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

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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.

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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

Dear readers of The Upgrade -

Hotel History is a way to share father’s newsletters, The Saturday Briefing, from the archives of 40 years of his weekly articles. Through these pieces, I hope to share the legacy that my family built through 4 generations of family hotel ownership of Outrigger Hotels, until our sale in 2016. My father has since passed away, so I want to give his writing new life by sharing it to other fellow hospitality enthusiasts.

-Anne Marie (Kelley) Brown

The Edgewater Grows Out of

Post-War Optimism and Hope

Excerpt from Paddling the Outrigger by Dr. Richard Kelley, pp. 28–30. Originally published in the Saturday Briefing newsletter, 1989–2005.

‘John Wayne was a frequent guest who enjoyed the mai tais, music and cool, late-afternoon breezes …’

In the early 1900s, Waikiki was a bedroom community for the downtown Honolulu commercial area. A trolley, first drawn by mules and later powered by electricity, carried young executives and office workers from Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, past the duck ponds and taro patches now known as Ala Moana Center, to their Bishop Street offices in less than 30 minutes. They enjoyed the open-air ride, and after work they could take a swim in Waikiki’s gentle waters or visit the bars and restaurants that were scattered about, even in those days.

As demand for home sites grew, a gentleman by the name of Percy Pond subdivided the property makai of Kalakaua Avenue and between Lewers Street and Saratoga Road. Since there were very few automobiles in those days, and most of those were not very big, the streets that Pond laid out were narrow. He included small alleyways behind the houses, possibly for trash collection, and remnants of those paths can still be seen today.

Many small homes were built in the area, some of which were rented out as vacation cottages. The tenants, who generally arrived on a Matson steamer for long stays, had convenient access to Waikiki Beach via the pedestrian right-of-way that still exists on the Diamond Head side of the Outrigger Reef Hotel.

It all changed when World War II ended in 1945. As demand for hotels gradually increased, my parents, who had found success with their new five-story walk-up, the Islander Hotel on Seaside Avenue, turned to the Lewers Street area for their next project. They acquired from the Buscher family a small block of land with several cottages bounded by Beach Walk, Lewers Street and Kalia Road. The cottages facing Lewers Street were turned into shops, and the bungalows at the corner of Kalia and Beach Walk were torn down to make room for the Edgewater Hotel.

I recall the opening of the Edgewater as though it were yesterday. It was 1951. World War II had ended, and in spite of the new war in Korea, early peace talks were in progress. The mood in Hawaiʻi and throughout the nation was one of optimism and hope. A record 50,000 visitors would come to Waikiki, a dramatic increase from the 22,000 visitors in 1929, the year my father and mother came to Hawaiʻi. And the stunning six-story, 100-room Edgewater Hotel, the first modern building to go up in Waikiki after the war, was ready to serve them.

Read more

My Ireland packing list was popular, so here’s what’s going in my bag for my French Riviera trip with my Bougie Bunnies later this month:

French Riviera Packing List

French Riviera Packing List

Kayl…

Read more

In The Upgrade this week:

· Pre-Departure – Why Is Everyone Going to Japan?

• The Room Report – Capella Kyoto (with guest writer Colin Nagy)

• The Lobby Bar – Japan’s tourist tax, Four Seasons Mykonos, Capella’s new president, Lake Como EDITION, Oetker’s first US property, Amanvari opening in Baja

Travelers,

If I get another request for cherry blossom season in Japan with a lead time of two months, I might expire prematurely. If you want to go in the spring, book a year in advance. If you want to go skiing this winter, start planning now.

This week, The Upgrade explores why it seems that everyone is going to Japan lately – where the luxury hotel market is headed, your guide to luxury ryokans, and a firsthand room report on one of the most exciting new openings of 2026, Capella Kyoto, from one of our industry’s tastemakers, Colin Nagy.

Buckle up, it’s a long one this week!

Happy travels! Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Why is Everyone Going to Japan? A Macro View By a Luxury Travel Agency Owner

In the past year, I’ve helped clients plan 12 trips to Japan, including:

1. Ski trips to Niseko to celebrate a 50th birthday

2. Retracing family roots in the countryside and exploring Japan through it’s artisans

3. A graduation trip to remember

4. A babymoon

5. 30th birthday romantic ryokan escape

This has me wondering, where is our current obsession with Japan as a destination coming from?

The first time I traveled to Japan was in 2012. I was working at Exclusive Resorts and had been tasked with creating a luxury-level experience with unique access. At Virtuoso Travel Week, I found a relatively new DMC (destination management company), called Inside Japan. I reached out to hear their pitch, and we began building an incredible trip together.

I conducted that site visit with a colleague during a sticky August heatwave. To ensure our experience felt authentic, Tokyo gave us an earthquake on our first night. We watched our Peninsula Hotel room walls ripple gently, while everyone else acted as if nothing had happened. We spent the next week touring just about every luxury hotel product available, meeting with artisans for calligraphy and kimono dyeing, taking a taiko drumming lesson, and meeting a geisha in a members-only tea house.

Six years later, I returned to Japan with my husband while six months pregnant with our first child. For the doubters – yes, I ate all the sushi. In case you’re not aware of it, the birth rate in Japan has fallen precipitously. It’s now about only seven births per 1,000 people per year. So, if you know 100 people, maybe not even one of them might be pregnant. In this condition, therefore, I was treated like a Fabergé egg, escorted to elevators instead of being allowed to go up a flight of stairs, immediately given any seat.

I fell in love with the country – the intentional, ubiquitous and distinctively Japanese hospitality; the art of noticing small things; the artisans; the exquisite kaiseki (elaborate multi-course) meals; the steaming onsen (hot spring bathing hotels). I have been a champion of tourism there since I first experienced their remarkable culture.

This brings us back to why Japan is only now becoming so incredibly popular with American luxury travelers.

Let’s Look at Some Numbers

A record 42.7 million foreigners visited Japan in 2025, a 15.8% increase over the previous record of 36.9 million in 2024, and the first time the total surpassed 40 million. ^[1]

That’s roughly 10 million more than the pre-pandemic 2019 total of 31.9 million. Visitor spending also hit a new record of ¥9.5 trillion in 2025. ^[1]

For Americans specifically: more than 2.7 million of us visited Japan in 2024, a 33% jump past 2023, and 58% above the 2019 pre-pandemic level. ^[2]

Why Is This Happening?

The Japanese tourism boom has largely been driven by four forces:

1. The weakening of the yen against the US dollar

2. The growing popularity of Japanese food in US fine dining

3. Anime, Pokemon, and pop culture attracting a Gen Z audience

4. The feeling of safety for international travelers

1. The Yen

My first trip to Japan generated the priciest expense report I’ve ever had to turn in. I’m pretty sure our karaoke evening was about $400, much to the surprise of both me and my boss at the time. (Sorry, Gina.)

While the exchange rate was around ¥110 to the US dollar in 2019, the yen weakened to between 140 and 160 throughout 2024. This made the news around the world, with Americans in particular being told that Japan was now on sale. ^[3]

2. The Omakase Expansion

If you have seen an omakase (chef-curated) restaurant opening every other week, you aren’t hallucinating. “Omakase everywhere” was one of the headline trends in the 2025 Hospitality Trends Report by AF&Co + Carbonate, describing these menus as “a sign of luxury and indulgence; a multi-course tasting menu journey with an element of surprise for the guest.” ^[4] Omakase-style dining has seen booking rates rise 22% annually, with seating typically limited to 8-12 seats per service. ^[5] High-end sushi restaurants like Masa in New York charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per person, turning sushi into a luxury indulgence. ^[6]

3. Anime and Pop Culture

During the pandemic hiatus, we all became glued to Netflix. Interest in Japan’s culture grew among Gen Z consumers of Pokemon and reruns of Dragonball Z. A 2024 survey found that 42% of Gen Z watches anime every week, compared to just 25% who watch the NFL. Younger respondents reported that anime influences their style, identity, and friendships. ^[7]

4. Safety, Service, and Infrastructure

In the post-COVID world, we are a society that travels in spite of concerns about geopolitical disruption. Between new entry requirements (EES [the EU’s Entry/Exit System], I’m looking at you), wars (Iran, Israel, Ukraine), outbreaks (Ebola and hantavirus), and natural disasters, venturing abroad can feel intimidating to even the savviest travelers. As a first-world country with a largely homogeneous and peaceful population, great public transportation, and an influx of luxury hotels, Japan seems like a safe bet. Demand for high-end hotels and private tour packages has tripled. Accommodation now accounts for 33.6% of visitor spending, up from 29.4% in 2019. Japan’s luxury hotel market reached $7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $10 billion by 2033. ^[8]

Driven by high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) seeking unique cultural and historical experiences, Japan’s overall luxury travel market is projected to grow at 8.35% annually through 2033, reaching $91.7million. ^[9]

The Five Star Growth in Japan’s Hotel Scene

Aman Tokyo was the new kid on the block when we traveled there for our babymoon in 2016. It was the most I had ever spent on a hotel in my life, and I feel like my morning soaks in those giant black stone bathtubs, Japanese breakfast at hand, looking over the Tokyo skyline largely lived up to the hype. Now, major luxury brands are establishing new properties throughout the country, particularly in emerging resort destinations and cities beyond the Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto corridor.

