling with children.

We had the most wonderful stay at Sonnwies, a Kinder Hotel in the Dolomites, this June, and I don’t think I have ever truly felt that relaxed.

I was lucky enough to meet one of the owners, and have included an exclusive interview with her in this week’s The Upgrade | Weekly.

Subscribe now

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

Yours truly with my Bougie Bunnies on a Sonnwies Land Rover picnic

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

What Kinder Hotels Do Differently

Many readers of The Upgrade are savvy hospitality professionals or travelers who know the typical categories of hotels – select service, lifestyle, resort, boutique, all inclusive, etc., but Family Hotels or Kinder Hotels are their own category, typically specific to Europe.

There is a certification program, primarily in the German-speaking Alpine markets – Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy’s South Tyrol. Hotels are rated on a point system across categories like:

1) Kids’ club programming and hours

2) Baby and toddler equipment

3) Family room configurations

4) Childproofing

5) Dining (kid menus, meal timing, allergy awareness)

6) Outdoor play space

7) Staff training for children

The Capex for these properties is extraordinary and they are a complex model to run. I did some research into the financials for the category for this week’s Master Key. Many of these hotels have long been family owned and operated, but are transitioning away as family members of younger generations are no longer interested in the grind. The family that owns Sonnwies is not one of those families. They have fully committed to family ownership, and it shows.

Sonnwies is a luxury, 5-star Kinder Hotel located about an hour from Bolzano airport, in Italy’s Dolomites. The property sits in Luson, a village of 1,500 people 12 kilometers from Brixen. Family-friendly hikes such as the Woody Walk at Plose are just 20 minutes away. The hotel has a farm with 30 animals, and kids can feed them, gather freshly laid eggs and eat them for breakfast, ride horses, take alpacas for a walk, and pet the bunnies. They also design everything with kids in mind, from hand rails on the stairs that are kid height to a kid-sized buffet, even stairs up to the front desk so kids can talk to the front desk agents.

When we vacationed there just two weeks ago, our children, (and we), were in heaven.

Kids’ Club

Sonnwies’ rates include kids’ club programming from 9 am to 9 pm most days. (Sunday hours are more limited.) Kids receive wrist bands that are either red (they can leave the club only with an adult) or green (they have full run of the property). By day three, we felt comfortable giving our kids green wrist bands and letting them explore on their own. That sort of independence is a unique experience for five and seven year olds.

Food is all-inclusive “soft.” All alcohol is a la carte. Anything ordered by the pool is also a la carte. Kids’ club hours are scheduled to allow parents to enjoy a proper dinner while the kids eat earlier with staff or to easily dine as a family.

Dining

Aside from the excellence of the childcare situation, Sonnwies really pulls ahead with its dining. The meals are designed as tasting menus with farm-to-table ingredients, and dinners are exceptional. Kids always have access to a pasta bar and can order chicken nuggets etc., but by the third day, my kids were eating fresh veggies, local cheeses, and duck. Outside of dining hours, food is available a la carte for an additional charge.

You are assigned the same table for all meals.

The Rooms

Entry-level studios run 40 square meters (430 square feet) with a pull-out sofa bed and a proper mountain-view balcony. The top four-room suite stretches to 130 square meters (1,400 square feet) with a freestanding bath and a separate children’s bedroom.

They have four room categories:

· 22 Studios

· 18 Suites

· 37 Luxury Suites

· 3 Forest Villas

Rates start at around €620 for studios, €830 for suites, and €925 for luxury suites, depending on the season. Full board with childcare is included. In the same tier, Cavallino Bianco in Ortisei starts at €456 and Quellenhof in Passeier at €400. The Sonnwies premium charge is justified by the product.

Interview with the Owner – Anna Hinteregger

This week, I’ve written an edition of Master Key for paid subscribers discussing our experience at Sonnwies, as well as the economics of Kinder Hotels, but for the purpose of this week’s Upgrade, I was lucky enough to meet and interview Anna Hinteregger, one of the siblings who own the property.

Coming from a hospitality family myself (for new readers, my family, the Kelleys, owned and operated Hawaii’s Outrigger Hotels for three generations until 2016), I enjoy discussing the unique challenges of family legacy in hospitality.

1) AMB: Your family bought the property as a farm in 1983. What inspired you to create a hotel specifically for families?

Anna: My mother was a teacher, and my father owned a construction company. In 1999, my parents opened a small guesthouse with just 17 rooms, laying the foundation for what Sonnwies has become today.

In 2002, my youngest brother was born, making us a family of four children of very different ages. When the youngest was a newborn my older brother was ten, I was eight, and my sister was six. As a family, we experienced firsthand how difficult it was to find accommodations that truly catered to families with children of different ages.

That experience shaped our vision. We wanted to create a place where families genuinely feel welcome and every generation can enjoy their holiday together.

Having grown up on a farm ourselves, it was equally important for us to keep nature at the heart of the experience. To this day, activities such as butter making, pony riding, feeding the animals, crafting with natural materials, gardening, and cooking together are part of our daily program. We want children to connect with nature while creating memories that will stay with them for a lifetime.

2) AMB: What sets Sonnwies apart from other luxury hotels in the region?

Anna: We are completely dedicated to families with children. Everything we do is designed around their needs while maintaining the highest standards of comfort and luxury.

Our architecture and interior design are timeless and of exceptional quality. Wherever possible, we collaborate with local artisans and use natural materials from the region. At the same time, the entire hotel has been thoughtfully designed so children can easily find their way around and feel at home from the very first moment.

For us, luxury is not only about beautiful spaces – it is about creating a place filled with warmth, nature, and meaningful family moments.

3) AMB: How are responsibilities divided within your family today?

Anna: Two years ago, my brother Lukas and I took over the business. He is responsible for the strategic development of our company, future projects, expansions, and marketing.

I oversee day-to-day operations with a strong focus on our guests, our team, and ensuring that every detail of the guest experience reflects our values.

Our parents continue to play an important role. My mother still supports us with financial administration and shares her invaluable experience whenever we need advice. My father remains actively involved in our construction projects, and our youngest brother supports the accounting department. Our sister Eva currently lives in Milan and is not involved in the family business.

4) AMB: As a family business, what are you most proud of?

Anna: I am especially proud that we have continuously invested in and developed Sonnwies over the past 25 years.

Even more importantly, I am proud of how well we work together as a family. Each of us contributes our own strengths, and together with our wonderful team – many of whom have been with us for many years – we have built something that goes far beyond a hotel.

5) AMB: What is something about running a family-owned hotel that people outside the industry often don’t understand?

Anna: Running a family-owned hotel requires an enormous amount of passion and dedication. The line between family life and work is often blurred because the business becomes part of everyday life.

Working with your own family is not always easy. Discussions can become emotional, but we also know each other incredibly well. We try to ensure that everyone takes responsibility in the areas where their strengths lie.

I believe that this is one of the greatest advantages of a family business. When everyone shares the same vision and contributes their best, there are endless opportunities to keep growing and improving together.

For me, there is nothing more rewarding than working in a place where other people create some of the happiest memories of their lives.

6) What does your all-inclusive concept allow you to do that a traditional à la carte model cannot?

Anna: We deliberately chose not to offer a traditional all-inclusive concept. Instead, we created our own hospitality concept that gives our international guests maximum flexibility.

Every morning, guests enjoy a generous South Tyrolean farmhouse breakfast buffet, while specialty coffees and freshly prepared egg dishes are served individually at the table.

Since we welcome guests from all over the world, dining habits and daily routines vary greatly. We wanted to create a concept that adapts to those different needs rather than asking guests to adapt to fixed schedules.

Serving regional, authentic, high-quality cuisine is very important to us. Many of our ingredients come from our own gardens at Sonnwies and Lake Garda, while others are sourced from trusted local producers with whom we have worked for many years.

Reducing food waste is another priority, so we have carefully designed our dining concept to combine flexibility with sustainability.

Children can enjoy their favorite dishes from the buffet whenever they are hungry after a day of playing, while adults – and children who prefer table service – can choose at any time from a menu featuring around twelve freshly prepared dishes that change daily.

This allows us to combine flexibility, exceptional quality, and sustainability.

7) AMB: What is the greatest challenge in operating a hotel where children are just as much your guests as their parents?

Anna: Although our focus is clearly on families and children, we never wanted to compromise on design or quality.

All our playhouses, family spa areas, and children’s spaces have been built using premium natural materials. The architecture was designed to encourage children to explore freely while creating a calm, elegant atmosphere where parents can relax.

Our philosophy is very simple: When children are happy, parents can truly relax.

8) AMB: How do you maintain consistently high-quality childcare as you continue to grow?

Anna: Our Kids’ Club is one of the most important elements of Sonnwies. Today, we have a team of more than 20 dedicated childcare professionals.

We invest continuously in training and professional development, meet regularly to exchange ideas, and constantly refine our programs. This ongoing collaboration enables us not only to maintain our high standards but to improve them year after year.

9) AMB: We’re excited about your expansion plans. Can you tell us about them?

Anna: Three years ago, we took our first step beyond South Tyrol by opening Borgo Tre on Lake Garda. This beautifully restored historic borgo (Italian for hamlet), overlooking the lake, has become one of our favorite retreats. It currently offers luxurious apartments, and we have exciting plans for its future development.

This autumn, we will also open our new adults-only property, SAN SONNEA Lodge Dolomites, located on the Zanser Alm in the heart of the Dolomites.

The five-star property will feature only 24 suites, each offering breathtaking views of the Geisler Peaks. Here, our focus is entirely on adults seeking tranquility, nature, and refined luxury in the mountains.

• SAN SONNEA will become our new umbrella brand.

• Sonnwies will be renamed SAN SONNEA Family Dolomites.

• Our Lake Garda property will become Borgo SAN SONNEA Lake Garda.

• Our adults-only property will be called SAN SONNEA Lodge Dolomites.

Each hotel will maintain its own unique identity while becoming part of the SAN SONNEA collection.

10) AMB: Could you ever imagine opening a property like this in the United States?

Anna: At the moment, our focus is on the exciting projects we are currently developing in Europe.

Of course, we are always open to new ideas and opportunities. Where the future will take us remains to be seen, but for now our priority is to continue bringing our vision to life here in Europe.

11) AMB: Who is your typical guest today compared to ten years ago?

Anna: Our guest profile has changed significantly over the past decade. Ten years ago, most of our guests came from neighboring countries and Italy. Today, we are delighted to welcome families from all over the world.

This international growth is incredibly rewarding and confirms that our concept resonates well beyond Europe.

12) AMB: Our clients are primarily American families. What do you think makes Sonnwies especially appealing to them?

Anna: I believe many American families are looking for something that has become increasingly rare: genuine connection – with nature, with each other, and with a slower pace of life.

Here in South Tyrol, we are fortunate to be surrounded by untouched nature, the majestic Dolomites, fresh mountain air, crystal-clear spring water, star-filled skies, farm animals, and authentic Alpine architecture.

To us, that is the true definition of luxury.

Sonnwies is about much more than beautiful accommodations. It is about creating meaningful family experiences, spending quality time together, and allowing children and parents alike to reconnect with nature. I believe that is exactly what makes our destination so special for international families – and especially for our American guests.

I am thrilled that our company, Alpenglow Travel, is building a partnership with Sonnwies.

We had an extraordinary stay there. Our kids loved the waterslides, animals, and friends we made. We loved the food, the chance to really relax while our kids were happy, and the hiking. The Dolomites are stunning. I haven’t felt that relaxed on a trip with our children in years. I’m already planning a return trip.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

• Hilton x Explora Journeys partnership launches — Hilton Honors members can now earn and redeem points on Explora’s ultra-luxury ocean voyages (MSC Group), with a 5% discount and tier-specific onboard perks. Launched July 9. Read on Luxury Daily

• The Vineta Hotel opens in Palm Beach — Oetker Collection’s first US property (the group behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Eden Rock St Barths) debuts in the heart of Palm Beach. Read on Wallpaper*

• Lily of the Valley Courchevel confirmed for Winter 2026 — The Saint-Tropez wellness brand extends into the Alps with a 575 sqm ski-in/ski-out chalet by architect Charles Zana. Six bedrooms, private cinema, gym, pool, hammam, sleeps 14. Read on The Opening List

• Hotel Palacio Bellas Artes opens in San Sebastián — Isabel López Vilalta transformed a 1914 Beaux-Arts cinema into a Curio Collection by Hilton hotel, leaning into cinematic references and Basque cultural heritage. Read on Business Traveller

• The luxury/extended-stay "barbell" market — Extended-stay demand hit a four-year high (up 6.2% YoY in May vs. 0.7% for conventional hotels), while ultra-luxury holds firm and mid-tier upscale stalls. Relevant context for why clients are paying up at both ends. Read on Skift

Travel Dispatch is a publication for paid subscribers. It features deep dives into the itineraries I build for myself and clients. This one features the full report of our Euro Summer with our 5 and 7 year old children, Malia and Jack.

Our Euro Summer did not start out as a nearly month-long trip. It began as trip to celebrate my friend Laura’s 40^th birthday in her favorite place, the French Riviera. Our favorite direct flight to Europe is the United Denver-London flight, so then we decided to tack on a few days in England. Once I looked at a map, I realized that Nice was driving distance from the Dolomites, so we added Sonnwies because I’ve been dying to check it out. Then, we had to add in Paris.

This is how many of my personal travel plans develop. Luckily, I have a supportive spouse who says “yes” to my insane ideas, such as dragging our 5- and 7-year-old children to 6 hotels between three countries and six cities.