My favorite part of the Aman Tokyo was baths in this deep soaking tub looking over the skyline

Tokyo

• Bulgari Hotel Tokyo opened in April 2023, occupying floors 40-45 of a skyscraper in central Tokyo with 98 rooms and suites. Tokyo EDITION Ginza opened December 2023; Janu Tokyo (Aman Group’s second brand) opened in 2024; Fairmont Tokyo opened July 2025; JW Marriott Tokyo opened October 2025; and Park Hyatt Tokyo reopened after renovations in December 2025.

Osaka

• Four Seasons Hotel Osaka opened in summer 2024 and is already well-loved by my clients. The 221-key Patina Osaka opened in 2025 across from Osaka Castle, and the Waldorf Astoria Osaka opened in 2025 as part of the Grand Green Osaka development, with 252 rooms designed by André Fu Studio.

Okinawa/Regional

• Rosewood made its Japan debut in 2025 with Rosewood Miyakojima on Okinawa, a 55-villa resort overlooking Oura Bay.

This Year’s New (Luxury) Kids on the Block:

• Capella Kyoto opened March 23 in the Higashiyama District near Kiyomizudera and Gion. Designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, it has 89 rooms and suites and is Capella’s first Japan property.

• Hoshino Resorts is opening KAI Kusatsu, a 94-key inn overlooking Mount Kusatsu-Shirane, and OMO7 Yokohama this year.

• Hoshinoya Nara Prison opens on June 25, converting the last of Japan’s Meiji-era “Five Great Prisons” into a 48-room luxury hotel with rooms fashioned from renovated solitary confinement cells. (No, they’re not limited to single occupancy!)

• 1 Hotel Tokyo, located in the upper floors of a Tokyo tower, is also opening this year.

WTF Is a Ryokan?

My parents liked to remind me that I was “Made in Japan” by placing gold stickers with that phrase on my bedroom door. (According to family lore, I was conceived in a ryokan in Niseko.) A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn where guests sleep on tatami (woven mat) floors, relax in yukata robes, soak in natural hot spring baths (onsen), and are served multi-course kaiseki meals, all centered around Japan’s philosophy of inexhaustible hospitality.

Today, the ryokan market is expanding rapidly. It hit $2.2 billion in 2025 and is growing at 12% annually, driven largely by international demand. Six Senses and Dusit Thani have both opened ryokan-concept properties in Kyoto, Hyatt is launching an entirely new ryokan brand called Atona with its first locations opening in Hakone and beyond this year, and Marriott partnered with Ryokan Collection in 2024 to fold traditional inns into its portfolio.

Hoshino Resorts, the dominant domestic player, now operates 73 properties across Japan and keeps expanding its KAI onsen ryokan brand into regional destinations. Japanese tourism authorities found that 68% of prospective foreign visitors want to stay in a ryokan, but only 49% manage to do so, mostly because booking has historically been difficult and intimidating without the help of someone who knows the system.

My favorite ryokans are Gora Kadan and Gen.

Powder Chasers

If you know any serious skiers (in Colorado, I know many powder bros), they have probably waxed poetic about skiing in Japan. Even with the Rocky Mountains right in my backyard, I find myself talking with my husband about a spring break ski trip to Niseko with our powder hound kids. Apparently, in the face of skyrocketing Epic and Ikon Pass prices, the rest of the world has discovered that flying to Japan and staying for a week can actually be a better deal than skiing in Colorado, particularly after this year’s abysmal ski season.

Visitors to Japan’s slopes grew approximately 40% year-on-year during the peak season from November 2024 to February 2025, after already exceeding pre-pandemic levels in the 2023-24 season.^[10] International arrivals surged nearly 50%, making up 80% of all skiers on the slopes, and accounted for around 90% of total spending during the 2024-25 winter season. ^[11]

The American booking pace is accelerating fast: as of mid-October 2024, Ski.com’s Japan sales for the 2024-25 season were pacing at nearly triple the previous year’s record total and had already more than doubled what they brought in for all of the 2023-24 season.

Takeaways

Japan rewards the clients who go in with a plan and a good advisor. The best ryokans in Hakone and Kyoto book out 6-9 months in advance, many require a Japanese-speaking intermediary to secure, and some of the most extraordinary experiences are unavailable to people trying to navigate the system alone.

For timing, late May through mid-June is the sweet spot: temples without tour groups, comfortable temperatures, and none of the Cherry Blossom pricing. September through mid-October is a close second. Avoid Golden Week (late April through early May), Obon (mid-August), and New Year’s week, all times when the whole country essentially takes a break and domestic travel surges.

🗝️ The Room Report - Personal Reviews

Capella Kyoto – With Guest Writer Colin Nagy

Anne Marie: My UHNWI (Ultra High Net Worth Individual) clients typically gravitate toward the Aman circuit in Japan, with some Hakone onsens thrown in. Aman Kyoto is pretty epic, but it sounds like Capella Kyoto is going to give them a run for their money. How does their service style compare to what you’d find at an Aman or a Four Seasons?

Colin: I think Capella has reached a level of service consistency across the portfolio that is really top notch. I find it more personalized than Four Seasons in many respects, especially as that brand has scaled. It is warm, thoughtful, and precise. And if we add on top of this the Japanese hospitality, it was a win.

Anne Marie: I talk a lot about anticipatory service at ultra-luxury properties – did you experience any of this during your stay?

Colin: I stay with Capella frequently (Taipei, Bangkok, Sydney), so they were very thoughtful about understanding and recognizing preferences with my first stay at the Kyoto property. I’m trying to avoid booze and sugary welcome amenities, and they delivered nicely with fresh fruit. Dietaries were consistently checked in on with meals, but not in an annoying way: sometimes preferences change from stay to stay, but there was just enough care to let me know they were paying attention, yet flexible. Yoga mat in room, and just subtle, thoughtful turndown touches, generous acts in the room (beautiful amenities, good minibar), and I was recognized by name in most interactions.

Anne Marie: What room level did you book?

Colin: I was in a Premier Temple king looking out over the Kenninji Temple. Great amount of space, good seating area, and desk area/work station. Big key here is that the room was quiet and quite peaceful, and the views up into Gion past the temple were lovely. Great light.

Anne Marie: What’s the room product like? Any of my favorite hotel pet peeves from my article “what luxury hotels get wrong”?

Colin: They nicely threaded the needle between classic Japanese and contemporary. Sometimes traditional Japanese stays can feel a bit minimal and austere and I am pleased to report this room looked visually beautiful but also felt quite plush in the places that mattered (bed, seating, etc).

Anne Marie: How were storage space, light switches, pool chair access, check in speech?

Colin: Storage was great, and the highlight of the room was a simple console with analog switches that controlled everything. No stumbling through iPad menus or doing the late-night scavenger hunt to turn off the lights. This was exactly the room/electronics experience that I wanted. Simple, satisfying and intuitive.

Highlight for me was also the use of the private onsen room, which is a lovely, modern-feeling room with a bathroom, separate living space with couch and TV, shower area and an onsen hot spring. Really divine way to spend an hour.

Anne Marie: Is there a standout suite or room category worth the premium?

Colin: There are suites with private onsens, which for a special occasion could be quite a treat.

Anne Marie: Kyoto is one of the most competitive dining cities in the world. Does the hotel restaurant hold up, or do you leave the property for meals?

Colin: They have a collaboration with Singlethread in Sonoma, SoNoMa, which was meticulously done. Instead of competing in the hyper competitive kaiseki space in Kyoto, they are doing a blend of California and Japanese in a very elegant way. Also, for foodies, Singlethread carries a lot of weight and credibility and is an unexpected find in Japan. My dinner was impeccable, and there was a mango desert that I am still dreaming about. Service was just a wonderful mix of California five-star hospitality (some of the staff have come over to work) but also Japanese precision.

There is also a more casual restaurant, Lantern, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served, as well as a later-night bar and convivial dining area called Yoi. I loved the touch of the vintage lamps ported over from an old school, with beautiful photography throughout.

Anne Marie: What were the favorite things you ate and drank?

Colin: Tasting menu at Singlethread, without question. And they did a wonderful, very elevated oatmeal dish at breakfast that was dialed.

Anne Marie: Who is this hotel actually for? What made it stand out so much in your mind as one of the best experiences you’ve had?

Colin: People who want precision, dialed service, but also a more subdued environment. It is not hard to get to the tourist attractions and more vibrant areas, but this felt hushed and residential in the best way. Also, Capella still feels like an “if you know, you know” brand, which is different from the current vibe of Aman. Also, the guests seemed cool, interesting, and international. Not a bunch of rich people staring at TikTok.

Anne Marie: If you went back to Kyoto tomorrow, would you stay here again – and if not, where would you go instead?

Colin: Without question. One of my best stays in five years. I would recommend this to people who know their stuff and have seen the best.

Anne Marie: What’s the thing the hotel does better than anywhere else you’ve stayed?

Colin: They have only been open for over a month, but I felt that John Blanco and the hotel leadership had this place running like a Grand Seiko watch. No discernable mistakes or friction, and the entire Capella hospitality and service playbook was nicely installed.

Capella Kyoto - image courtesy of the hotel

Additional Guest Take - by Viraj Bajoria

He Got Omotenashi’d

Viraj traveled this May with a group that had multiple dietary constraints. The kitchens simply knew and adjusted without making them feel like the difficult table. There’s a word for that, and it names the thing every first-timer feels but can’t quite place: omotenashi. The lazy translation is “hospitality.” The truer one is closer to wholehearted, anticipatory care offered with no expectation of return, the kind of thing a culture grows over four centuries rather than something a hotel switches on. Its roots run to the tea ceremony (chanoyu), where the host prepares details the guest will never consciously notice: the angle of a scroll, the flower cut that morning. The effort you don’t see is the entire point.

Two ideas sit underneath it, worth carrying with you:

Ichigo ichie (一期一会): “one time, one meeting.” The idea, also born in the tea room, that every encounter is unrepeatable and deserves your full presence. It’s why the service stays a step ahead of you: your one stay, on these exact days, will never come again, so it’s worth getting right.

Shokunin (職人): the craftsman’s spirit, the belief that mastering your work, however humble, is a matter of personal honor. It’s also the answer to the question every American quietly asks here: if no one tips, why is everyone so good? Because excellence in Japan was never for sale.

One morning at Patina Osaka, a director walked Viraj into the team’s daily meeting, where the department heads accounted for every small thing that had slipped the day before. Credit corporate for that part; it is a brand standard, the same ritual Patina runs everywhere it operates. What you won’t find in the manual is a director inviting a guest in to watch her team air their own failures without a flicker of defensiveness. The system is Patina’s, but the care is unique to Japan.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun

Japan’s Tourist Tax: You can’t talk about Japan without discussing the overtourism issue. Japan is now working on formal two-tier pricing at tourist sites, meaning foreign visitors will pay more than residents. The Tourism Agency is expected to publish guidelines by March 2027, with an expert panel currently gathering data from cities that have already tested the model.

Four Seasons Mykonos is now bookable. The Four Seasons Resort Mykonos opens on June 26 with 94 rooms, villas, and suites on Kalo Livadi Bay. It’s the first newly opened luxury property on the island from a major hotel group in quite some time. Book through us for upgrade priority and breakfast included.

Capella has a new president. Roland Fasel, who took over in April, is targeting Aman, Rosewood, and Belmond as his competitive set and told Skift he needs Capella in that top tier within a year. His strategy: scarcity, heritage property conversions, and highly personalized service over rapid expansion. Fasel ran operations at Aman for six years before moving to Maybourne, so he knows the category from the inside. Florence opens in 2027. Skift

The Lake Como EDITION is open. Marriott’s EDITION brand opened in a restored 19th-century palazzo in Cadenabbia in March, with 148 rooms and four dining concepts led by three-Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco, his first restaurants in Italy. The signature dining experience is Cetino. There’s also a floating pool on the lake. FTN News Tao Hua Yuan

Oetker landed in the US. The Vineta Hotel reopened in Palm Beach on March 2 as Oetker Hotels’ first US property, restored to 41 rooms at 363 Cocoanut Row, a short walk from Worth Avenue. Oetker owns Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and The Lanesborough, among others. Rates from $1,900 per night. Hoodline AFAR

Amanvari about to open in Baja. Aman’s Mexico debut on Baja’s East Cape starts welcoming guests on August 1, with rates beginning around $4,500 per night and climbing past $7,000 in peak season. The 18-key property sits where desert meets sea, with a temazcal (ancient Mesoamerican sweat lodge), open-air yoga pavilion, and the privacy the brand is known for. It sits inside the Costa Palmas community alongside Four Seasons Los Cabos. Two Aman-adjacent brands, one address. Upgraded Points Asmallworld

Anne Marie

1. Nippon.com – Japan tourism records 2025 – https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h02673/

2. Japan Travel – USA-Japan tourism 2024 breaks all-time record – https://www.japan.travel/en/us/press-release/usa-japan-tourism-in-2024-breaks-all-time-record/

3. Nippon.com – Yen exchange rate data – https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h02262/

4. Restaurant Business Online – Omakase menus go beyond their Japanese roots – https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/food/omakase-menus-go-beyond-their-japanese-roots-new-culinary-territory

5. Market Reports World – Sushi restaurants market – https://www.marketreportsworld.com/market-reports/sushi-restaurants-market-14722218

6. Toast POS – Sushi trends – https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/sushi-trends

7. Asia Times – Why everyone loves Japan – https://asiatimes.com/2025/12/why-everyone-loves-japan/

8. IMARC Group – Japan luxury hotel market – https://www.imarcgroup.com/japan-luxury-hotel-market

9. IMARC Group – Japan luxury travel market – https://www.imarcgroup.com/japan-luxury-travel-market

10. Visa – Skis up: enduring appeal of Japan’s snowy slopes – https://www.visa.com.sg/about-visa/stories/2025/skis-up-enduring-appeal-of-japans-snowy-slopes-deliver-a-tourism-boost-in-the-ski-season.html

11. Travel Weekly Asia – Japan’s ski tourism hits new heights – https://www.travelweekly-asia.com/Destination-Travel/Japan-s-ski-tourism-hits-new-heights

May 26, 2026

In this week’s issue:

• Pre-Departure – You Can’t Sit With Us. Behind the membership club play creeping into luxury hotels

• The Room Report – Swanning About At Estelle Manor

• The Lobby Bar – Michelin Pulls Green Star, Raffles Going to Courchevel, Four Seasons Gstaad Coming Back, Conde Nast Wants to Go Shopping With You, AI Not Yet at Check-in, TikTok’s Now Doing Bookings, Will AI Soon Be Booking Your Hotel?

Travelers,

I confess that I was denied admission to the Tuxedo Society last year. My husband was thrilled at the slight. My fragile ego was briefly bruised, but the reason they gave was that I’m too old…at 40. I didn’t worry about it too long because I’m more fabulous at 40 than ever. If you haven’t heard of the Tuxedo Society, they are a membership club of 20- and 30-somethings galavanting about Europe for events/photoshoots in the Old-Money European style. Are they “old money?” TBD. My bank balance and pedigree didn’t matter, but being superannuated did.

So, what’s a girl to do when turned away by such a club? I began researching other options and went down the membership club rabbit hole. As a hotelier, this naturally led me to examine the hospitality industry angle – specifically how luxury hotels are trying their hand at creating such clubs within their (usually) welcoming walls.

This week I’m breaking down the hotel membership club boom and highlighting how Estelle Manor is handling it.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel

Check out previous editions of The Upgrade Weekly:

• Why you should travel with your parents

• What’s the Deal with Farm Hotels

• What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong

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🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

You Can’t Sit With Us: The Hotel Membership Club Boom

The unabashed exclusivity of private membership clubs has long been a source of fascination for me. Carson Griffith writes Rich People Shit, a Substack I enjoy that covers cultural capital and the systems that produce it. She wrote about membership clubs in her Hollywood Reporter article of May 13, 2026, titled “Has New York Hit Peak Members Club?”