I affectionately call our children the Bougie Bunnies, which you will see on my Substack. They are incredibly spoiled when it comes to travel, and they love five-star hotels as much as I do. I love traveling with them. Our 5 year old is still a challenge, but he’s getting there. Our daughter is a blast to travel with at this point. I grew up in a family that took us everywhere, and want to instill that same sense of curiosity in our children.

Was this trip insane? Overly ambitious? Did I overpack? Yes, yes, and yes. We also timed it with the heatwave, got nine million mosquito bites, were yelled at by an angry French dude in a museum, and drove 7 hours instead of flying from the Dolomites to Nice, losing our entire plane ticket fare in the process. However, it was also absolutely worth it.

Our itinerary was:

• England: Estelle Manor 4 nights, Covent Garden Hotel 3 nights

• Dolomites: Sonnwies 5 nights

• Nice: Maison Albar Le Victoria 2 nights, a villa for 6 nights

• Paris: Hotel Regina Louvre 3 nights

  To Read the Rest of This Post, Please Become a Paid Subscriber

Read more

Issue 13 · Is the 40^th Birthday The New Bachelorette?

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – Is the 40^th Birthday the New Bachelorette?

2. The Room Report – Hotel Regina Louvre, Paris

3. The Lobby Bar – Louis Vuitton Will Open a Hotel, Coolcations, and another large hotel chain enters the Safari lodge game

Travelers,

I am sending out The Upgrade a bit late this week, as I’m flying home for our big Euro Summer trip. With a three-hour delay leaving Paris, we will land in Denver around midnight, if all goes according to plan. To be honest, the delay was the only travel hiccup we encountered on a 3.5-week trip through England, Italy, and France with a 5- and 7-year-old in tow, so I’ll count that as a win.

My husband has had the patience of a saint as I conducted site visits and meetings at every stop of our trip, because let’s face it, travel advisors never really vacation but rather balance work and travel simultaneously in a constant tug-of-war. The Travel Dispatch this week for paid subscribers will be the full details of our trip.

This week, I’m reflecting on milestone birthdays, particularly 40^th ones.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Yours truly in Paris, on our balcony at the Regina Louvre, with the 40th Birthday Girl

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Are 40^th Birthdays the New Bachelorette Trip?

Bailey Quin (McCarthy) is dressed in pink Dolce & Gabbana in Paris, surrounded by friends and people in pink poodle costumes. The next day, she posts elegant shots of herself and her guests in “tweed and tipple” dress aboard the British Pullman train.

Her trip, outfits, and themes are fabulous – ushering in her next decade with a fanfare that puts our boomer parents’ “over the hill” fetes to shame.

I devour each of her posts and message about them to a friend, gushing over how incredible each day is.

Bailey Quin, who is infinitely cooler than I am

I am writing this on a flight home from celebrating that particular friend’s 40th birthday on the French Riviera. She rented a villa and filled it with our family and another one for a week of beach clubs, pool time, Sancerre, hotel tours (because it’s me), and incredible food. At nearly 40,000 feet, I am now digging through photos and reflecting on an incredible week.

A year ago, I took five of my closest girlfriends on an epic trip through the British countryside. We galivanted in the gardens of Cliveden House, indulged in martinis and caviar in the Lanesborough bar in London, drove Ineos Grenadiers off road on the grounds of Estelle Manor, and played croquet in our best crisp whites at Four Seasons Hampshire. And oh yes, we dressed in 1920s garb and boarded the British Pullman murder mystery train. (If you’d like to recreate this trip, send me an email at AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com).

I was, admittedly, not the first woman to celebrate my 40th in style abroad with “my girls.” Also, Bailey’s birthday trip was likely much higher in budget, larger, and included more poodles.

We were, however, all part of a greater trend of women celebrating our fourth decade not with a whimper, but a bang.

These trips often include smaller groups, more curation, zero penis straws or “tribe” hats, and significantly more luxury hotels or villa rentals.

As my millennial clients turn 40, I’m sourcing villas in Mallorca, Irish castles, Mediterranean sailing yachts. There’s not the “everyone has to agree on a restaurant and hotel” discourse of our bachelorette days gone by. These are trips where you are given an agenda and show up, frequently treated by the birthday girl to the accommodations and at times, to much more of the trip.

On my trip, some of our favorite moments were true reflections of girlhood. We became hilariously lost on a forest walk, attempted to film Downtown Abbey reenactments at Highclere Castle, tried to solve the mystery on the Pullman in terrible British accents, and went to bed each night after dinners full of meaningful discussions about such things as private vs public schools for our kids and what the rules of croquet actually are.

I haven’t laughed that hard or stayed up that late in years.

Each day, we gave ourselves permission to fully dress up. (Our luggage was excessive, but that was the point.) I wanted the trip to be filled with the opportunity to take up space and stop apologizing for being a group of dynamic women wholeheartedly ourselves, having a blast.

As a travel advisor, I could have easily booked all this myself, but my birthday gift to little old me was to use another travel advisor to handle the logistics for me, and it was such a treat! For once, I was the designer but not the executor. I set down my mental load and giggled my way through this milestone. My friends took that mental load on for me, and I got to relax.

This year, in addition to spending the week in France for the aforementioned 40th celebration, I traveled to Rwanda to celebrate another friend’s 40th with gorilla trekking. I’m off to Charleston – much closer to home – for yet another later this year.

My Instagram feed continues to yield more examples of what Brittany Allyn dubbed a “Me Moon,” or what Carrie Bradshaw called her “self wedding.” Influencers are cresting 40 with fervor and pizazz.

Millennials are coming into our own as the “Great Wealth Transfer” begins. While for many, that transfer may not be a reality, my cohort is hitting the point in their careers where they have the salary to spend on meaningful travel and the seniority to take the time off.

We have ridden an early adulthood filled with student debt, global instability, pandemics, economic upheaval, and for many, bidding the dream of owning a home as nice as our parents’ place goodbye.

While new social media platforms pop up at the speed of prairie dogs, Instagram continues to reign supreme in the millennial female zeitgeist. Most of my travel inspiration begins with Instagram, and many of my clients find me there or through Reddit. When I ask what they are envisioning for a trip, they often send reels or posts. These big celebrations are a chance to curate that vision for our closest friends.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the rise of women’s retreats, and I believe these 40^th birthday trips are a continuation of that larger trend.

It’s not just women. My husband spent his 40th birthday heli-skiing with some of his closest guy friends and traveled to the Masters to celebrate the 40th of another friend this past spring.

Hotels and experiences are once again, the forefront of these celebrations, and should embrace the trend. The hotels that make group bookings for rooms, upgrade the birthday girl or guy, smooth the process of transfers and restaurant reservations, these will be the ones that end on Instagram. Of course, they should also avoid my check list from “What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong.”

Forget “thirty, flirty, and thriving.” We are now “Forty, fabulous, and fleeing the country with our friends.”

🗝️ Room Report — The Hotel Regina Louvre, Paris

Our trip ended with a last-minute extension to Paris. Realizing our flights would be cheaper flying out of CDG than Nice for our dates, we called an audible about a week before we left for our Euro Summer and booked three nights at the Regina Louvre.

I’ve mentioned this hotel a few times on this Substack, mostly because I feel like it’s not one of the most well-known hotels, but it does punch above its weight for the price point. I have typically stayed in the Marais at my other favorite little boutique hotel - the Pavilion de la Reine - and have also stayed at Le Meurice, The Relais Christine, La Reserve, and others. My clients are typically at the Rosewood or Bristol, with an occasional Four Seasons George V booking thrown in.

Keys: The hotel has 98 rooms and 32 suites, restored to 19th-century style.

Room we stayed in: The Eiffel Tower Suite - our kids were on a sofa bed with a separate door between our room and theirs. We had one bathroom, and a small balcony overlooking the Touleries Gardens and the Eiffel Tower.

Rate: 1800 euro per night (included breakfast and a $100 credit due to being in our Preferred Hotels network partnership)

History:

The Regina Louvre is owned and run by the fourth generation of the founding Baverez family, 125 years after they first purchased it.

The building sits on the site of the former Royal Stables of the Palais du Louvre, where Kings Henri III, Henri IV, and Louis XIII learned to ride horses.

• Named after Queen Victoria as a nod to the then-new friendship between Britain and France

• Opened for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which drew 50 million visitors to Paris

• In 1919, representatives from the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, and Japan sat down inside the Regina and created what became the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The organization now serves 160 million people. It was born in this hotel.

• Appeared in The Bourne Identity, Kiss of the Dragon, La Femme Nikita, and a dozen other films

Good Parts:

I’m a sucker for a classic, elegant hotel that feels like it's right out of the Belle Epoc. Relais Christine has beautiful wood interiors and ceilings, without feeling stuff. The lobby bar was a cozy spot filled with red velvet chairs for late night cocktails. Breakfast was solid, and the included breakfast could also be taken in our room, so we could watch the sun come up over the Eiffel Tower.

Our suite was on the 6th floor, and it’s always been a dream of mine to see the Eiffel Tower from a hotel room. This room delivered.

The location is excellent for shoppers who want an easy walk to the luxury stores of the Place Vendome area, or visitors who would like to be near the Louvre.

Drawbacks:

Our room and our friends’ room were not cleaned our first morning there until 4 and 5pm, respectively. That is likely the latest I have ever had a room turned in my life. I requested that housekeeping come the next day at 10am and they did deliver on that, but really, a 5pm turn is now just a missed cleaning. This is abysmal for a 5 star hotel.

I also was seriously bummed about the shower situation. For 1800 euro, those suites need a real shower, not a bath with a detachable head that’s not even high enough to go over my 5’6’’ frame. Showers were a challenge, but for three nights, it was livable. I wouldn’t book this room for a longer stay due to that issue. Our friend’s Junior Suite did have a real shower with a glass door and a separate bath. Choose wisely.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

Louis Vuitton is opening a hotel on the Champs Elysées. In another example of retail dipping their toes in the waters of the hotel world, Paris will soon welcome a Louis Vuitton hotel. The Paris property is shaping up to be one of the highest-profile openings of the year, with interiors and programming built around the house codes. If you collect Objets Nomades or plan trips around a Vuitton exhibit, start thinking about booking your stay.

Air France added La Première to Houston on July 5. Texas clients heading to Europe finally have a first class option out of IAH. The same aircraft carry Air France’s new business class with doors, so the buy-up crowd benefits too.

Wealthy travelers are trading August in Positano for Arctic lodges. Instagram is serving me tons of “coolcation” videos in the midst of the European heat wave. Apparently, I’m not the only one. New data from Global Travel Collection shows European summer bookings down 10 percent while fall is up 25 percent. Greenland and the Faroe Islands have begun to appear in my request folder, and more of my clients are picking Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania over the Amalfi Coast.

PUBLIC West Hollywood opens July 15. Ian Schrager’s third PUBLIC hotel puts 137 rooms on the Sunset Strip. It’s the right hotel for a design-conscious couple who want to walk to dinner. It’s the wrong one for a multigenerational family that needs connecting suites and a pool deck; stick with the Bel-Air or Beverly Hills Hotel.

JW Marriott is opening a safari camp on Solio Game Reserve. Because every hotel chain now wants to get in on the safari camp world, JW Marriott is opening a camp in Laikipia, Kenya, where you can spend your Bonvoy points with less controversy than the Ritz Carlton camp in a migration crossing.

Issue 12 · Finding Hidden Gem Hotels that aren’t on the Global Distribution System

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – Finding Hidden Gem Hotels that aren’t on the Global Distribution System

2. The Room Report – Le Negresco, Nice, France

3. The Lobby Bar – Global tourism has officially recovered to pre-Covid levels, FAA brings AI into the control tower

Travelers,

I’m writing The Upgrade | Weekly in Nice, France, this week. A heat dome has driven temperatures up into the mid 90s here and they cancelled the Ironman. We’ve spent two nights bouncing from poolside to beach clubs, just trying to stay cool. We drove here from the Dolomites, where we passed five nights at Sonnwies, a family hotel, which looked straight out of The Sound of Music. Sonnwies will be the subject of next week’s The Upgrade Weekly and Master Key. It’s an incredible property, and a great example of the independent hotels that aren’t on GDS and don’t usually work with travel advisors, which are the subject of this week’s article. We are signing a partnership with them and will become one of the first few agencies they work with as they expand their US market presence. I’m thrilled about the partnership after our stay and can’t wait to send them my clients.

Marissa Klurstein, @mklurstein on both TikTok and Instagram, is my guest on this week’s The Upgrade. She writes Happy Hoteling on Substack and is an expert on hidden gem hotels. I wanted to go straight to the source and share her knowledge with my readers since not every hotel is a Four Seasons, and many are worth a stay. The fact that advisors don’t receive a commission shouldn’t keep us from booking them (a subject I discuss with Marissa below) at rare finds like these if that’s the kind of experience a client is seeking.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Yours truly in Nice with my Bougie Bunnies, trying not to die of heat stroke. Follow along on our Euro Summer on Instagram, @AnneMarieBrown7

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Hidden Gem Hotels With of Happy Hoteling –

When Independent Properties Aren’t On GDS

For The Upgrade readers who are not in the travel industry, GDS stands for Global Distribution System. It’s the digital marketplace that connects travel sellers – like agents and booking sites – with airlines, hotels, and rental car companies, letting them check real-time availability and pricing and book it all in one place. Sabre, one of the largest GDS platforms, was born in the late 1950s as a joint project between American Airlines and IBM to automate the airline’s reservation system. It then grew into the independent global booking network that powers much of the travel industry today.

By using GDS, travel advisors can pull rates and attach our IATA numbers to bookings, which tells hotels how to pay our commission. Many travel agencies have developed booking portals that also pull from Sabre.

While long-time agents with extensive personal travel experience – like my Alpenglow Team – typically recommend hotels based on our own travels, a large portion of the travel agent industry uses GDS or consortiums such as Virtuoso to research which hotels to recommend.