Carson Griffith is a journalist, editor, and ghostwriter whose bylines appear in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and across the top titles at Hearst and Condé Nast, where she held senior editorial roles. She has ghostwritten five books, two coffee table volumes, and speeches for political figures, Fortune 500 executives, and celebrities. Her reporting is grounded in close observation and primary sourcing — she writes from direct experience of the financial and cultural realities she covers, including the economics of taste, the mechanics of modern wealth, and the private economies that rarely make the news.

Griffith notes that private members clubs are not a new idea in New York. The Union Club, the Metropolitan Club, the Colony Club — these Gilded Age institutions date back more than a century, with application processes that took years and dining rooms that functioned more like urban country clubs. Soho House changed the pace when it landed in the Meatpacking District in 2003, which I will get into later.

Post-pandemic, the floodgates opened: Zero Bond, Casa Cipriani, Aman Club, ZZ’s, Colette, San Vicente, Maxime’s, each one staking out a slightly different corner of the market. London, the city New York largely borrowed the model from, has more than 130 members clubs according to a 2025 report in The Hollywood Reporter. ¹

Now more than ever, we are a society craving community — but a curated, rarified type of community. The club founders Griffith interviews nod to the collapse of third places and a loneliness that social media made worse rather than better.

On a recent podcast episode of On with Kara Swisher, Jeff Klein, the founder behind San Vicente Bungalows and a handful of other highly coveted private clubs, stated that the product is not food, drinks, or hotel rooms. Those are “delivery systems” for the real product, which is a sense of belonging and psychological safety. He posits that membership clubs create an environment built for interesting, socially additive people who value discretion, curiosity, and creativity. The clubs he builds enforce a strict no-photos, no-phone-calls policy. In a world where the new status signal is the luxury of being offline and unreachable, membership clubs with strict no-cellphone policies are the peak symbol of sophistication.

Hotels, despite being a glacially slow industry to adapt to new technology, are masters at designing a “sense of place” and a “feeling of belonging.” Hotels are a place to see and be seen by the right people, and so are clubs. In the past few years, hotels are jumping into the club membership arena, with all its velvet chairs, moody lighting, crisp caviar martinis, and exclusive clientele.

Why Hotels Are Getting Into the Club Business

There isn’t much data tied to hotel-aligned membership clubs just yet. However, when examining the total membership club market, we find that the global private members’ club market reached $31.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at 7.2% annually through 2033, reaching nearly $59 billion. It’s important to take these statistics with a grain of salt, because so many clubs are private and don’t report revenues publicly, so that $31.7 billion figure likely undercounts the actual market size. ²

For context, the broader luxury hospitality market was valued at $154 billion in 2024 and is expected to surpass $218 billion by 2029. If those membership club growth estimates are correct, it makes sense that hotels would want a piece of the action. ³

Just like the farm hotels I profiled in my previous edition of The Upgrade, membership clubs are a TRevPAR (Total Revenue Per Available Room) play, aimed at boosting ancillary revenue past heads in beds. If you can sell spa memberships, social memberships, and golf memberships to locals who never sleep in your beds, you’re generating revenue independent of occupancy. Post-pandemic, after two years of watching geopolitical instability wreck forward bookings, building a local revenue base is a smart move for the luxury hotel set.

The generations driving this boom are primarily Millennials and Gen X. We are also seeing an increase in corporate spending for business networking, as return-to-office mandates again push executives to conduct business away from home. Who wants to attend a meeting under fluorescent lights in a conference room? Take me to lunch at your private hotel members’ club, and maybe I’ll consider that LP investment in your new hotel concept.

Demand signals are hard to ignore

Hotels are jumping into membership clubs because demand points full steam ahead. About 63% of clubs boosted their membership counts in 2022, and 62% had a waiting list for prospective members at the end of 2022 and into early 2023. ⁴

The Soho House waitlist currently exceeds 100,000 applicants, meaning a prospective member can expect to wait four to five years. Annabel’s in Mayfair maintains a waitlist where six years is considered normal. ⁵

Soho House as Both Industry Darling and Cautionary Tale

Soho House has been the one to watch. Their Americas segment is the company’s largest revenue generator, encompassing US Houses, stand-alone restaurants, and management fees. Soho House New York, a 45,000-square-foot property, offers hotel bedrooms alongside its club spaces and restaurants. Membership starts from $950 quarterly, so we are not talking huge dollars here. In contrast, Exclusive Resorts, the luxury travel club I worked for previously, required a deposit of $100,000 to $500,000 on top of annual dues ranging from $20,000 to north of $60,000.

Soho House grew from 30 properties in July 2021 to 41 in July 2023, while membership jumped from under 112,000 to over 176,000 in that same two-year window. By 2024, they reported a 7% increase in total revenues and a 14% rise in adjusted EBITDA, with over 193,900 members. ⁶

Are they profitable? It’s complicated. Despite generating $1.2 billion in total revenue for fiscal year 2024, the company posted a full-year net loss of $163 million. Full-year adjusted EBITDA was $131.9 million.⁷

The question is whether a hotel-cum-membership-club model can scale without losing cachet. Jeff Klein’s view is that scale and soul are inherently in tension with one another, and that many new clubs entering the market will fail because they are social scenes or real estate products dressed up as communities.

Moreover, running a hotel and a members’ club under the same roof creates friction. Members expect exclusivity, hotel guests expect access. Both groups fight for restaurant reservations, spa appointments, pool loungers in the shade. At scale, that tension is tough to manage and often falls on the shoulders of the GM.

Two Models Worth Knowing

There are essentially two versions of this playing out in hotels right now:

1) The wellness and fitness club attached to a hotel. The membership value is gym, spa, and pool access. The Lanesborough’s Club & Spa in London starts from £6,000 a year. Chewton Glen in Hampshire runs a country club model with over 60 classes per week. Beaverbrook in Surrey splits its golf club and spa into two separate membership products entirely. Membership clubs like these have existed for decades – they are high-end health clubs that happen to sit inside famous hotels.

2) This model is the social members’ club integrated with, or attached to, a hotel. Here, the product is programming, events, community, and identity. Estelle Manor is the best UK example; Gleneagles Townhouse in Edinburgh is another. There’s also the Ned in London, which Soho House took global. At these properties, membership is more in the realm of F&B than of grunting at the gym and having a quick steam before work.

The Hotels With Memberships Currently

Luxury hotel brands that are starting to expand into this arena are Rosewood and Aman. Rosewood added Carlyle & Co. in Hong Kong. Aman launched its Aman Club in New York. Soho House created the Ned hybrid hotel-and-club concept, which now operates as a separate membership program across three properties.

While Soho House is a volume play where revenue depends on scaling membership and in-house spend across a large portfolio, Aman is the inverse. At Soho House, the hotel rooms are a benefit of membership rather than the primary revenue engine. At Aman, the membership club is an ultra-thin layer of permanent access to the hotel sold at a price point that functions more like a real estate transaction than a subscription. The Aman Club charges upwards of $200,000 to join, making it among the most expensive private membership clubs in New York City.

Even smaller cities, like my home haunt of Denver, have started getting their own membership club hotels. The Clayton Club in Cherry Creek is now where most of my out-of-town guests stay, and where I conduct many business meetings.

Maison Estelle, Mayfair

• Estelle Manor, Oxfordshire: Full private club on the estate with the Enshym Baths Roman spa, padel, falconry, events, and social programming. Sister club Maison Estelle operates in Mayfair. You can be a hotel guest without being a member, and the two cohorts exist side by side.

• The Ned NoMad, New York and The Ned London: Hotel guests can stay, but club spaces are members-only.

• The Lanesborough Club & Spa, London: Wellness-focused, starting from £6,000 annually. Hotel guests get complimentary gym access; full membership is a separate commitment.

• Gleneagles, Perthshire: Golf membership on the three championship courses, plus the separate Gleneagles Townhouse in Edinburgh.

• The Club by Bamford at Daylesford, Cotswolds: Child-free, wellness-forward, opened in 2023. Membership from £3,850 per year plus a £1,650 joining fee. Cryotherapy, padel, ice baths, personal training.

• Aman Club, New York: Upwards of $200,000 to join. This is less a subscription and more a real estate transaction masquerading as a membership.

• Rosewood’s Carlyle & Co., Hong Kong: Rosewood’s plunge into the social membership space.

With the proliferation of these membership club hotels, the question has become not why but when. How does the concept of community curation create relevance for a hotel in a city? Will they be able to capitalize on the culture of exclusivity? We will see.

For further reading on membership clubs, check out:

· The House Standard, “The Private Club Boom Has a Blindspot”

· Colin Nagy, “Cracking the Code for a New Wave of Members Clubs”

· Hotels Above Par, “The Hottest Membership Clubs”

· Hotels Above Par, “Have Hotels Cracked the Code on Private Members’ Clubs?”