For hotels, the upside of GDS is wide distribution through the agency network. For travelers, the downside is that not every hotel, particularly smaller, independent hotels in Europe, is on Sabre.

Marissa Klurstein of Happy Hoteling here on Substack is one of the experts at finding these smaller properties that are worth a stay.

I interviewed her for The Upgrade to tap into this enormous fount of knowledge.

A: Can you tell me a bit more about your background and how you got into the hospitality business?

M: It was not a linear path!

I’m a very fortunate only child with an older dad who took me to Capri every summer as I was growing up. Staying in the same room at the same hotel every year, I was obsessed with being a version of Eloise. I never liked to play “house” growing up, but I spent lots of time playing “hotel,” dreaming up the most out-there and unique places that I wished existed. I traveled extensively throughout my childhood and it was the hotels that most stuck in my mind. However, I tucked away my little kid dream of somehow working in the world of travel and instead, after college, began my career as a creative strategist and copywriter at a New York agency that worked with fashion, luxury, beauty, and lifestyle brands. I was always the idea girl of the office who had a way with words and a strong intuition about how people dream instead of how the data suggested they should dream.

In my 20s, I traveled a lot with one of my best friends from high school, and she would give me full rein to plan the trip. We would end up at these little gem hotels that still fit our age bracket’s budget, and her mom would always say that I should really do something with this knack I had. I never knew how that might come to be until I took a big splurge of a 30th birthday trip and stayed at the Ritz in Paris. The Delta strain of COVID had just hit, so rates were at an all-time low and AmEx had a special. So I stayed at a place I had long dreamed of and then started dreaming about how to make this a part of my real life. I wanted Hotel Marissa and Real Life Marissa to interact year-round.

I had the nugget of an idea to start posting about hotels on TikTok, and one day I decided to just go for it and committed to posting every day for a month to see where it would go. It turned out to go very far very fast. People on the internet trusted my taste just as my office colleagues did. I decided to turn my video sign-off, Happy Hoteling, into my brand name, which was available as a .com URL. As someone who has named many a brand in my career, I knew that green light was golden.

I started by making a comprehensive guide to the place I was so fortunate to know both as a tourist and a local, Capri. Then I broadened it to Rome hotels, Tuscan countryside hotels, and then all of Italy. I was still working as a freelance strategist and copywriter, but my heart was increasingly moving to travel. I decided to try working as a travel advisor to earn a living despite my gut telling me that my strength was not in anything that required attentive email checking.

I was incredibly fortunate to never have to search for clients, as they immediately appeared through TikTok, but I was eager to find another outlet to share my perspective and knowledge. So, on another late-night whim, I started a Substack and immediately shared it with my online community, which gave me the responsibility to actually stick with it. That was three years ago, which is nuts! When I hit the top 10 of the travel leaderboard I decided to give it a full-time go, and step away from what I didn’t love which was the travel advisor route. And now we are here!

A: Tell me about your publication on Substack.

M: Happy Hoteling is a home for “Good People with Good Taste.” It is a repository for the most extraordinary hotels around the world, with full, deeply-researched hotel lists for many of the most-traveled countries in the world – Italy, France, the US, Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, Japan, Sri Lanka, China, Morocco, South Africa, Central America…you get the gist. And then, for Founding Members, I offer a Google Map to every single Happy Hoteling-approved hotel across the globe, called “Happy Hoteling Around the World.” I’ve tried to build a single destination where any Hotel Person from anywhere can find a hotel that is much more than a place to lay your head, not a soulless structure, anywhere in the world. My archive is a kind of evergreen resource.

My deepest specialty is Italy – hotels and itineraries specifically. This is one big arm of Happy Hoteling, especially now that I live in Florence. I know this country extensively and deeply, both on and off the typical tourist track, and I take great pleasure in sharing it with the world. The goal is to help readers discover places they didn’t know existed, including hotels that are woven into the cultural fabric of their location, and return home with great memories and a deeper understanding of our world.

Happy Hoteling is also a place for my ideas and opinions – I have lots of both – and somehow I got lucky enough to discover that people are interested in them.

A: You were a travel advisor briefly. Tell me what you learned during that stint and what you wish other advisors knew?

M: Oh gosh, there’s a lot, but most importantly I wish advisors were more conscious of their role in over-tourism and the erosion of local culture and quality of life by sending clients to the same places over and over again. Advisors have a huge influence on where their clients travel, and there’s immense opportunity in and appetite for guidance on hotels and destinations that are not packed with other Americans.

The other thing, which is controversial but I don’t think should be, is that advisors have a great opportunity to encourage clients to travel in a way that allows for spontaneity, getting out of their comfort zone, and learning something about local culture even if they think they don’t want to. Advisors can curate wonderful cultural immersions that don’t feel like a chore or a box to tick. Too often, however, they focus primarily on creating a seamless experience.

M: I’m big on the concept of a planning fee to compensate for non-commissionable properties. Travel advisors work hard and spent so much time on planning every trip. That time should be properly compensated, but I don’t feel it has to come from the hotels themselves, or at least not from every hotel on a multi-stop itinerary. Creating access to these smaller hotels that are not on the GDS is where I hope Happy Hoteling creates value because it takes a great deal of time to find these places.

Consortia like Relais & Chateaux aim to bring small, independently owned hotels to the marketplace through various channels, like advisors. What do you think of them? Are there any smaller consortia you know of that do a good job of creating awareness of these properties?

Relais & Chateau is the absolute best for this, without a doubt. To me, it’s the most trusted name for hotels that are soulful, character-filled, and part of the culture they inhabit. I particularly respect them as they have still not partnered with a mass distributor like a Marriott or IHG, which is where I think these consortia start to lose their appeal and level of taste.

Leading Hotels of the World and Small Luxury Hotels are two others I respect, and I think they have bridged a huge gap in the independent hotel space, but they are often properties that can also be found through Virtuoso or AmEx Fine Hotels and Resorts, so they tend to become more American-heavy than R&C for example.

Tablet is not the same, as it is an OTA (online travel agency), but it probably has what I would consider the biggest inventory of independent hotels worldwide that it makes commissionable.

Smaller consortia like Pretty Hotels and Room + Wild are great for discovery, but at the end of the day they have their own advisors. This is to say there is immense white space – it would be my ultimate dream for Happy Hoteling to become something of the sort.

A: How do you go about finding these “hidden gem” properties, and how do you propose solving the marketing challenge if they aren’t willing to pay commission to advisors?

M: Oh man, so many ways! First, I have been “collecting” hotels since I was a kid, and I have a strangely good memory so I remember where that well-dressed family from Germany we met when I was twelve vacations, and I have pored over legacy travel publications throughout my life. When I worked with some of the world’s biggest and greatest luxury brands, I always paid attention to where the clients with the best taste traveled, and I’d hunt down where they stayed as if there were a prize for finding it.

The biggest paths of discovery for me are the most labor-intensive, and honestly they require zooming all the way in to a particularly wonderful part of the globe on a Google Map and then looking at every single hotel in the area, searching for gems. Because I love historic hotels, I often go through the deep inventory of listed buildings in any country or destination of interest and look for the ones that are hotels and which of those seem worth staying at. It involves some stalker-like behavior too, like looking through the thousands of accounts that some of my favorite legacy fashion editors, photographers, tastemakers and creatives follow on Instagram. Hotel owners and concierges with great personal style and taste, too.

For a travel advisor, I see it much like the reason I have a paywall. Readers who want to discover these hotels should realize that when an advisor goes deep into research to find these gems it’s reasonable to charge a planning fee for all that work. If people want to stay at a hidden gem, they should pay for the effort to discover it.

A: What are some of your favorite off-the-beaten path properties that you’d like people to know about?

It’s so hard to choose! Nearly everywhere I stay sits in this category. La Minerva in Capri is top of mind, even though it’s certainly on the beaten path – it’s a family-run business that makes every single guest feel like the most important one, and staying there is purchasing a path to the heart of the island that many never find. I have sent some of my most picky and successful friends there and they love it as much as they do the Belmonds of the world. In the same vein, La Minervetta in Sorrento, Palazzo Niccolini al Duomo in Florence, and Castello di Potentino in the Tuscan countryside – all destinations on the beaten path but they all have an off-the-beaten path feel.

When a hotel is in a location that’s off the beaten path, I usually don’t really want that many more people to know about it because I’m so conscious of protecting locals’ quality of life. There has to be some barrier to entry, to ensure it won’t become a hotspot where rates triple and the local culture changes. Verana, in Yelapa, Mexico, which can only reached by speedboat and a hefty hike up through the jungle, is a truly special place. In Northern California, where I’m from, the Inn at Newport Ranch on the Mendocino Coast is another – and luxury is served with true authenticity. Grandhotel Giessbach on Lake Brienz in Switzerland, where I went with my dad as a kid and then returned a year and a half ago is a near-perfect hotel in my mind. It’s totally from the past but so comfortable for today. In Italy hundreds come to mind as so much of the country is wonderfully off-the-beaten-path for the American audience at least. A couple to share are the Wes Anderson Grand Hotel Bagni Nuovi in Bormio in the Dolomites – for the most insanely wonderful spa experience and grand dining room – and Terre di Sacra in Maremma on the Tuscan Coast.

A: What do you look for in a hotel that makes it worth recommending?

M: A point of view, a sense of place, and an opportunity to leave with an understanding of the place the hotel is in! More specifically, family-owned properties, historic places handed down for centuries, and a hotel that cannot be compared to any other because it is simply one of a kind. A big name means nothing to me if offers a cookie-cutter experience, or all rooms look the same, etc.

A: What are some expectations that American travelers have that they should leave at the door when staying in smaller properties in Europe?

M: It depends where, but all the amenities that come with a well-known property. They might not have room service or even a TV in the room (a huge plus for me), but they have so much to offer in ways that matter for the memories that stick with you for a lifetime. Another thing to leave at home is the expectation that everyone will always speak English, and that it is a requirement for being able to stay somewhere. As English-speakers we are so blessed that our language is an international one, but for most every other country around the world this is not the case. With a translation app and the understanding that a smile is universal you can stay anywhere, language barrier be damned.

In general, I would encourage people to stay in places that don’t tick every single box on their wish list. When I was a travel agent, the least rewarding itineraries were for the clients who had the longest criteria checklists.

A: “Slow travel” is trending online, but the reality is that most US travelers have limited vacation time and are constrained by school schedules. If a couple with kids were to come to Italy, what route would you recommend for them? What do you think of the slow travel trend and the reality?

M: In theory, slow travel is the dream, but as you said, for most Americans it’s not realistic, and there shouldn’t be any shame in that. I’m wary of sharing any one route as THE route because it’s the antithesis of how I view travel. I’d encourage families to think of Thanksgiving, December, Presidents Day and spring break as great times to visit Italy simply because they’re not summer. Cities are especially hard for kids to enjoy when it’s so hot and seeing the sights comes with long lines that are no fun for anyone. I’d also encourage parents to take their kids where the adults want to go, not to a specifically family-friendly destination or hotel, as long is there no age requirement. I don’t subscribe to the idea that there has to be a lot of kid-specific infrastructure in place for kids to have fun. Fun can be had anywhere, and grown-ups who are interested in the world are the most likely to create fun for kids by exposing them to new things without expecting 100% comfort 100% of the time.

I encourage people to go where their own families’ interests lie. Do your kids really like tennis, for example? Make an itinerary out of hotels with great courts. Or maybe you’re a hiking family – take to the many places you can hike, from the coast of Liguria to the coast of Tuscany, to Valle d’Aosta, or the Aeolian Islands of Sicily. Hiking doesn’t need to equate to the Dolomites alone, just as a beach vacation doesn’t need to be restricted to the Amalfi Coast.

If you are traveling in the summer, it’s lovely to remember that Italians really take advantage of their country on their time off, so kids can be found nearly everywhere and they don’t need to speak the same language to hunt for seashells on the beach together.

One way I like to lean into slow travel is a longer game – returning to the same destination multiple times to really get to know the place and its people, even if you can only stay for a few days at a time. Tradition is so powerful in travel!

🗝️ Room Report — Le Negresco, Nice, France

During my stay in Nice, I had the chance to tour the iconic Le Negresco Hotel. You may recognize the hotel’s iconic pink dome from many postcards and renderings of Nice’s sweeping, angel-wing coastline. Henri Negresco, the son of a Romanian innkeeper who worked his way up from confectioner to casino director, opened the hotel in 1912 and wanted it to pull in the richest travelers on the Riviera. World War I decimated his business, and the building became a military hospital. Negresco died nearly broke in 1920.

The hotel’s second life started in 1957, when a local businessman named Mesnage bought the run-down property and handed it to his daughter, Jeanne Augier. She ran it for the next sixty-two years, until her death in 2019, and she treated the place as one long collecting project. She bought furniture, paintings, and objects across France until the collection passed 6,000 pieces, spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries. When you stay here, you are sleeping inside a private museum.

The Salon Royal, under the dome designed by Edouard Niermans’ who also designed the Moulin Rouge in Paris, holds a Baccarat chandelier of 16,800 crystals. Tsar Nicholas II commissioned a matching pair for the Kremlin, the Russian Revolution cut the order short, and the Negresco ended up with the one that never shipped east. A few steps away sits Niki de Saint Phalle’s bright yellow Nana, so 17th-century portraits and pop art share the same room.

The hotel runs 102 rooms and 28 suites across five categories.