🗝️ The Room Report — Personal reviews from my own travels

Estelle Manor, Oxfordshire

Estelle Manor, Anne Marie Brown

Last year, I stayed at Estelle Manor for two nights with my girlfriends. I loved it so much that I’m returning this summer with my family to stay in a woodland cottage. We will be doing a falconry walk, the baths experience at their Roman spa, and my children will ride around in “Little Landies” (mini Land Rovers that are endlessly Instagrammable).

There’s a maximalism at Estelle Manor that I love, but it’s not for everyone. Helicopters landed on the lawn, and I have a sneaking suspicion that several of the willowy women floating around the lobby in floor-length gowns were influencers. Estelle Manor is home to both a membership club and a hotel. Consequently, its management team has been working to balance both client classes as they jockey for restaurant reservations and pool chair use.

Sharan Pasricha made his name with the Hoxton Hotels, sold Ennismore to Accor in 2021 in a deal that valued the company at over $1 billion, and then kept Estelle Manor for himself. He and his wife Eiesha, who serves as the artistic director of both Estelle and its London sister Maison Estelle in Mayfair, own these properties personally, entirely outside the Ennismore/Accor structure.

The property sits on 85 acres of Oxfordshire countryside, surrounded by over 3,000 acres of parkland, in a Grade II-listed Jacobean house that, in a previous life, has been a wartime maternity hospital, a gym, and a police training college. Opened in May 2023, it is now 108 rooms, four restaurants, a 3,000-square-meter Roman-inspired bathhouse, padel courts, a gym with 48 classes a week, a kids’ club called The Nook, and a members’ club that runs alongside the hotel operation.

Rooms

We stayed in the Walled Garden and Stable Rooms. They were sumptuously decorated, spacious, and came with all sorts of ayurvedic snacks and goodies. It was a bit challenging to navigate the pebbly gravel in heels on my way to dinner each night, but I made it. I did feel a bit bad for the bellhop who had to lug my giant suitcase up and down the narrow stairs to the second floor.

The estate houses woodland cottages for families near the spa, and larger cottages that start at £6,000 a night.

In the main house itself, there are suites with delicious soaking tubs, bathrooms you can get lost in, and plenty of guests enjoying people-watching from the windows overlooking the pool.

Spa

I can hardly wait to spend another full afternoon at the Enshym Baths. If you want to do the bath circuit, book early as those slots fill up. Make sure to build in time to enjoy tea and snacks at the café. I had one of the best massages of my life at that spa – so good I literally cried.

The Membership Model

This is a hotel and a members’ club sharing the same grounds, which means the energy shifts depending on the day. Weekday stays are quieter while Friday and Saturday evenings are more crowded. Club membership includes full estate access, priority booking, exclusive programming, and community events.

Sustainability

All electricity at Estelle Manor now comes from 100% renewable sources. The property has attained Green Key certification, a leading global standard for sustainable operations, and undergoes rigorous independent audits to maintain its status.

In the walled garden, a “no dig” approach sees herbs, fruits, and vegetables harvested for use at The Glasshouse restaurant. The gardening team repurposes flowers into dried arrangements displayed around the property for up to a year. Bottled water is served in glass bottles (plastic is beneath contempt here) supplied by Blenheim Water, a ten-minute drive away. Other comestibles are locally sourced as well, like the Mayfield Eggs from a nearby family-run farm.

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

Michelin Pulls the Green Star

The Michelin Guide Great Britain & Ireland has announced it’s retiring the green star, which recognized restaurants for sustainable practices. The designation launched in 2020, and the 37 green-starred restaurants across the UK and Ireland will lose it by the end of this year. In its place, Michelin is launching an editorial initiative called Mindful Voices. Unlike the green star, Mindful Voices is not a formal accolade and will have no accompanying icon or logo. Make of that what you will. A certification that restaurants spent years striving to earn is gone, replaced with something that amounts to a story series. The chefs found out via a mass email addressed “Dear Chef.” Not very classy, Michelin. The Caterer

Raffles Is Going to Courchevel

Raffles Hotels & Resorts is opening its first-ever alpine resort in Courchevel 1850, set within the Jardin Alpin precinct with views across the Tarentaise Valley. The property is slated for the 2028 winter season, featuring 50 rooms and suites with interiors by Humbert & Poyet. Rosewood beat them there, opening its own Jardin Alpin property in December 2025. One&Only has also announced plans in the same enclave, with a target of 2030. Courchevel is turning into a luxury hotel arms race. If ski-in/ski-out France is on your list, the window to book before rates reflect all this new inventory is closing fast. Tao Hua Yuan Business Traveler

Four Seasons Gstaad Is Coming Back

The Park Gstaad, currently being reimagined by interior designer Joseph Dirand, is scheduled to reopen as The Park Gstaad, Four Seasons Hotel in time for the 2026-27 winter season. This one’s been watched closely in Swiss circles for a while. Six private residences are now also for sale alongside the hotel. If wintertime Switzerland is on your radar, this is worth putting on the list early. parkgstaad

Condé Nast Wants to Be Your Shopping Platform

Condé Nast launched Vette, a creator-focused commerce platform that lets influencers and editors build curated storefronts. Brands drop-ship orders, Vette handles checkout, and creators focus on curation. It’s their answer to LTK and ShopMy, using editorial credibility as the differentiator. Why should this matter to travelers? Travel content is heading in the same direction. Newsletters, Substacks, and creator-led recommendations are replacing the glossy magazine spread. When Condé Nast builds infrastructure for it, that tells you where the money will follow. Influencer Marketing Hub

Your Hotel’s Check-In Is Now Partly Run by AI (But the Desk Isn’t Going Away)

New research from Mews found that 98% of hoteliers have used AI across their operations in the last six months, with AI involved in 11 of the 19 most common hotel tasks. Despite that, 59% of hoteliers say the front desk welcome and check-in should remain in human hands, and that view is strongest among properties already using AI most extensively. Your room assignment, rate, and housekeeping schedule are almost certainly touched by an algorithm now. The being who greets you at check-in is probably still human. For now, at least. eHotelier Insights

TikTok Is Now a Booking Engine

A platform called Cray has been building “the OTA for Gen Z”: a tool that connects influencers and tour operators, letting travelers on TikTok or Instagram impulse-book experiences directly through short-form video. Commission that would normally go to Viator or GetYourGuide goes to Cray instead, which splits it with the creator who generated the booking. It’s affiliate marketing with a booking layer built in, aimed at the generation that uses TikTok the way everyone else uses Google. Arival

TikTok Go now links videos directly to Booking.com, Expedia, and Viator, letting users check availability and book without leaving the app. Bookable clips appear in the For You feed, search results, and location pages, collapsing the reservation process into a single closed interaction. Tubefilter, Travel Weekly

Ascott Is Building for a World Where AI Books Your Hotel

Ascott Limited announced a major investment in AI-ready infrastructure through partnerships with Accenture, Amadeus, and EHL Hospitality Business School, aimed at preparing for a future where intelligent agents increasingly shape how travelers discover, plan, and book stays. The initiative spans digital architecture, distribution systems, and workforce training. The panel they hosted at their global conference put the question plainly: “When AI agents become the first audience, how will Ascott convince software before humans?” Hotel Management

🗝️ Anne Marie, Founder of Alpenglow Travel, Managing Director of Colorado Ohana Ventures, Traveler, Mother, Writer of the Upgrade, Solver of Travel Problems

Sources

¹ Luxury London, “The New London Members’ Clubs,” November 2025. Note: the 130+ figure is widely cited in industry coverage; the piece originally attributed it to The Hollywood Reporter, but the Hollywood Reporter article referenced (Carson Griffith, May 13, 2026) covers New York clubs. Attribution corrected here.

² Growth Market Reports, “Private Members’ Club Market Research Report 2033,” via Hospitality Net / RLA Global, October 2025. Note: market sizing figures vary by research firm ($31.7B–$34.2B for 2024; projections range $59B–$64B by 2033 depending on source). The piece’s caveat about undercounting is well-founded.

³ Business Research Company / Luxury Hotel School Paris, “Global Luxury Hospitality Market,” 2024–2025. Verified across multiple industry sources including digitalguest.com and worldbigroup.com.

⁴ GGA Partners / CMAA Research, “A Club Leader’s Perspective: Emerging Trends and Opportunities for 2023,” February 2023. Note: survey covered primarily country clubs and city/athletic clubs, not social members’ clubs of the Soho House type. Direction of travel applies broadly; absolute percentages should be read in that context.