Exclusive and Deluxe rooms give you the traditional French look: rich fabrics, antique pieces, warm colors, with views over either the sea or the city. The suites are where Augier’s taste really shows as each one is built around a person or a period. La Marie-Antoinette leans on period furniture and silk, La Pompadour does 18th-century wood paneling and Regency pieces, there’s a Chanel-themed room, and the The Empire suite, one of Augier’s own favorites, comes with eagles, griffins, and a swan-neck bed that nods to Empress Josephine.

Augier had no children, so she set the hotel up to outlive her on her own terms. Rumor has it that Bill Gates once offered a blank check and told her she could name her price to sell him the hotel, but she refused. Instead, in 2009 she created FDMAN, the Fonds de Dotation Mesnage-Augier-Negresco, and willed the hotel to it. That fund owns Le Negresco today and directs the proceeds toward four causes Augier cared about: helping people in need, improving life for people with physical disabilities, fighting animal cruelty, and preserving French culture. The money from your stay feeds those causes.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

Global tourism returns to pre-COVID levels

Global tourism recovered to pre-Covid levels in 2024, according to UN Tourism, reports Associate Editor Rashaad Jorden.

About 1.4 billion people traveled internationally last year, up 11% from the year before. That increase was driven in part by substantial growth in visitors to Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Tourism to Asia-Pacific was boosted by China easing visa requirements, with the country seeing a significant jump in tourist arrivals during the first three quarters of last year. UN Tourism projects that 2025 international tourist arrivals will grow 3% to 5%.

Hotel demand is climbing, and not only at the top

US hotel demand is rebounding across every tier, Skift reports. RevPAR rose 6.7% year over year on a trailing 10-week average through June 13, then accelerated to 9.7% for the week ending June 20. Luxury led the field, up 17.4%, with upscale higher by 9% and mid-market up 3%. The gains cluster Monday through Thursday, which points to business travelers coming back rather than weekend leisure deals. If you’re watching rate trends before locking in fall bookings, keep this in mind.

Travel keeps growing, but the pace has cooled

International travel is still expanding, though more slowly than forecast. UN Tourism reports 307 million international trips in the first quarter of 2026, about 6 million more than the same period last year, a 2% increase. That sits below the 3% to 4% the agency had projected, with the slowdown tied in part to disruption in the Middle East in March. For all of 2025, arrivals finished up 4%, reaching an estimated 1.52 billion.

FAA brings AI into the control tower

The Federal Aviation Administration is moving AI from talking point to working tool, TravelPulse reports. The agency is testing technology built to reduce runway incidents and flag conflicts before a plane leaves the gate. Three firms, Palantir, Thales, and Air Space Intelligence, competed on the SMART program, with Air Space Intelligence winning the contract to deploy the system. It could be operational in some form later this year. Former NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt told Politico the technology can sharpen the FAA’s awareness of safety risks, while warning against over-reliance: human judgment remains essential for now. For your clients who watch the headlines on air travel safety, this could be worth pointing out.

Issue 11 · World Cup Fever In America

In The Upgrade this week:

1. Pre-Departure – The World Cup Showcases America, Have Our Hotels Benefited?

2. The Room Report – Covent Garden Hotel, London

3. The Lobby Bar – Stop Guzzling Ranch, Marriott Bets on Wellness, Hotel Investment is Heating Up

Travelers,

I’ve spent the last week in England, staying at Estelle Manor and the Firmdale Covent Garden Hotel in London with my Bougie Bunnies. (To follow along on my IG stories, go to @AnneMarieBrown7 on Instagram). Between juggling bedtimes, museums, a near-constant search for fries for my five-year-old, and meetings with hotels and other advisors (and Substack friends!), I’ve also spent a shocking amount of time consuming World Cup content on Instagram. I can’t seem to get enough of the Europeans and others experiencing small-town culture in America. From Japanese tourists chowing down on Texas BBQ, to Scottish fans waking up the Boston suburbs with bagpipes, and Rock Chalk Algeria, my feed has become a happier place than it’s been in months. Experiencing all this from abroad while the world, in pubs down the street, focuses on my home country feels rather surreal.

In The Upgrade this week, I am taking a detour from my planned articles and jumping on the World Cup bandwagon to discuss how the numbers have played out in the hospitality world.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Yours truly at the Neal’s Yard area next to the Covent Garden Hotel, where I’ve watched the World Cup from abroad. Monty Python, (one of my heroes), lived here.

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

I Can’t Get Enough of the World Cup Social Media

I co-own a company with enormous depth of special event experience. We have run groups to the Masters, Kentucky Derby, Wimbledon, Final Four, Super Bowl, and US Open for years. So I was surprised to find we had very few clients who would be traveling for the World Cup.

Did our client experience indicate a larger dearth of demand?

The 2026 tournament expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches across 16 host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and FIFA reported more than 5 million tickets sold. Early booking data as of December 2025 looked promising. For stays around the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium (just across the Hudson River from New York), booking volumes climbed 102% year over year, with ADR (Average Daily Rates) up more than 72% for that period. For the US opening match at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, volumes were up 80.5% and ADR increased more than 21% year over year.

Hotels built their entire summer strategies around those holds: pricing up, pausing other bookings, turning away regular summer business to protect capacity, and in some cases investing in World Cup-specific renovations and activations.¹

The trouble is that a lot of early “demand” was artificial.

FIFA had made mass room bookings at hotels in host cities, and then cancelled those holds to the tune of roughly 70% of the room blocks they had reserved in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle.² ³

The AHLA (America Hotel Lodging Association) surveyed more than 200 hoteliers across 11 US host markets in May and found that nearly 80% reported bookings tracking below initial forecasts.⁵ In Kansas City, bookings lagged below normal June and July levels entirely. In Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, many hoteliers described the tournament as a “non-event.”⁵ About 65-70% of respondents cited visa barriers and geopolitical concerns as the top constraint on international demand.⁵

Sticker shock has also been deterrent. Ticket prices reached record highs, with FIFA’s official listings for the final at MetLife Stadium at $32,970 per seat, more than triple the average Super Bowl resale price from February.

Occupancy Levels and ADR Lift

So, if demand had such a rocky start, how about rates? Was a rate lift seen across the cities hosting matches and teams?

CoStar’s Jan Freitag put it plainly. This is “more of a rate event than an occupancy event.”⁶ Hotels are charging significantly more for the rooms that do fill.

CoStar projects New York RevPAR to grow roughly 16% year over year during June and July, driven almost entirely by a 14% ADR increase rather than higher occupancy.⁷ Across US host cities broadly, rooms on match days are running about 31% higher than on non-match nights.⁸ For context, when the US last hosted the World Cup (in 1994), RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) rose 6.9% in June and July on a 5% ADR increase. The 2026 number currently sits closer to a 1.7% national RevPAR lift.⁹

What about last minute demand?

The AHLA reported that nearly 80% of hotel bookings across host cities were running below initial forecasts. In Kansas City, bookings lagged below normal rates for June and July.

At the start of 2026, hotels hiked prices and set minimum-stay requirements. By March, properties were facing what one analyst called a “reality check associated with the lack of demand,” and group-stage rates started coming back down.

Hopefully, these heartwarming videos will encourage people to make plans to visit and attend the final matches — an optimistic result that might not yet be evident.

Amex GBT Consulting noted that historically, 70% of accommodations for previous World Cups were booked in the 30 days leading up to matches.¹⁰ Knockout-round bookings are expected to move once fans know which teams are advancing, with markets like New York and Los Angeles better positioned to capture that surge than secondary venues.⁷

Many travelers are making decisions much closer to match day, watching ticket prices and booking only once they know which match they want to attend. The expectation is that as the tournament progresses, social media will amplify demand curves, with fans attending matches creating real-time FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that drives additional last-minute travel.

The broader national picture is more modest. CoStar and Tourism Economics projected US hotel RevPAR to increase 1.7% year over year during June and July overall, with host markets seeing 12.7% RevPAR growth for those months and 3.8% for the full year. For context, when the US hosted the World Cup in 1994, RevPAR rose 6.9% in June and July, largely on a 5% ADR increase.⁹

Of course, hotels don’t reflect the whole picture. Short-term rental (STR) platforms are faring better than hotels in some markets. Kansas City saw a 44% increase in STR demand from last year, and Mexican host cities are seeing sharply higher short-term rental activity, with Guadalajara up 136% and Monterrey up 125% versus the same period last year. The price differential explains a lot: STR listings in Mexican host cities are running around $100 per night, compared to roughly $300 per night in places like Kansas City, Boston, and Miami.

Honestly, I feel the social media coverage of travelers being warmly welcomed – meeting people from all different walks of life across the US in cities and small towns – has done more for the US tourism industry than any campaign could hope to achieve.

In the meantime, we are watching the games where and when we can, between entertaining our little bunnies and packing/unpacking as we move along on our giant Euro Trip.

🗝️ Room Report — Covent Garden Hotel By Firmdale, London

In the first week of our Bougie Bunny Euro Tour with our kids, ages 5 and 7, we experienced both Estelle Manor in the countryside and the Covent Garden Hotel in London. The space to spread out at Estelle Manor and the grounds to let our kids run wild were amazing after a long flight. I’m glad we spent the first few nights there, despite some activity coordination issues. Overall, they are demanding to return to Estelle in the future.

For anyone who has followed me for a while, you may know that I am a die-hard Lanesborough fan. If I’m traveling through London or booking clients in the city, that’s typically where I put them – not only for the traditional Bridgerton vibes, but because of how well they treat kids, they have a hotel cat named Lilibet, an indoor pool, an ideal location next to the park, and truly impeccable service.

With Royal Ascot overlapping our stay, the rates at the Lanesborough were enough to make me look elsewhere for once, and we settled on Covent Garden. I’ve never stayed in that part of the city before, but it reminds me a lot of a mixture of SoHo and the theater district in NYC.

The little streets of the Seven Dials area specifically, where the Firmdale Covent Garden is located, are dotted with perfumeries and boutiques, small cafes and classic pubs. Yes, it is full of people, but it didn’t feel overwhelmingly crowded by any means.

I loved how close we were to the British Museum, Transport Museum, and theaters.

Fast Facts:

• 58 rooms

• Located on Monmouth Street in Seven Dials/West End

• Room we stayed in: a Four Poster Room connecting with a Luxury Room, total of £1,782 per night for the two rooms.

Firmdale and the Hotel Itself:

Firmdale has 11 hotels across London and New York, all designed by Kit Kemp. Tim and Kit Kemp co-founded Firmdale in 1985. The collection has grown to 11 hotels across London and New York. Kit Kemp, the creative director, holds an MBE and designs every property herself, filling each hotel with whimsical design, rich patterned textiles, and a mix of modern and traditional art of and furniture. It feels like a manor house designed for fairies.

History:

The building dates to the 1890s and originally operated as a French hospital from 1867 to 1948, with the words “Nouvel Hôpital et Dispensaire Français” still visible in the brickwork. The hospital structure, formerly called the Shaftesbury Hospital, was designed by Thomas Verity, an architect better known for designing theatres, in 1899. So the building itself has a theatre architect’s DNA, which is a nice detail given where it sits. After the hospital closed in 1948, the building sat in various uses before Firmdale converted it. The Covent Garden Hotel opened in April 1996

What we loved:

The rooms were huge by London standards. They have very high ceilings and plenty of space to spread out. The lock off configuration for our room connecting to our kids’ room was awesome, and allowed us to breathe while they could leave their toys strewn about with impunity. Let’s be honest, they still played musical beds and came to sleep with us most nights, but the illusion of separate spaces was great.

The Staff:

This is where they really shine. We were greeted by name each time we walked in the door. They really made an effort to make our kids feel special.

When I mentioned on a room tour with the GM that I wish hotels would provide snack baskets for kids so they don’t raid the minibar, a basket magically appeared in our room that evening.

That is service – it’s just the kind of touch that luxury hotels should strive for.

We greatly enjoyed afternoon tea in the drawing room that we ordered through room service, cocktails at Brasserie Max (try the Caper Martini, it was fantastic), and breakfast.

Kids:

They have kid-sized robes and mini slippers in the rooms as well as coloring books and colored pencils. Our kids were thrilled. It’s really lovely to go to a hotel where kids and made to feel like they are welcomed and not to be kept separate.

Downsides:

The only minor complaint I have is that the transfer the hotel arranged didn’t leave quite enough time to make it to Gatwick, and we almost missed our flight to Bolzano, which would have been a huge bummer.

The showers also inexplicably lack a glass panel and the water gets everywhere on the floor, so allocate floor towels accordingly.

Otherwise, I’d absolutely recommend this hotel for families staying in London.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

The TSA had to remind World Cup visitors not to chug ranch at security. International fans descending on U.S. cities for the World Cup have discovered ranch dressing and, apparently, cannot get enough of it. On the first day of the tournament, the TSA posted on Threads: “If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home.” It only escalated from there. A follow-up post read: “your carry-on wasn’t actually made for 4 bottles of ranch & a taser.” Ranch is a liquid, standard 3.4-oz carry-on rules apply. Pack accordingly. Yahoo!KTLA 5 News

Marriott just bought its way into luxury wellness. On June 10, Marriott finalized a joint venture with the Leali family to bring Lefay, an Italian luxury wellness brand, into its portfolio. Lefay currently operates two properties in Italy and will be bookable through Marriott’s platforms, with Bonvoy integration expected by late 2026. This is Marriott’s first brand dedicated exclusively to wellness, sitting alongside Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis in the Luxury Group. I’m currently at Sonnwies in the Dolomites and it’s parental wellness to the max. If a Dolomites wellness trip is on your list in the next year or two, now is a good time to start paying attention.

Luxury hotel investment is heating up. A JLL report out this week put numbers behind what we’re seeing on the ground: ultra-luxury properties with ADRs above $1,000 have seen RevPAR reach $872 through April 2026, hitting 148% of pre-pandemic levels. Hotel investment activity surged 115% year over year in Q1 2026, with the Four Seasons Orlando and Four Seasons Jackson Hole selling together for a combined $1.1 billion. High-end hotel real estate hasn’t looked like this in years.

The Lotte New York Palace has new management. Lotte spent over $1.3 billion assembling control of its 909-room Manhattan flagship and this week handed operations to Highgate. Lotte stays on as owner.

Sources

4. Hotel Dive — “Hotel bookings, ADR up across 2026 FIFA World Cup host cities” (Dec. 2025): https://www.hoteldive.com/news/fifa-world-cup-2026-booking-volume-adr-increase/808374/

5. Hotel Dive — “World Cup to bring ‘modest’ RevPAR growth to US: report” (Feb. 2026): https://www.hoteldive.com/news/fifa-world-cup-modest-revpar-growth-us-report/812826/

6. CoStar — “Hoteliers’ optimism weakens as US World Cup demand softer than expected” (Mar. 2026): https://www.costar.com/article/1608606242/hoteliers-optimism-weakens-as-us-world-cup-demand-softer-than-expected

7. NPR — “Hotels have a big World Cup problem: Bookings are running far below projections” (May 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/05/04/nx-s1-5810626/world-cup-hotels-tourism-bookings-visitors

8. Al Jazeera — “Low US hotel bookings paint grim hospitality picture at the World Cup” (May 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/5/6/low-us-hotel-bookings-paint-grim-hospitality-picture-at-the-world-cup

9. Hotel Dive — “’We’re holding our breath’: What hotels are expecting from the FIFA World Cup” (May 2026): https://www.hoteldive.com/news/what-hotels-are-expecting-from-fifa-world-cup-booking-data/821334/

10. Skift — “Hotels Are Hoping For a Last-Minute World Cup Surge. Will It Come?” (Jun. 2026): https://skift.com/2026/06/11/hotels-hope-last-minute-world-cup-bookings/

11. Front Office Sports — “World Cup Fans Face ‘Significant Sticker Shock’ for Hotels” (Jun. 2026): https://frontofficesports.com/u-s-hotels-still-struggling-to-fill-rooms-as-world-cup-approaches/

12. Lodging Magazine — “Game-Time Decisions Are Reshaping World Cup Hotel Demand” (Jun. 2026): https://lodgingmagazine.com/game-time-decisions-are-reshaping-world-cup-hotel-demand/

Issue 10 · I Love You, But I Won’t Travel With You

In The Upgrade this week:

• Pre-Departure – I love you, but I won’t travel with you. Not every friend is a travel friend, especially when you have kids.

• The Room Report – Reporting Live From Estelle Manor with My Kids

• The Lobby Bar – Four Seasons is coming to Sevilla, the Sagrada Família's completion, Mandarin Oriental's Mallorca debut, a Kerzner leadership move, the World Cup hotel flop, and what's happening at U.S. international airports this summer.

Travelers,

I’m reporting live from Estelle Manor with my Bougie Bunnies this week - read the Room Report to see how it’s lived up to my expectations a year later and with my children in tow this time.

Given the complexities of traveling with my own children, how do I select another family to spend the kind of concentrated time together that travel demands?

The answer is my rubric below. After my 20’s and 30’s spent learning how I travel with others, and what works best for my style of travel, here’s my unfiltered take on traveling with friends

Happy travels! Anne Marie

My little family on a Land Rover experience at Estelle Manor

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

I love you, but I won’t travel with you

After some very number-heavy articles the last few weeks, this week’s The Upgrade | Weekly is more of a personal essay / rant. I’m currently traveling on a 3.5-week trip with my children and husband through Europe, and have observed families traveling together in the wild.

I like to think my kids are great travelers. The truth is, they are kids. Jack is basically Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and is just as likely to launch a stick at his sister’s head as to agree to wear an adorable suit jacket (see my IG this week). Malia is easily one of my favorite people to travel with, but is in constant need of my 100% attention - which makes it difficult to produce work like The Upgrade or you know, trips that I design as part of my actual job.

From the safety of my sunglasses, I silently judge other people’s children as they throw their spaghetti at each other, while praying my own children won’t do the exact same thing in five minutes. We swear we won’t break out the iPads, and then by day 3 we are so desperate for a meal where no one has a meltdown due to the time change that we cave and we are that family.

We will meet up with another family towards the end of our trip and share a villa for a week. I am certain that after 2 weeks of concentrated time with my own children sans childcare, we will be more than ready for a week with our friends.

We have traveled with these friends several times over the duration of our friendship. Our kids get along great whether we are in the mountains of Colorado or in a villa on Lake Como. They are up for spending similar amounts as we are on things like restaurants, memorable experiences, and hotels, and they keep similar schedules. This is pretty much a unicorn situation.

Friends at home and travel friends are distinct groups, and they do not necessarily overlap.

When you find a fellow travel family who approaches parenting, airport timing, travel budget, and trip pacing the same way you do, hold on tight. Treasure them forever.

Traveling with a mismatched friend or family, on the other hand, can ruin a friendship or relationship.

Over time, I have identified certain things worth discussing before you go overseas with another family or friend. Have these conversations early, (and be honest). It will save the friendship and your sanity.

1. Be Super Clear About Your Accommodation Budget.

This is perhaps the most obvious and yet most difficult discussion to have ahead of time. You need to ask your friends:

“How do you allocate your budget for a trip? Are you looking to maximize your dining experience and don’t care about the hotel? Are you a business-class-only traveler who prefers Airbnbs over dropping $2k per night on hotel rooms for your family? What is an amount that would feel shocking to you to spend on a restaurant bill or an excursion?”

I have many friends that are perfectly comfortable sharing a queen bed with their spouse in an Airbnb. I am not that person. My spouse is like a giant furnace, and queen beds spell disaster for us. Trust me, no one is happy when I don’t sleep.

My travel is precious to me, and I would sacrifice a lot of other comforts at home (or maybe a limb), to have a more ideal experience when traveling.

Table stakes for me include: a king bed for us, a real bed for my kids (not a couch), air conditioning in bedrooms and main area, and good pillows. I undoubtedly prefer hotels to rental homes, but will make an exception and share an Airbnb if I’m traveling with another family that I know and trust will travel the same way we do.

If you are considering travel with other friends, get on the same page about what you are comfortable paying per night for lodging before you book anything.

I have made this mistake before and been out more money than I’d like to admit when a friend changes their mind and I’m stuck with a non-refundable hotel room or rental house that I wouldn’t have booked if it were just my own family.

The bottom line is this: never take the financial risk for accommodations until the other family has confirmed they are 100% in and the day they will pay you by (preferably the same day you pay the deposit).

Get travel insurance – specifically cancel for any reason coverage - in case they cancel, and include it in the total amount of the trip that you split from the beginning.

Also, make sure they have looked at flight pricing before booking anything. A surprising number of people don’t factor in flight costs and then pull out of a trip because the flights end up being too high.

If this is a difficult discussion to have, don’t travel with that friend and move on.

2. What’s better – rental home or hotel?

Rental homes can be great for common spaces and cooking meals in, but they almost always create uneven room situations that nobody wants to negotiate on arrival.

Who gets the Master? Who gets the pullout? The unspoken rule seems to be that the person who books the rental home gets the Master bedroom. However, there may be occasions where one family has a baby that needs space for a pack-n-play that only the Master has, etc.

Different friends may also have a different understanding of dividing costs based on which rooms each person get. I found this was more common in my 20’s on bachelorette trips when budgets were tight, but this disagreement rears its head even today for friends who travel with extended family and are expected to pay the same when they have been delegated to the trundle bed as the cousin/sibling/family who take over two rooms for themselves and their children. At that point, you’re just subsidizing someone else’s vacation. Go with a hotel.

Make sure to discuss room allocations and price per family before anyone books the rental home.

I’m typically team hotel for this reason: everyone gets the room they paid for, and there’s no awkward conversation after a long travel day.

3. Match your pacing and routines.

My children are early risers. I’ve lived an entire lifetime by the time a 10am sleeper emerges. I have some family members that are like this and it drives me crazy on a trip. I find myself asking my kids to tiptoe around in the morning to avoid waking them up, we push activities to accommodate their late starts, and I just end up feeling resentful.

I completely understand if they want to sleep in on a vacation, but that trip will not be with me and my kids.

Have a frank discussion with your friends about daily routines and expectations before you travel together. If you’re a morning lark and they are a mid-afternoon pigeon or a night owl, it’s not going to work.

4. Set a commitment timeline.

I know my travel plans six months to a year in advance. If I ask a friend or another family to join us on a trip, I need a commitment or a “no” as soon as possible.

I am, admittedly, a speedy decision maker. If I bring up a trip with another friend and they say, “Yeah, let’s do it,” I’m going to take that seriously and begin making plans. I have learned that for a lot of people, “Let’s do it” really can mean anything from “I’m in, let’s go on the date you mentioned, I’m ready to book” to “I would like to do that before I die but I can’t believe you took that discussion seriously – how could you be so obtuse?”

Friends, there are other people I can ask, and if it’s going to be just our family, I’ll plan accordingly.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a friend won’t say “yes” or “no” within 1-2 weeks. Their indecision gums up the planning gears. I have learned to set a deadline and ask for a “yes” or “no” within that time frame.

Yes, I am incredibly privileged to have the financial resources to hire child and pet care if we are going to be out of town. I also co-own a company, so don’t have to request PTO. My parents are no longer alive and my family all lives in another state very far away, so I occasionally have to rely on my in-laws, who are absolute saints.

That said, I’ve never understood people who can’t commit to things quickly outside of those constraints.

Keeping someone waiting while you decide is not a small ask. Clear is kind.

5. Share the mental load.

I plan travel for hundreds of clients every year. I love the initial planning stage: choosing the hotels, selecting the activities. There is a reason this is my chosen career.

However, my vacation is my vacation from work. I do not love being the sole person on a trip who: navigates where we are going on Google Maps, changes restaurant reservations, texts everyone what we are doing the next day because people would rather borrow my brain than pull up the itinerary in their email, herds the group like a kindergarten teacher.

The time for input from the other travelers on a trip is during the early planning process, not mid-trip, not the day before the activity, not when we check in to a hotel. If you wanted to do something else, you should have brought that up during the 20 emails we exchanged 6 months ago.

I am not the tour director on a trip that I am not being paid to travel on.

Everyone should listen to the house or hotel orientation.

Everyone should be willing to look up directions on their phone and navigate, not just the person who decided to pay a data plan.

Everyone should read the itinerary and check it every night, so there aren’t nonstop questions of “Where are we going tomorrow? What are we doing next?”

Share the mental load and don’t just be a passenger princess. If you want to add someone to the dinner reservation, you make the call to the restaurant – you don’t ask the person who made the res to make adjustments because your plans changed.

6. Be responsible for your own stuff.

You did not leave your brain at home. You are an adult. I am not here to remind you to get your passport out of the safe or track down the sunglasses you left in an Uber.

7. Practice time management.

If everyone is waiting on you, that is a problem. If you know you need to use the restroom before a drive, handle it before you come downstairs. Don’t wait until everyone is loaded in the car to disappear. You are not my child and I will leave without you.

8. Read your texts.

A trip requires communication. Pay for international cell service, charge your phone, and bring a battery pack charger out with you each day.

I should not be the only person on the trip with a charged phone and an international data plan. You should not rely on hotel wi-fi for your phone data.

9. Your friends are not your bank.

Split everything or take turns paying for meals. Decide which of these options you will commit to with your friends before you depart.

Use Splitwise and make sure everyone knows how to set it up before you leave so there’s no excuse that they didn’t understand it.

Everybody on the trips settles their Splitwise before you fly home. Don’t make your friends chase you down for payments.

Get enough cash before the trip (if going to a country with sketchy ATMs) that you aren’t relying on other people to be your bank. This seems to be on an ongoing issue we encounter when traveling with friends even in our 40’s, such that I’ve now taken to texting everyone a week before hand and reminding them we are pulling out enough cash for our own family, but everyone should be prepared with enough to tip etc.

Practice all the above and you will have a better time. These are lessons we all have to learn at some point between age 21 and 40, but hopefully this article shortened that learning curve a bit for some of you.

🗝️ Room Report — Reporting Live From Estelle Manor with Kids

It’s rare that I make it back to the same hotel twice in one year. However, I had such a spectacular time at Estelle Manor over my birthday a year ago, that I left saying I wanted to bring my children to experience the hotel.

In an unusual Room Report this week, here is my experience as to whether the hotel lived up to the hype in my head. I will caveat this review with calling out that we had a great a time this week during our stay. Estelle Manor has only been around for 3 years, and does a lot of things really well that drive me nuts at other places with higher ADRs (read my article “What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong” for my punch list). They are figuring out their identity between members club, luxury hotel, and family-friendly resort. This is a difficult task. Since they’ve decided to make the family friendly aspect a priority, my review is an honest report of our family’s experience.

Unit we stayed in: Woodland Cabin

Children are not allowed to stay in the main Manor house, but can stay in the Stable Rooms, Garden Rooms, houses, or Woodland Cabins. The Woodland Cabins are little wooden octagonal homes with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a central fireplace.

Room Positives:

Much more space to spread out than the Garden Room I stayed in last year. Having two bedrooms has been amazing as everyone adjusts to the time zone. We have loved our evenings around the fire, watching the rain from the rocking chairs on the front porch, and letting the kids adventure in the woods out back.

Room Negatives:

There is a surprising lack of clothes storage. Each bedroom has a large wardrobe with two drawers and an area to hang things….and that’s it. If you are a packing-cube evangelist like me, you will need to resort to floor organization. Our situation started out ok… now it’s chaos. No one can find their underwear. We are missing a single shoe. My anxiety is high.