⁵ Soho House & Co, Q2 2024 Earnings Report (waitlist at 111,000, August 2024). Text updated from 100,000 to 110,000+ to reflect the most recent reported figure. Annabel’s waitlist sourced to Spear’s, “How to Join Annabel’s,” November 2023; “six-year wait” language softened to “measured in years” as no primary source is attached to that specific figure.

⁶ Soho House & Co (NYSE: SHCO), Q2 2021 Earnings Report (30 Houses, 111,910 members) and Q2 2023 Earnings Report (41 Houses, 176,305 members); FY2024 Earnings Release, March 31, 2025 (212,447 members). Member count in text updated from 193,900 (a 2023 year-end figure) to 212,000+ to reflect the correct FY2024 number.

⁷ Soho House & Co, FY2024 Earnings Release, March 31, 2025 (via Nasdaq / BusinessWire). Financials corrected from Q4-only figures to full fiscal year 2024: total revenue $1.2B, net loss $163M, adjusted EBITDA $131.9M. The original text cited $91.7M net loss and $32.3M EBITDA, which were Q4 2024 figures only.

A brief note on this publication. Travel Dispatch will be a new series you can opt into. The Upgrade includes three publications:

1) The Upgrade | Weekly. Everybody gets this. It’s free and arrives on Tuesdays in your inbox. Hospitality hot takes, industry deep dives, the Room Report of hotels worth a stay, and the Lobby Bar with hospitality industry tea and news.

2) Travel Dispatch. You’ll receive your first post for free this weekend. Going forward, they will be available for a paid subscription. These are personal travel essays, destination guides, and real itineraries I’ve built for myself and clients over 18 years in the luxury travel industry. This weekend - you’ll receive my mother-daughter trip to Paris with my bougie bunny. These are not weekly - they will come out once or twice per month.

3) Hotel History. My father, Richard Kelley, wrote a weekly newsletter about the history of our family company, Outrigger Hotels, for 40 years. Paid subscribers will receive occasional editions of my father’s archived Saturday Briefing articles. I want him to live on through his work now that he’s gone.

To customize what lands in your inbox, go to substack.com/settings, click on The Upgrade under Subscriptions, and toggle each section on or off.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

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A Mother-Daughter Trip to Paris

My daughter is, undoubtedly, the luckiest kid I know. Last fall, she turned 7, and I let her choose a trip with me as her birthday present.

My Bougie Bunny chose Paris, (because of course she did).

Insane 7th birthday present? Absolutely. Do I regret it? Not for a second. I’m decently certain that my 7th birthday involved a Lisa Frank theme and Chuck-E-Cheese. But, my daughter went to Paris.

I’m a luxury travel planner, and honestly, if I can flex my planning skills anywhere, it should be on designing the quintessential Princess Paris trip for my offspring.

Malia loves the “Claris Goes to Paris” books, which feature a little mouse with expensive taste who wants to be a fashion designer, and proceeds to adventure around France name dropping Pucci, Chanel, and Dior. Malia also loves princesses, sweet things, and being the center of attention. She also complimented a woman in an elevator on her bag, saying “I just love your Chanel!” Yes, I know I’m in trouble.

I knew I needed to anchor the trip around fashion, food, and Marie Antoinette.

Where we stayed:

I chose Relais Christine both for its location near the Luxembourg Gardens (and their epic playground), and for its ornate decor.

Our room was fit for a princess, and the staff made sure to sing Malia happy birthday the first morning of the trip over a breakfast filled with hot chocolate and croissants.

What we did:

• A mother-daughter massage at the Cheval Blanc Dior spa

• A boat ride down the Seine blasting music so we could have a dance party

• A tour of the Dior museum to brush up on her fashion history

• A chocolate and macarons tasting tour

• A guided tour of Versailles after watching the Marie Antoinette movie

• A photoshoot in front of the Eiffel Tower

• A private shopping experience at https://www.lileauxfees.com/

Where we ate:

• Vagenende - art deco style French restaurant where Malia devoured escargot

• Huguette - sweet little restaurant with piano music and amazing clam dish

• Giraffe - fancy brunch with views of the Eiffel Tower

• The Ritz - afternoon tea

I am lucky enough that I’ve been to Paris several times in my life, but I’d never seen the city like this - at a slower pace, through her eyes. Everything felt magical, from watching the Eiffel Tower light up to riding the carousel at the Luxembourg Gardens together.

7 is special. She’s still such a little girl who loves dolls and Disney movies, who believes in fairies, twirls in dresses, and doesn’t quite understand what happened at the end of the Marie Antoinette movie. My daughter is also now able to travel as an excellent companion. She never complained about the long flight or distances we walked on winding streets. When it rained, she was thrilled to have a chance to carry an umbrella and sing in the rain. She charmed the pants off of just about every server and front desk person we encountered. I quite honestly had one of the best trips of my life with her.

Celebrating my daughter’s birthday was as much a celebration of my day of giving birth, and our bond together, as it was her moment. Let’s face it, motherhood is hard, and after seven years of it, I deserved to reap a bit of what I’d sowed.

Traveling with our kids gives us the brief gift of concentrated time together, focused on memory making and story sharing. There are no “just a second while I respond to this emails” while you’re walking through the Versailles gardens. There is a brief respite from endless navigation of soccer games, ballet recitals, birthday parties, and theater performances. Routine gives way to “yes” moments where you eat gelato at 10am because you are in Paris.

I am so excited to raise a traveler, and can’t wait for the adventures ahead with my wonderfully spoiled Bougie Bunny.

-Anne Marie, The Upgrade Weekly

Dear readers of The Upgrade -

I’m going to use this platform to occasionally share some of my father’s newsletters, The Saturday Briefing, from the archives of 40 years of his weekly articles. Through these pieces, I hope to share the legacy that my family built through 4 generations of family hotel ownership, until our sale in 2016. My father has since passed away, so I want to give his writing new life by sharing it to other fellow hospitality enthusiasts.

-Anne Marie (Kelley) Brown

My father, Richard Kelley'

My Parents Build Their First Hotel: The Islander

by Richard Kelley

‘By the time I was 15, I was the desk clerk and bellman on weekends …’

When I was 13 years old, my parents were completing the Islander Hotel on Seaside Avenue where the Waikiki Trade Center now stands. I got some lessons on how a building was constructed by following my father around the job.

Today is so different from the time my parents entered the hotel business shortly after World War II. There was no real visitor industry then. In 1947, the year they opened the Islander, Hawaiʻi welcomed some 25,000 tourists, the first year the visitor flow rebounded to roughly the same level as in the immediate prewar years. Perhaps my parents were hearing a voice that said over and over again, “Roy, Estelle … if you build it, they will come!”

Well, build it they did. My father not only employed his architectural skills to design the building, but also served as chief financial officer, general contractor and construction site foreman. My mother cooked lunch for the workmen, and when the property was opened, she took reservations and answered letters on a manual typewriter. In later years, when her desk was at the Edgewater, she responded to over 100 letters a day before going home and preparing dinner.

The construction foreman for the Islander was a huge man named Paul Heady who had been out in the Pacific during the war. I was allowed to pitch in and help with the construction where I could do so safely. Child labor laws were not an impediment in those days. Everything went very slowly because construction materials and supplies were hard to obtain in the early postwar period. It was a great experience.

The Islander was a five-story walk-up with 48 units and a little two-by-four office on the ground floor. Listed room rates started at $5.00 a night, single occupancy, and $6.00 for a double. But if you were a little short of cash and a room was available, my father would make you a deal!

The property was fully occupied for many years and provided a base of operations for many additional rental units scattered around the neighborhood in cottages, low-rise apartment buildings and converted homes.

My experience in the hotel industry started in Housekeeping when I was in junior high school. It was in a small but busy room facing the parking lot behind the Islander. We served not only the Islander “tower,” but the far-flung group of outlying units, scattered in a two-block radius, from Aloha Drive to Nohonani Street. You learned how to be efficient because you practically needed roller skates if you forgot something when you went out to make up rooms.

Yoshiko Sato ran Housekeeping efficiently. The laundry was done in small domestic washers across the driveway in an open garage. My summer job was to run towels, linen and supplies to the housekeepers as they cleaned rooms in this far-flung hotel and to help with heavy work, like moving beds and furniture.

By the time I was 15, I was the desk clerk and bellman on weekends. I can remember the thrill of getting a tip when I hauled bags up the stairs of the main building or over to one of the outlying units. I particularly remember those stairs. They were deceptive, zigging and zagging so you could never see more than half a flight at a time. The stairs became a challenge for me in the summertime, when I worked in Housekeeping and carried linen and bags up those flights.