The cabins are very dark. They seriously need more lighting in here - especially the bathrooms. I have completely given up on makeup.

The fireplaces are made of glass, in the center of the room, immediately at little kid height. My son is 5 and the amount of times we say “Don’t touch that!” after lighting a cozy fire in the evenings is…stressful, to say the least.

Dining:

For some inexplicable reason, most dining outlets do not open for lunch until 12. For any parents of young children, this is a major issue. By then, my kids are losing their ever loving tiny minds. You can’t even order from the pool QR code until 12pm on the dot. Give me fries or give me death. If Estelle Manor hopes to develop their kid-friendly reputation, this needs to change immediately as it’s torture. There are grab-and-go sandwiches and a handful of options from the Potting Shed, but they need to add kid-friendly options to this menu.

• The brasserie - one of the better meals we have had with our kids. Service was fast. Breakfast is a simple buffet that’s not blowing anyone away, but it’s included and honestly, my kids mostly survive on a diet of croissants and prosciutto for breakfast during trips anyway.

• The Armoury (Japanese) was as good as I remembered it, but the tables are tiny and my kids dropped their chopsticks about every five minutes.

• The Billiard Room does not allow children - we are eating there tomorrow on a much-needed date night.

• The pool food situation needs help - the menu is small and it takes a long time.

• The terrace would be a better option if it opened earlier.

• The Glass House - this is their casual pizza and burger option. We ate on the patio and that was great so our kids could go explore the garden and make friends at other tables of families also trying to get their children to not throw pasta at each other.

• It is important to note that photos are not allowed inside the Manor House or the restaurants, apparently. This is a shame as they are such beautiful spaces, but thankfully, I have some photos from my last time here.

Activities -

We were looking forward to lead-led horseback riding for our Bougie Bunnies, but the hotel has a different pony that can accommodate kids under 6, and apparently that pony just retired. So, I was left with the choice of watching my littlest lose his mind while his sister rode and he didn’t, or scratching the whole exercise. I chose the latter.

We did the falconry walk in the forest and my kids loved it. I liked that it was different from the falconry displays we’ve done at places like Adare Manor.

Last year, my girlfriends and I did the Ineos Grenadier Off Roading course and that was SO much fun. They have since stopped that activity, sadly. We were able to take a vintage Land Rover out with a guide for a woodland walk and picnic. The kids loved it, and we learned a lot from Mac, our guide, about the flora and fauna in the area.

We rented a James Bond car – My husband and I were the first guests to take out the hotel’s snazzy new Morgan car for a 3 hour spin through the villages of the Cotswolds. I LOVED it. We would have kept it out all day, except we had to be back to pick up our children at the Nook. This is a stellar option to live your Grace Kelley dreams.

Be advised that a lot of the activities have age limits that start at 7 or 8 (archery, ax throwing, ropes courses). I’m going to work with their adventure team to put together a Travel Dispatch guide with the perfect three days for each age group to feature here on The Upgrade.

The pool - in another blow to the family-friendly nature of the hotel, they only allow kids to swim in the pool from 9-11am and from 4-5pm. The British countryside has been freezing at 9am, so my kids haven’t been willing to hit up that first slot. By the 4pm hour, every other kid in the whole resort jumps in for their brief splash time, and I honestly think the funneling of kids into these time periods is making the whole thing worse. To temporarily solve this problem, the hotel has built a play fountain. They do have plans for another pool for kids in the future, but these sorts of projects take a while. We absolutely utilized the play fountain, though our kids required frequent warming up in the little shower beach hut.

The spa - kids are not allowed in the Eynsham baths at all. No one under 18. I would lower this to 15 if it were me, but it just means this won’t be on my mom-daughter hit list when Malia is a teen.

Childcare options:

The Nook is the kids’ club for kids under age 8. They allow you to book for 2 hour increments max, and you have to sign up quite far in advance of your stay. Also important to note that they don’t take the kids outside at all during that time period. My kids love a good craft project, but they are pretty over being inside by now. Babysitters are bookable but also have to be booked quite far in advance. We tried to book one for an additional activity on arrival, and they couldn’t find anyone.

They also have this inexplicable penchant to book massages and activities for the exact moment you are allowed to check in your child to the Nook. The spa is on the opposite side of the estate, so logistically, this just doesn’t work.

Which brings me to pre-planning.

Again, I am a professional planner. I’m highly organized. I love spreadsheets, and make the majority of my travel plans weeks or months in advance. Planning with the Estelle Manor team was a bit of a cluster. I was sent a link to activity options, which I then laid out in an email to the Friends of Estelle team (because I had stayed here before, I was put in touch with these wonderful people). Things started out fine, although they didn’t have some of the activities and dining on the days I requested. Then, it became a “who’s on first” situation where the Adventure Team, Spa Team, and Reservations teams were all copied in and told to respond to me with options for what was available.

This is not a luxury experience. What a concierge or luxury-level hotel pre-planning team should do in such a case is to work with those various teams themselves, have one person own the client communication, and then reach back out to the client with a proposed itinerary that has been reviewed for feasibility and accuracy.

We ended up with activities missing, things double booked on different days, overlapping activities, and about 15 more emails than was necessary.

To the hotel’s credit, the GM did come meet with me on arrival after I expressed my frustration with the process. A lot of how I judge a hotel is not in their mistakes, but in how they recover. And so far, they have done a great job winning me back on this trip.

Overall:

TLDR - Estelle Manor has a lot going for it, and we’ve had a lot of fun with our kids. Some frustrations need to be addressed - the pool hours, the kids club only allowing 2 hour increments and not having any outside time, how hard it is to book babysitters, lunch options not opening until 12pm, not enough options for kids under 7 for activities. The pre-planning situation should be overhauled as soon as possible.

Would I recommend this to clients still? Yes, with a lot more discussion about these restrictions so they know what they are booking. I think the hard product is still lovely and I’d come back with my girlfriends or husband again. My kids would also love to return, if they change the pool hours.

I’ll post some more photos and videos from our stay here over the next couple of days.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

Four Seasons is coming to Sevilla. Opening in 2028, developed with Spanish investment firm Blasson, the property sits on Plaza Nueva in the Arenal Quarter. 55 rooms across five stories, architecture by Madrid-based Lamela, interiors by AD100 honoree Belén Domecq. Three outlets, a rooftop restaurant and pool, a spa, and skyline views. If Sevilla is on your list, start planning now.

The Sagrada Família is structurally complete. On February 20, 2026, the final piece of the Tower of Jesus Christ was installed, bringing Gaudí’s basilica to its full height of 172.5 meters, now the tallest church in the world. Construction began in 1882.

Mandarin Oriental has opened in Mallorca. Mandarin Oriental Punta Negra is now open on the Costa d’en Blanes peninsula, the brand’s first property in the Balearic Islands. 131 rooms, suites, and bungalows, six restaurants, seven acres of gardens, direct access to two secluded coves, and a seaside wellness retreat overlooking the Mediterranean.

Kerzner has a new head of global operations. Kerzner, owned by the Investment Corporation of Dubai and the group behind One&Only Resorts, Atlantis, and fitness-focused SIRO, has promoted Mattheos Georgiou to oversee all three brands, reporting directly to CEO Philippe Zuber. Georgiou joined Kerzner in 2022 as Global VP of Operations and has been instrumental in elevating service standards across the portfolio. Three very different brands, one person accountable for all of them.

Pay attention to this if you're flying internationally this summer. DHS Secretary Mullin has proposed pulling Customs and Border Protection staff from airports in sanctuary cities, including Newark, New York, Chicago, LA, and San Francisco. Not enacted yet, but the industry is taking it seriously. If you're routing international itineraries through any of these airports, build in flexibility now.

The World Cup hospitality boom didn't materialize the way anyone expected. According to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, 80% of hoteliers in U.S. host cities reported bookings tracking below initial forecasts, with Kansas City seeing nearly 90% of properties running behind normal June and July levels. Visa barriers, geopolitical concerns, and high ticket prices all suppressed international demand. In cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Seattle, survey respondents described the tournament as a "non-event." FIFA also quietly cancelled a large portion of its block-booked hotel rooms across host cities, which had inflated early demand signals. The takeaway for anyone still trying to book: rates in several markets have actually dropped, and availability that looked impossible a year ago is now there.

Subscribe now

The friends who travel well together are worth more than the trip itself. Figure out who those people are before you buy the plane tickets.

Alpenglow Travel | alpenglowtravel.com | AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com |

Typically, my Master Key series is for paid subscribers. Since this is such an important topic to cover, I decided to gift this one for all subscribers of The Upgrade | Weekly.

For background, I grew up in a hotel family - we owned Outrigger Hotels for 3.5 generations until we sold it in 2016. I now run a personal investment fund that invests in hospitality, venture, and private equity, and hold several LP positions in hotels around the US. I sat on the advisory board of directors for Outrigger for several years and now sit on our larger family’s board, post-sale of the company. From the operational side, I own a travel agency and see the client-facing side of hotel ownership structures frequently. Many people do not understand who owns the hotel they are sleeping in, so I thought this would be a solid place to start.

FYI I learned none of this in business school during my MBA.

-Anne Marie Brown

Who Actually Owns Your Hotel

I was 14 when we broke ground on the Hilton Garden Inn at Denver International Airport. The earth was so frozen that my father couldn’t get the shovel to go in for the photo op. For the next several decades, I attended annual owner meetings at that hotel. I wrote down terms I didn’t understand and looked them up later, too embarrassed to ask what they meant in the room.

In 2021, occupancy hovered around 7%. It was the height of Covid, my dad’s Parkinson’s was testing his mental capacity, and several of the other LP’s (limited partner owners) didn’t want to put up money for a capital call to carry the hotel through more months of shortfall.

My dad asked if I could start leading the LP meetings. If you’ve ever tried to set up an ongoing Zoom meeting with a bunch of men in their 70’s and 80’s, it is not something I would wish on any 35-year-old new mother. Technological difficulties aside, I started finally piecing together the situation we were in.

You may be unfamiliar with how hospitality investment works. I still see people expressing confusion over who actually owns the Four Seasons hotel they want to tweet at furiously. Is the verb still “to Tweet?” is it now “To X at?” If this is wayyyy too much information for you, skip my post. If you are an investment banker, this is not a post for you. You already know this at a level most people will never want to.

But, if you are a casual luxury traveler and want to know about the ownership structure of the places you are staying in, read on.

Here is your hotel investing and ownership guide, level 101

Most hotels operate under one or a mix of these arrangements – franchise, owner/operator, or management. A handful of hotels are owner/operated, but that’s more common at the independent, boutique level.

1) Franchise: Under a franchise deal, an independent owner pays for the right to use the name, the loyalty program, and the reservation system of a brand or “flag.” The owner, or group of owners made up of LPs (limited partners) and GPs (general partners) own and operate the hotel themselves.

2) Management Contract: Under a management contract, the brand runs the hotel instead of the owner/owners. The brand collects additional management fees.

3) Lease: The property owner leases the hotel to a corporation, chain, or operator for a set period. The tenant then runs everything and pays the owner a fixed rent or share of net revenue.

4) Mix of franchise, manager, ownership group of LP/GP. This is what the Hilton Garden Inn at DIA was structured as. We had a group of LPs, my father and I were the GP, we partnered with Springboard Hospitality to manage the property, and then we were flagged as a franchise under Hilton.

5) Owner-operator - The same entity that owns the real estate also operates the hotel. A single family or family office makes all the decisions.

Oetker, Belmond, Airelles are all examples of owner/operator models. Owners typically pour tons of personal capital into a hotel in these models, often without great returns. Other brands that own and operate most of their own properties include Peninsula Hotels, Cheval Blanc, some of the Amans (except what’s owned by the Sacklers).

Our family business, Outrigger, was an owner/operator model. Everything we made went back into the company until we sold it.

Who are these hotel owners?

Private equity firms are among the largest hotel owners in the world, and the ones you are most likely to encounter. In 2024, PE firms represented 30% of all hotel buyers in U.S. deals above $5 million. In 2021, that share was 55%. The pullback since then reflects higher interest rates and a more cautious market, but PE remains a dominant force.

Blackstone is the largest real estate investor in the world and has moved more hotel real estate over the past two decades than any other firm. Its biggest triumph was buying and selling Hilton Hotels, which netted $14 billion when it exited in 2018. Today Blackstone’s hotel strategy centers on buying properties, refurbishing them, and leasing them to luxury operators like Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, and Marriott, where Blackstone is the landlord and the brand runs the hotel. In southern Europe alone, Blackstone committed over 500 million euros in 2024 to hotels in Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, bringing its southern European portfolio to 22,000 hotel rooms across 70 properties.

Starwood Capital Group, run by Barry Sternlicht, is the other name that shapes the industry. Sternlicht created the W Hotels concept, built Starwood Hotels and Resorts into a global brand, sold it to Marriott for $12 billion in 2016, and is now relaunching the Starwood Hotels brand with a new portfolio that includes Baccarat Hotels, 1 Hotels, and Treehouse. Starwood Capital’s funds have invested in approximately 2,600 hotels over the firm’s history.

KSL Capital Partners, based in Denver, is the most hotel-focused of the major PE firms. KSL owns The Grove Park Inn, The Homestead, Barton Creek Resort, and Rancho Las Palmas, and most recently acquired Soneva, the ultra-luxury Maldives and Thailand brand, in May 2025. Unlike Blackstone, which deploys capital across all real estate categories, KSL lives exclusively in travel and leisure, which tends to produce more operationally engaged ownership. KSL is who we sold our family company, Outrigger, to in 2016. They’ve done a solid job since purchasing the company from us.

The critical thing to understand about PE ownership is the time horizon. PE firms optimize for a 5-7 year hold and exit, not for the guest experience as an end in itself. They will invest in a renovation if it drives revenue per available room and justifies a higher sale price. They will cut costs when margins are under pressure. The brand provides operational consistency, but the owner’s financial situation shapes what resources the operator actually has to work with.

Host Hotels and Resorts is the largest lodging REIT in the world and one of the largest owners of luxury and upper-upscale hotels in the United States. Host owns the real estate; brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt operate the hotels under management contracts. They acquired Turtle Bay Resort in Hawaii from Blackstone in 2024 for $725 million, which then became The Ritz-Carlton Oahu.

The REIT structure subjects hotel ownership to quarterly earnings pressure in a way that private family ownership or sovereign wealth does not. This shapes renovation decisions, staffing budgets, and capital allocation. The hotel carries a prestigious flag, but the owner is a publicly traded corporation answering to shareholders every 90 days.

3) UHNW Families or Family Offices — The private investment arm of a single ultra-wealthy family (or sometimes couple be in a multi-family office group). Family offices tend to be the most patient owners in the market, holding assets for decades through LLCs.

4) High Net Worth Partnerships — A group of wealthy individuals, usually from the same professional network, pooling capital through a private LLC to buy one asset together. The Hilton Garden Inn at Denver International Airport was an example of this.

5) Sovereign Wealth Funds — Government-controlled investment vehicles from countries like Abu Dhabi or Singapore that take long-horizon LP positions in hotel deals for stable income and capital preservation.

6) Insurance Companies and Pension Funds — Long-duration institutional capital, think CalPERS or MetLife, that wants branded, stabilized assets in gateway cities with no appetite for risk.

7) Hotel Brands — Many brands have gone the way of an “asset light” model in which they don’t own their properties. Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt spent the last two decades selling off their owned hotels to focus on management and franchise fees. Some examples of owner-operator models include Belmond, and a few Amans.

8) Developer-Operators — Private companies that build and manage their own hotels with no outside investors, eliminating the conflicts that come with management contracts. These are usually small, independent boutique hotels.

9) Opportunity and Distressed Funds — A more aggressive subset of PE that specifically targets hotels in bankruptcy or default, buying at steep discounts and exiting within 3-5 years.

The Role of Banks

Banks do not typically own hotels directly, but they are the invisible layer behind almost every PE and REIT transaction in hospitality. Wells Fargo and Bank of Montreal originated the $553 million financing package for KSL’s 23-property U.S. hotel portfolio in 2025. Goldman Sachs partnered with Starwood Capital on the original Westin acquisition in 1994. Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, and Citigroup are consistently the debt providers on large hotel portfolio transactions.

It’s helpful to understand the debt structure behind a hotel as well as who owns the equity. PE hotel portfolios funded with floating-rate debt got into serious trouble when interest rates rose after 2022. As of mid-2025, a $265 million loan against a 22-property Starwood Capital hotel portfolio has been shipped to special servicing, with occupancy at 63% and the portfolio generating less than 65% of the revenue needed to cover loan interest. This is the select-service segment of Starwood’s portfolio, not its luxury brands, but it illustrates the leverage risk that comes with PE hotel ownership at any tier.

Understanding the LP and GP Relationship

The people who typically pony up the money are structured as Limited Partners. This is how we usually invest out of our fund, Colorado Ohana Ventures. We have LP positions in a handful of hotels, including:

• The Home2 Suites Denver Convention Center

• The Santa Monica Proper

• Hyatt Boston

• Hyatt Irvine

• Thompson Denver

• Indigo Denver

• The Santa Monica Proper

LPs contribute the bulk of the capital and collect returns, but they don’t make operational decisions.

The GP, or General Partner, is usually a developer or hotel investment firm. (We work with Stonebridge, McWhinney, Alpine Investments, and many others). They control the asset, structure the deal, and source the capital (through debt and equity from banks and LPs), in exchange for a smaller equity stake. When the deal performs well, the GP earns a “promote”. A promote is a larger share of the upside designed to reward the party taking on the operational risk.

When a hotel is a franchise, like our little Hilton Garden Inn at Denver International Airport, the hotel brand requires frequent renovations to keep the hotel operating at brand standard. This is a called a “Pip” or Property Improvement Plan. In theory, it’s a good concept and makes sure your Hilton Garden Inn doesn’t smell like mold in the bathroom or have flaking plaster above the bed. However, in reality, we often see brands demanding PIPs just because there’s a new ‘brand standards’ director who wants to make their mark. I’ll never forget the requirement to move our room outlets a few inches up the wall one year. When a hotel switches brands (a reflag), it typically triggers a PIP.

When a hotel’s financial performance falls below the thresholds outlined in its loan documents, the lender can trigger a “cash trap.” The property keeps operating, but distributions to ownership stop until performance recovers. This happened during the pandemic, and many franchise LPs found themselves suddenly facing capital calls to keep their hotels afloat, or fund PIPs during times of low occupancy.

Why Should You Care About Ownership Structure?

If you have no desire to own a small slug of a Hilton Garden Inn at an airport, then most of this terminology will remain meaningless in your life. However, ownership structure can affect your stay, so if anything, it’s good to know why certain hotels, like Airelles and Oetker, deliver a superior guest experience (owner-operator model).

These owners and the brand may have motivations that are at odds – the LPs want to keep cashflow coming, the PE firm may want to cut costs as much as possible, the brand wants to demand a PIP from the owners to maintain the newest and brightest brand standards.

Owner-operator models like Belmond, Passalacqua, and Oetker can have more control over your inhouse experience. They take, as Nadine at the Stanza put it in her interview with the CEO of Airelles, a “patrimonial view” of ownership.

They are there to steward a legacy asset into the next generation, keeping standards as high as possible. The families that own these properties and companies are often pouring personal wealth into their hotels year after year to fund renovations, pay staff higher than average wages, and maintain their culture of excellence.

At Outrigger, we took great pride in trying to maintain ownership over the experience, and a sense of family across our employee base. We ultimately had to sell to a private equity firm, which I’ll touch on more in depth in a future article for my substack, The Upgrade.

A few terms worth knowing:

LP (Limited Partner): Puts in most of the capital, collects returns, or has to pony up capital calls in times of crises. An LP has no or very little say in daily operations. Liability is limited to what they invested. This is us for most of our deals, and the easiest way to enter the world of hospitality.

GP (General Partner): The GP controls the asset, makes operational decisions, typically contributes 5-20% of the equity.

Pref (Preferred Return): The minimum return the LP receives before the GP gets to take home any profit sharing. You’ll typically see the pref expressed as an annual percentage, 8-10% is average. Don’t think you’ll be making a ton of cash on an annual basis investing in hotels – they are a long game. The pref has to be fully satisfied before the waterfall (see below) moves down to the GP’s “promote.” If the deal underperforms and never clears the pref threshold, the GP gets nothing above their invested capital.

Promote (Carried Interest): How developers are paid when deals work. A GP who put in 10% of the equity might walk away with 30% of the gain above the hurdle rate (below).

Hurdle Rate: The performance threshold that has to be cleared before profit-sharing with the GP kicks in.

Waterfall: The order in which cash gets distributed to everyone in the deal. Senior lender gets paid first, then mezzanine debt, then preferred equity, then the LP, then the GP. The GP’s promote sits at the bottom of the waterfall, which means they only get paid when everything above them has already been satisfied. When deals go sideways, the waterfall is why developers sometimes walk away with nothing even on properties that technically stayed solvent.

Cap Rate: Net operating income divided by purchase price. We usually see this as a quick shorthand for comparing hotel values and is our first question when reviewing a pitch. A higher cap rate means more risk, and a lower cap rate means the market sees the asset as stable. As an investor, it may seem obvious but you want to target an underpriced asset, (like during Covid when we bought out some LPs at a discount because they didn’t want to keep paying capital calls), and then sell the hotel for market rates or slightly above when you can stabilize the property.

Comp Set: Short for competitive set, this is the group of hotels a property benchmarks itself against for pricing, occupancy, and performance. A hotel’s comp set is usually 5-8 properties in the same market and category. If the Four Seasons is running 95% occupancy and your hotel is at 70%, that may not be the hotel to compare yourself to because you own a select service property.

Franchise vs. Management Contract: See first section. Under a franchise, the owner runs the hotel and pays for the brand name. Under a management contract, the brand runs everything and the owner(s) collects (or doesn’t collect) the returns.

Key Money: this is cash paid by a brand to an owner in exchange for signing a management or franchise agreement. For example, say you as an ownership group agree to fly the Rosewood flag at your new hotel, so Rosewood gives you upfront cash to lock in the deal. Often, key money with longer terms and harder exit clauses.

Reflag: When a hotel switches brands, like when a Courtyard Marriott becomes an Autograph.

PIP (Property Improvement Plan): The mandatory renovation a brand requires of franchise owners. Can run $15,000 to $75,000+ per room. Annoying and at times arbitrary, but understandable in theory.

Mezzanine Debt / Preferred Equity: Capital that sits between the senior bank loan and the ownership equity. This investment is higher risk, higher return, typically 10-14%

Ground Lease: When the hotel owner doesn’t own the land the building sits on. They lease it, usually from a family trust, municipality, or estate. This is a term to watch for if you’re an LP in a deal where the GP owns the land and their operating company is executing a ground lease. It can feel like double dipping from the GP, and complicates financing significantly.

General Hotel Finance Terms

Revenue, Distribution, Cost Metrics:

• RevPAR – Revenue Per Available Room. Also see NRevPAR (Net RevPAR) — RevPAR after distribution costs (OTA commissions, booking fees)

• GOPPAR (Gross Operating Profit Per Available Room) — profit, not just revenue, per room

• BAR (Best Available Rate) — the lowest publicly available rate on a given night

• LOS (Length of Stay) — average nights per booking; hotels use minimum LOS restrictions to manage demand

• F&B capture rate — percentage of hotel guests who spend money in the restaurant or bar

• GDS (Global Distribution System) — Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport; used by travel agents and corporate bookers

• Cost of acquisition — total cost to secure one booking; OTAs typically run 15-25%

• CPOR (Cost Per Occupied Room) — total departmental costs divided by rooms sold

• FF&E reserve — furniture, fixtures and equipment fund; typically 3-5% of revenue set aside for capital upkeep

Thanks for coming to hospitality investing 101.

For transparency - the investment terms and list of revenue, distribution, and cost metrics were pulled with the help of Claude and Notebook LLM, where we have many of our previous hotel investment subscription documents held. All other writing is fully my own.

• Anne Marie Brown, The Upgrade | Weekly

In The Upgrade this week:

• Pre-Departure – Branded Hotel Residences, Financing or Folly? With an interview with

• The Room Report – Maslina Hvar, Croatia

• The Lobby Bar – Ritz Carlton Yacht is losing money, ResortPass signs a big deal, Expedia is moving ad budget to creators, and free water at a hotel restaurant is apparently not a right

Travelers,

It’s Euro Summer for our family, and we are about to embark on an epic month-long jaunt around England, the Dolomites, and the South of France. 5 hotels and 1 villa, three countries, 6 cities. Two kids ages 5 and 7. Wish me luck.

Check out my packing lists if you want to see what I’m aiming to fit in my suitcase. Euro Summer Packing List, French Riviera Packing List

This week, The Upgrade explores branded hotel residences. I’m talking about the Aman, Montage, and One & Only villas that are privately owned and attached to these luxury hotels. We see pitches from hotels looking for LP investors (Limited Partners), and one of the most frequent inclusions in these pitches as of late is the concept of a branded residence model to finance construction. With prices north of $10M, I began to wonder, who on earth is buying these? Why? While the model may make financial sense to developers, it’s often fraught with inherent tensions that the GM has to sort out, unless it’s designed thoughtfully.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Yours truly on a speedboat in Hvar with one of my Bougie Bunnies, Jack

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Branded Residences — Why Luxury Hotels are Betting on Villas

I’ve worked for two of the largest luxury destination clubs, Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato. The pitch at both these companies was the certainty of a hotel experience with the privacy and space of a villa. The hotel industry is now finally catching up to that tempting offer with an explosion of branded hotel residences.

Conduct a site inspection at just about any luxury resort in Mexico today and you’ll hear about their residence product. Families are traveling as multigenerational groups more than ever, particularly my client base, and they want space for the grandparents, nanny, and maybe another family. However, owning a resort residence (i.e., second-home ownership with a more alluring label) comes with maintenance and upkeep. Branded residences aim to straddle this yawning gap.

Branded residences, the private homes sold alongside luxury hotels under the hotel’s flag, have been one of the fastest-growing segments in hospitality for decades. In their current form, they date to The Four Seasons Boston in 1985 and have now become central to how luxury hotels are built in the face of rising construction costs, high land prices, and inflation.

The sector has grown 180% over the last decade. There are now over 700 branded residences globally, with supply expected to double by 2030.^[1] Savills forecasts that 60 new brands will enter the space over the next five years.^[2]Marriott alone has 142 residences with 138 more in the pipeline. And hospitality outsiders Ferrari, Bentley, Fendi, Armani, and Bulgari have all entered the fray as well.

Why Developers Love This Model

As I noted in The Upgrade a few weeks ago about historic renovation projects, building a luxury hotel is a terrible standalone investment. New construction costs upwards of $2 million per key today. So, what’s a development group to do? They can’t all head down to the bank in a trenchcoat hiding cash to bid on a hotel like my grandfather used to do.

Enter: Residential sales. Developers often sell units before construction is complete, with deposits of up to 70% of the purchase price before handover. In essence, residence buyers are the ones financing the hotel.