On Fridays, I escaped the stairs by staying up all night to do the audit. The accounting for the whole hotel, more than 200 rooms altogether, was on a giant manual spreadsheet covering three or four pages. Every night, someone had to add in the day’s room revenue and miscellaneous charges across the columns and make the columns and the rows balance, using a manually cranked, 10-key adding machine. I never could get it right the first time and often had to stay far into the morning, punchy from lack of sleep, to make it all add up correctly.

When elevators, air conditioning and hotel swimming pools came along, the Islander became obsolete and was torn down to make way for one of the expansion units of the Waikiki Theater.

Roy and Estelle Kelley at the Islander Hotel, 1947. Islander Hotel.

From Paddling the Outrigger by Dr. Richard Kelley, pp. 26–27. Originally published in the Saturday Briefing newsletter, 1984–1997.

May 19, 2026

In this week’s issue:

• Pre-Departure – The Race for Irreplaceable Hotels

• The Room Report – Passalacqua, Lake Como

• The Lobby Bar – One&Only Courchevel, Fouquet’s Mykonos, World Cup pricing, the most stolen item from hotel rooms

Travelers,

Some of the world’s most storied properties are getting a second life as luxury hotels. A Venetian palace, a former U.S. Embassy in Mayfair, a 15th-century Austrian castle on an Alpine lake – these properties are irreplaceable and chasing the top of the K in today’s K-shaped economy. In The Upgrade this week, I explore what’s driving these historic renovations, where the money is coming from, and my personal favorite historic luxury hotel – Passalacqua.

It’s no question that I was absolutely a princess in another life, so are these properties on my TBV (to be visited) list? Absolutely. What do you think is the most stolen item from hotel rooms? It may not be what you’d expect.

Happy travels! Anne Marie

Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel

Check out previous editions of The Upgrade Weekly:

• Why you should travel with your parents

• What's the Deal with Farm Hotels

• What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong

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  🗝️ Pre-Departure - Hospitality Hot Takes

  ---

The Race for Irreplaceable Hotels

In the K-shaped economy, the race for irreplaceable hotels is going strong. Investors are chasing the top half of the “K,” targeting the luxury spending of travelers whose pocketbooks are most insulated against global disruption and inflation.

In this vein, we have recently seen a rash of historic properties being acquired, renovated, and reflagged under luxury brands.

Case in point – two years ago, I sat on the patio of the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, watching the feluccas sail past at sunset, imagining Agatha Christie penning “Death on the Nile.” Previously a Sofitel, the Old Cataract commands prime real estate on the bank of the Nile and a famous history that rivals many of the Grande Dame properties in Europe.

Now, Mandarin Oriental will take over the Old Cataract as well as the Winter Palace in Luxor, planning significant renovations to both before they reopen in 2027 together with the debut of the brand’s first luxury river cruise between Cairo and Aswan.

Venice, where real estate is finite and demand is not, has become the center of this activity:

• Rosewood Hotel Bauer, the 1880 landmark situated between the Grand Canal and Piazza San Marco, is now in mid-renovation.

• Hotel Danieli is being reflagged as a Four Seasons. Designer Pierre-Yves Rochon is uniting its three historic palaces and restoring Gothic architectural details. The renovation carries a €30 million price tag, with 52 suites and 168 guest rooms. Reopening shortly (“mid-2026”).

• Orient Express Venezia opened in March inside the restored 15th-century Palazzo Donà Giovannelli in Cannaregio, with 47 rooms, suites, and residences, preserving original frescoes and high ceilings.

• Airelles Venezia opened on the island of Giudecca inside a former 16th-century school for young women and a 17th-century villa. Airelles also operates the only hotel inside the Palace of Versailles, so they know something about historic real estate.

Beyond Venice: the former U.S. Embassy in Mayfair is now The Chancery Rosewood. In Berlin, the 19th-century HQ of Dresdner Bank is being converted to a Four Seasons. A 15th-century Austrian castle on Lake Fuschl is now Rosewood Schloss Fuschl.

As a hotel investor, I can confidently say that the economics of building a new luxury hotel from scratch have become almost untenable. Construction costs have skyrocketed with supply chain disruption. With the Iran war and the pandemic still causing ripple effects throughout travel, institutional investors hesitate to back new greenfield development in an industry so susceptible to disruption.

With that kind of development cost, luxury hotels are chasing high ADRs (average daily rates), and one of the best ways to justify them is to offer a historic property. A palace comes with several hundred years of story in the walls. That story is the product – the difference between all-but-identical city Marriotts in San Francisco and Rome, and a place like Passalacqua on Lake Como, a palazzo that once belonged to counts and that hosted Churchill and (though not quite at the same time!) Bellini.

Historic hotels carry an ADR roughly 12% higher than comparably luxurious contemporary properties, with occupancy running about 8 percentage points above average.

Investors like me call this a moat. There is nothing comparable to staying in a 14th-century Venetian palace on the Grand Canal. A newly built five-star hotel nearby competes on amenities and price. The Danieli’s historic pedigree simply blows modern competition out of the (canal) water.

The Danieli in Venice

Ownership structures explain why properties that sat dormant or deteriorating for years are suddenly getting $30, $50, $100 million renovations. Sovereign wealth funds, primarily from the Middle East and Asia, have been targeting European gateway markets aggressively. In 2024, hard assets including real estate accounted for 61% of all publicly disclosed sovereign wealth fund direct investments, up from 40% the prior year.

Aman is a perfect illustration of what this capital is chasing.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested $900 million in Aman Group alongside Cain International, valuing the brand at $3 billion. The following year, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala led a further $360 million round. That’s $1.26 billion in sovereign capital into a single ultra-luxury hotel brand in under 18 months. Aman now has properties under development at AlUla and Diriyah.

Egypt’s Garranah Group is backing the Luxor and Aswan Mandarin Oriental renovations and the river cruise, resulting in a luxury corridor linking Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan under the MO flag. Egypt gets world-class hospitality at its most iconic sites without bearing the full development risk, while Mandarin Oriental gets a flagship presence in one of the most famous destinations on earth.

Public Private Partnerships

Historic preservation in Europe adds another layer of complexity, which often requires both significant investment from an owner-operator, like a family office, or a company like LVMH (invested in Belmond), in partnership with the country or city where the development takes place.

Venice operates under one of the world’s tightest regulatory regimes – facades cannot be altered, architectural elements must be retained wherever possible, and permitting requires navigating multiple layers of local, regional, and national heritage authorities.

For most hotel developers, the combination of regulatory complexity and capital intensity is enough to steer clear of a project. In contrast, sovereign and institutional investors can hold an asset through a two- to three-year renovation and dark period without the financial pressure that kills most private real estate deals.

The luxury brand brings a globally recognized flag, a distribution network, a loyalty program, and the operational expertise to run a property of this caliber.

The structure typically involves the investor owning the real estate while the brand manages under a long-term agreement. Mandarin Oriental’s Paris sale to Gruppo Statuto followed this model, with MO retaining a 50-year management agreement even after selling the asset.

The investor benefits from a world-class operator and premium brand attached to its irreplaceable asset. The brand gets a flagship property it could never afford to own outright, in a location with predictable traffic.

What it means for you

I rarely send clients to a new property in its first year, thanks to the heightened possibility of operational hiccups. But, if you can look past a missed turndown or slow breakfast service, the months right after a major historic property reopens tend to be the sweet spot. Opening-rate incentives are common before pricing stabilizes. Perhaps counterintuitively, neighboring properties often soften rates while a major competitor is off the market to entice travelers before the competition reopens.

When Rosewood Hotel Bauer (see above) comes fully online in Venice, expect the broader San Marco comp set to adjust upward.

🗝️ The Room Report - Personal reviews from my own travels

Passalacqua, Lake Como

In 2024 we stayed in a villa down the street from Passalacqua. When my son developed an ear infection on a weekend, I called their concierge to ask if they could recommend a local pediatrician. Not only did they find a doctor (who drove an hour to our villa on a Sunday), but the hotel also invited us up for a site visit, cocktails on the terrace, and a wine tasting. Now that is service.

Passalacqua offers 24 rooms on seven acres above Lake Como in a palazzo that once belonged to the Counts Lucini Passalacqua and that hosted Churchill and Bellini. “World’s 50 Best" named it the “Best Hotel in the World” in 2023.

It’s now owned by the De Santis family, who also own Grand Hotel Tremezzo farther down the lakeshore.