Marriott’s chief development officer for North American luxury brands said at the 2026 Americas Lodging Investment Summit: Half of Marriott’s new luxury hotel signings now include a residential component because “luxury hotels are hard to build ... residential allows for higher returns.”^[3]

Here’s how the financing for branded residences works:

Hotel brands typically operate under a management agreement and collect fees of 2-3% of property value and rental income, without owning the asset directly. The developer takes the risk. The brand takes the fees and gets the marketing halo.

Additionally, branded residences command a significant premium. The average markup over comparable unbranded properties across the global market is around 33%, rising to 47% in some emerging markets and exceeding 90% in parts of Dubai.^[4]

The developer owns the building, not the brand. There is a licensing agreement in place, and that license can expire or be terminated. Management agreements with hotel brands typically run around 30 years. Buyers who purchased under a specific brand may find their property rebranded if the contract is not renewed.

The inherent tensions branded residences create: Four Seasons Hualalai

The downside of branded hotel residences appears in the tensions they create between the two classes they serve, residence owners and hotel guests. Often, the property GM is left to manage demand for the same resources (restaurant reservations, spa access, pool chairs) between the two groups.

The plaintiffs argued this created a direct conflict of interest: the same company now managed both the hotel and the residential community with a financial incentive to push private renters toward the hotel instead. The resort responded that the fees were permitted under existing agreements. A hotel guest present at the time described what he called an “apartheid experience,” referring to the visible friction between how residents and paying hotel guests were treated. That is an extreme characterization, but the underlying dynamic is not unique to Hualalai.

How much do they cost?

Aman Beverly Hills starts at $20M with an average of $7,000/sq ft (a Southern California record), and the first tower is already 60% under contract. The developer explicitly states that “today’s ultra-high-net-worth buyers seek certainty, homes that are resilient, private, and secure.”

At Aman New York, one unit sold for $64M (up from the $51M the previous owner paid), another recently traded at close to $30M asking, and a Thailand-based investor purchased a unit for $20.7M.

Four Seasons ranges from roughly $1M in secondary markets to over $30M for oceanfront and ultra-prime urban residences, which explains why the averages look depressed when you combine them all.

Who is buying?

These sales are almost always structured through LLCs, family trusts, BVI (British Virgin Islands) companies, and Cayman entities precisely to obscure buyer identity.

Past data for sales of the residences north of $20M include American tech and finance wealth, Middle Eastern family offices (Saudi and UAE specifically), and Southeast Asian buyers (Singapore-based, often ethnic Chinese with Singaporean or Hong Kong residency). Russian buyers dropped off sharply following sanctions imposed after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Mainland Chinese buyers for US property have also pulled back due to capital controls.

The Aman New York resale market in late 2025 included a Thailand-based investor who bought for $20.7M and flipped it six months later, and an anonymous buyer who paid $35M in 2022 and recently listed at close to $30M.

The Offshore Money Issue

Branded residences sit at the intersection of two things that have historically attracted foreign capital seeking discretion: a globally recognized brand and high-value real estate in prime locations. Like a lot of high-value real estate in cities like New York and Vancouver, these properties attract foreign money thanks to their ownership opacity.

Brookings researchers studying ownership in New York, Miami, and Boston found that the probability of corporate ownership of a residential property exceeds 50% once it is valued at $10M, and exceeds 80% at $100M.^[7]

Shell companies are about twice as likely to be listed as owners of high-value properties. When researchers attempted to measure offshore ownership using only public data, it appeared to be nearly zero, attributing less than 0.3% of NYC real estate value to foreign jurisdictions. That near-zero figure is itself evidence of how effectively opacity works: shell companies registered domestically hide the true owners.^[7]

The 2022 DOJ seizure of Viktor Vekselberg’s properties is a good example. The official register listed only a Panamanian shell company with a mailing address at Madison Square Garden. Vekselberg, subject to US sanctions for years, had held a $70M US property portfolio without detection until investigators pieced together the ownership chain.

A unit purchased through an LLC and placed in the hotel’s rental program can generate income, appreciate in value, and remain legally opaque about its actual owner. Meanwhile, the brand provides legitimacy, and the LLC ownership structure provides cover.

While most buyers are wealthy people who love a hotel and want a turnkey second home without the headache of managing one, the structural features that make these properties appealing to legitimate buyers also make them attractive to those for whom enjoying the spa is a secondary (if that) consideration.

🗝️Q&A: Emma Näpänkangas on Branded Residences

Anne Marie: Where do you think all the money to buy these residences is coming from? Some of these Aman and Montage properties are upwards of $20M.

Emma: There’s definitely an emotional driver when it comes to branded residences, both from the homeowner and investor side. People who buy, say, an Aman residence for $20M are essentially making an identity purchase and opt in on the brand’s philosophy in a more permanent way.

From the investor side, on the other hand, there is most definitely some FOMO (fear of missing out) and scrambling because the premiums on branded residences are simply so high that everyone and their mom simply wants in on the fun. For a development perspective, I recently spoke to Christopher Norton (CEO of Equinox hotels), and he said branded residences are now just a standard part of hotel developments since they are what make the hotel profitable at the end of the day.

Anne Marie: Do you have any branded hotel residence projects that you think have been executed better than others? What makes for a successful integration of residents and hotel guests?

Emma: I’m actually quite wary of naming a winner because I haven’t experienced one as a resident myself, and I think branded residences have enough hype for them from the outside.

What I can speak on, however, is what doesn’t work, and here I think the biggest risk is brand dilution. A branded residence does not need to have the actual brand behind it to carry the name, because a developer can just license it and slap it on the building, and then the brand has nothing to do with a person’s actual experience.

I think this is an extremely risky business for hospitality brands that pride themselves on a certain level of service and brand promise. To give you an example, there is a Nobu residence in Toronto, Canada, which is one of these licensed deals, and the feedback from residents on the quality of the building has been subpar.

Anne Marie: What do you think of the potential for money laundering in these projects?

Emma: The tea surrounding this is so piping hot it’s hilarious. But anyway, I’m a hospitality girl and not a financial crime expert. HOWEVER, I will say this: I think the brand premium that makes branded residences super attractive commercially is entirely dependent on trust, meaning that if branded residences become associated with sketchy/opaque money, those double digit premiums will disappear. Transparency is key.

Anne Marie: Is there anything you think the readers of The Upgrade | Weekly should know about branded residences that I haven’t covered?

Emma: A house of cards I have my eyes on is non-hospitality brands that are entering the space – your car brands (Porsche, Bentley) and fashion houses (Fendi, Armani, Missoni), et cetera (the crystal house Baccarat). Everyone wants to be in hospitality now, but I’m personally dubious about how brands that do not have hospitality savoir-faire built into them can pull it off in the long term.

🗝️ Room Report — Maslina, Hvar, Croatia

Matt and I traveled to Croatia and stayed at Maslina Resort (just off Split on the Dalmatian Coast) in the summer of 2023 with his parents, our kids, and our nanny in tow, which meant we needed the four-bedroom villa. Sitting on the patio at that villa, with the wind rustling the pines, watching the sun set over the Adriatic was a Zen moment I focus on when I try (generally without success) to meditate.

The resort sits on the shore of Maslinica Bay on the island of Hvar, and from the water it’s nearly invisible, the buildings covered in bamboo panels that blend entirely into the pine forest behind them. Maslina means “olive,” and every pre-existing olive tree on the property has been preserved. The whole place operates on a “mindful luxury” philosophy – it’s definitely a wellness-oriented property. There were some Butterfield & Robinson and Backroads groups there during our stay, which usually means a solid hotel with a strong concierge and reservations team.

The villa was spectacular. The décor is modern with tons of light wood and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the sea. The stairs are a bit challenging for small kids; ours managed to avoid falls.

Each bedroom has king beds, a full living room, and outdoor space that made it feel like a beautiful home that happens to offer resort services. The pool wasn’t heated, which in high summer sounds fine in theory, but my kids and I are wusses and barely dipped our toes in before we chickened out.

The two main resort pools are heated saltwater, one an infinity pool with sea views and the other a larger family pool with a shallow entry platform, so we spent most of our pool time there rather than at the villa. The outdoor terraces and the grounds themselves were where I fell in love with the property. Everything is stone, wood, and sea views.

The kids’ club has a dedicated space with water elements, a climbing wall, and a full range of activities. It’s gorgeous – like the Montessori playhouse I dreamed I’d have instead of the destruction zone that is my basement filled with plastic noise-making dinosaurs and Barbie gear.

The spa, called Pharomatiq, takes its name from “Pharos” (Greek for lighthouse or beacon), the ancient name for Stari Grad (Croatian for Old City), and “aromatic,” a nod to Hvar’s long history with healing plants and herbs. It runs 600 square meters and includes a gym with sea views, steam rooms, saunas, and a cold plunge, and every stay begins with a health consultation where you choose an intent for your time there. I didn’t get nearly enough time in it.

Stari Grad, one of the oldest towns in the Eastern Adriatic, is a short walk away, and Duboković, the local winery, produces bottles shipped across Europe, with small group tastings available on request. Hvar town is a transfer away from Stari Grad if you want the nightlife and the scene, but Maslina sits on the northern, quieter, end of the island, and that’s the point.

Who would love Maslina? Multigenerational families who want a home base that works for everyone. Grandparents who want a spa and good food, kids who need to be entertained, parents who want more space than a hotel room for their families. Budget at least four nights.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar — Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection is losing a lot of money.

The company is running at roughly 50% occupancy, well below its target of 85-90%, and has pushed that goal back to 2029. Marketing spend topped $104M in 2025 alone, and accumulated losses since 2017 now sit at nearly $700M. Its largest creditor agreed to defer $171M in repayments while the controlling shareholders injected another $275M in equity, taking total capital past the $1 billion mark. The rates are excellent ($1,900 per guest per day), but filling three yachts is not like filling one. Four Seasons Yacht I, Aman at Sea, and Orient Express are all coming. Read more.

Hilton just launched its 28th brand.

Undergraduate by Hilton is designed for smaller college towns that its Graduate chain doesn’t reach, with a lower development cost and simpler operating model. Hilton acquired Graduate in 2024 for $210 million and is now building the tier beneath it, with long-term potential for 400-500 hotels. First property expected in 2027. The name is either clever or a little too on the nose, depending on your sense of humor.

Expedia is moving ad budget to creators.

Expedia partnered with YouTube streamer iShowSpeed for a live-streamed trip that reached over 400 million people. Their SVP of brand marketing called him a “Gen Z Anthony Bourdain.” The underlying data: a Skift Research study found that 57% of travelers are comfortable booking high-priced activities directly through social media, with younger travelers leading that shift. Booking and Virgin Voyages are following the same playbook. The longer-term questions are whether TikTok and YouTube can build booking layers on top of their discovery platforms, the way Google built on search, and whether OTAs (online travel agencies) end up being cut out.

Marriott signed a global deal with ResortPass.

The partnership expands the number of Marriott properties offering day access to pools, spas, and fitness centers without an overnight stay. Marriott already had over 500 properties on ResortPass before this agreement, so this formalizes and accelerates what was already happening. The question worth watching: does selling pool chairs and spa access to day visitors improve revenue, or does it crowd out paying guests at peak hours? Worth keeping an eye on at properties where you have clients booked. Full story at Skift.

Tap water.

Italy’s Supreme Court ruled that hotels are not legally required to serve tap water. The case started at the five-star Hotel Sassongher in the Dolomites, where a guest staying over New Year’s 2020 was told only bottled mineral water was available at dinner, at €7 a bottle. She sued on the grounds that water is a universal human right and lost at every level, including Italy’s Court of Cassation. France requires a carafe of water with every meal. Spain has required free drinking water at bars and restaurants since 2022. Italy has no such requirement. File under “things to know before you go.”

Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian gave an interview to the WSJ worth reading.

He covered the World Cup’s impact on hotel demand in host cities, the challenge of paying housekeepers wages that reflect what the job actually costs now (the article refers to salaries soon reaching $100,000+ in some markets), and his view of the “K-shaped economy” — the widening split between travelers spending more than ever on luxury and everyone else. His framing of Hyatt’s positioning tracks with what we’re seeing on the booking side. Read it here.

Capella Hotels has a new president with a one-year deadline.

Roland Fasel, who took over in April, is openly targeting a position alongside Aman, Rosewood, Six Senses, and Belmond as Capella’s competitive set. His stated goal: get there within a year. He spent six years as COO at Aman and most recently ran operations at Maybourne (Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Berkeley), so he’s not bluffing about knowing how those brands operate. The growth play goes through Capella’s sister brand Patina. Full story at Skift.

A note on the Colosseum for anyone with Italy on the summer itinerary.

All tickets are now issued in the holder’s name and require matching ID at entry, enforced strictly since May. Tourists who show up with tickets purchased through resellers that weren’t properly name-matched or weren’t issued through licensed operators are now getting turned away at the gate. Book through the official site at ticketing.colosseo.it or a vetted operator. It’s no fun to stand outside the Colosseum on a 95-degree July day explaining your receipt.

🗝️ Anne Marie

Sources

[1] Charlotte Duck, “What are branded residences and who’s buying them?” Yahoo Finance / Savills, July 2025

[2] EHL Hospitality Insights, “Branded Residences”

[3] CoStar, “Luxury Hotel Development Increasingly Dependent on Branded Residential,” February 2026

[4] Elite Traveler, “Hotel Chains and Branded Residences”

[5] Zyda v. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts / Hualalai Investors LLC, filed 2015.

[6] Coverage of Hualalai lawsuit, various press reports, 2015-2016.

[7] Matthew Collin, Karan Mishra, and Andreas Okland, “Offshore Ownership of American Real Estate is a Black Box,” Brookings Institution, August 2024