What sets Passalacqua apart from every other historic palazzo hotel in Italy is that it doesn’t feel like a museum. The De Santis family’s personal antiques are everywhere, plates on the wall that belonged to their grandparents, objects collected when the pace of travel was slower. You feel like a guest in someone’s home, rather than a customer in a hotel designed to look like someone’s home.

Chef Viviana Varese runs an open kitchen, meaning you can walk in and get something made to order whenever you want. We did a wine tasting in the private cellar and watched guests roll pasta with the kitchen team. The property spreads across the Palazzo, the Villa, and the Casa al Lago, a lakeside cottage with four rooms that’s perfect for families.

The calendar fills almost a year in advance, and they price accordingly.

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

• One&Only is coming to Courchevel. Kerzner International just announced One&Only Courchevel 1850, the brand’s first resort in the French Alps, opening in 2030 on the site of the historic Courcheneige Hotel, with ski-in/ski-out access to the Bellécôte slope. Also in the Courchevel pipeline: Raffles is opening its first-ever ski property there in 2028. Via HotelsMag

• Fouquet’s lands in Mykonos. Barrière just opened Fouquet’s Mykonos on Paraga Beach, the brand’s first Greece location, with 61 suites, three villas, an indoor pool (rare on the island), a Barbara Sturm spa, and a restaurant created with Roka. I’m there with clients this summer. First impressions to follow. Via HotelsMag

• World Cup hotel pricing update. If you’re planning to attend any matches this summer, the anticipated pricing hysteria in host cities has not materialized. 80% of hoteliers surveyed reported bookings are tracking below forecasts, with visa barriers and geopolitical concerns cited as the main factors. Rooms are available in Miami, LA, and New York at rates more reasonable than predictions suggested. Via HotelsMag

• The most stolen item from hotel rooms is… (hint – it’s not the shoehorn). Over 88% of hotel staff surveyed said towels are what’s most commonly filched, followed by bathrobes at 66% with hangers in third place. Hotel theft costs the industry roughly $100 million a year in the U.S. alone. The branded pens and mini soaps? Take ’em. That’s marketing. The Frette bath towels? Hotels are charging your card for those. Via AOL (is anyone else surprised that AOL still exists?)

🗝️ Anne Marie

alpenglowtravel.com | AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com

Oahu, Hawaii

The Insider’s Guide from Someone Who Grew Up There

I grew up on Oahu, right outside of Waikiki at the base of Diamond Head. My family had a hotel company. We go back at least twice a year to see my siblings who stayed behind, and we host friends and their families regularly there. This guide is built on a lifetime of knowing and loving the island.

Setting Expectations

Oahu does not have the hotel product to compete with the Rosewood Kona Village or the Four Seasons Lanai. If your vision of a Hawaii trip is staying at your resort the entire time and leaning into full-service amenities, Oahu is not your island. Nothing in its hotel lineup will match those properties.

What Oahu does have is everything else: the best restaurants in the state, better shopping than any other island, a huge range of activities you can easily drive to, and a genuine energy that the quieter islands do not have. The key is knowing what kind of experience you are in for.

I can’t emphasize this enough - rent a car. There is too much to see beyond Waikiki to go without one.

Hotels

From a luxury standpoint, your real options on Oahu are:

• The Halekulani

• The Kahala

• The Ritz-Carlton Waikiki (residences)

• The Jewel

• The Four Seasons Ko’olina

• The Ritz-Carlton Turtle Bay

Ritz-Carlton Waikiki (Residences)

The location is unbeatable, the pool is solid, and the bar is great. You will need to walk a couple of blocks to the beach, but with small children we found it completely manageable. The family suites accommodate a family of four or five comfortably, and

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Read more

May 12, 2026

Inside The Upgrade this week:

• Pre-Departure – Why you should travel with your parents, a personal note

• The Room Report – The British Pullman’s new luxury train car

• The Lobby Bar – Your new passport might have Trump’s face on it, UAE airspace is back open, hotel earnings reports worth watching, good-bye to Spirit airlines (not that I ever flew on them)

Travelers,

This week’s edition of The Upgrade | Weekly is more personal. This weekend had me thinking about my parents – both of whom I lost within 6 months of each other in late 2022 and early 2023. As part of the sandwich generation, I wanted to take a moment to remind you why you should travel with your parents while you can. If you aren’t ready for the guilt trip, scroll past to the Room Report where Baz Luhrmann has designed a train carriage, Celia, for the Belmond British Pullman, and it is a maximalist masterpiece.

Happy travels, Anne Marie Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel

The Upgrade is free for subscribers. Support this publication by forwarding it to your friends and booking your trips with us.

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Yours truly in Botswana with my parents

🗝️ Pre-Departure – Hospitality Industry Hot Takes

Why You Should Travel With Your Parents

I often write about traveling with my children and the benefits of raising kids who have a global view that extends beyond their own country. Most of my clients are millennial families, trying to navigate room configurations that work for a couple with two or three kids, hotels located near playgrounds, and activities that won’t result in meltdowns.

What we don’t explore often enough is the other end of the curve – traveling with our parents once we are no longer children. Yes, every older parent is a unique case. My father at 80 happily navigated safari vehicles in Botswana. My mother thought a hotel without room service was equivalent to camping.

Yes, our parents may not remember to turn on international service for their cell phone before travel. They may need 5pm dinner reservations in a country that eats at 9pm. They may be prime targets for pickpockets and scam artists. They may book the wrong date for a hotel and then argue at check in about why their Booking.com reservation can’t be honored. They may forget their daughter is a travel agent and try to make their own bookings, which they hopelessly mess up.

Nonetheless, I am going to argue here in favor of traveling with your parents as an adult.

I was in my early 20s, working my tail off in my first job, a full social calendar, bounding between happy hours, hikes, and bachelorette parties. The last thing on my mind was calling my parents. They often called me, after all, and I could schedule time on my calendar if they really needed to see me. I was very busy.

My father, who had been in the travel industry for most of his life, had a tradition of taking a solo trip with each of his seven kids when they reached adulthood. He’d been asking me for a few years where I would like to go for my trip, but I kept putting it off. I had limited PTO.

As the youngest – the child my dad had at age 50 with his second wife – I grew up with people thinking he was my grandfather. He had white hair when I was born. Soft spoken and brilliant, he loved travel with a passion I inherited.

I was knee deep in planning a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for clients – one of the first trips I would be responsible for – and I was proudly explaining the details to my dad when he asked if I’d like to take that same trip with him.

He had never served in the Vietnam War, but it had a large impact on his life, and he’d always wanted to travel there.

I am forever grateful I said “Yes” at that moment.

My dad and me in Halong Bay, Vietnam, 2009

For the first time, my father passed the travel leader baton to me. I ordered our visas, created binders with all printed documents, designed the itinerary, bought the flights.

In line at TSA, my father paid me the highest compliment, “Honey, you are such an easy person to travel with.” We spent ten days (all of my PTO for the year) traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos together.

My father’s Parkinson’s was starting to take its toll, and I held him upright down temple steps, cupped my hand over his head as he ducked into Tuk Tuks, and helped him locate the restroom at night.

I could tell the trip was hard on his weakening body. We booked massages at each stop to ease his pain, and I cancelled a few items to free up time for him to rest, despite what he had always said: “You rest, you rust.”

That was our last trip together, just the two of us. After Vietnam, my life got busier than ever. I got married, moved away for graduate school, then moved home and had two children.

My dad kept a framed photo of us in front of Angkor Wat on his desk. In the hospital during his last few weeks, when I’d come visit him and bring ketchup or ice cream (his favorite foods), he’d talk about our trip and what it meant to him.

The photo my dad kept on his desk - Angkor Wat

I was on a ski run in the mountains with my brother when I got the call that he was gone. The run was called “Angel’s Rest.”

Looking back, I want to grab everyone around me by the collar and whisper like a Victorian ghost, “Travel with your parents! Do it now, before it’s too late.”

Those moments in Southeast Asia – eating bowls of breakfast pho with steam curling in the humidity, dodging motorbikes like Frogger, blocking out my dad’s deafening, lumberjack snores while swaying to sleep on the night train – those were what I see as the peak of our adult relationship.

On that trip, he seemed to recognize the traveler in me, and bless the future I’d chosen for myself in the travel industry.

So, whether you’re a parent worrying about pulling your kids away from college or a budding career, or you’re an adult child making room on your calendar for your parents like it’s hardly top priority, listen up.

🗝️ The Room Report Personal reviews from my own travels, hotels you should know about

Last year, I traveled on the British Pullman’s Murder Mystery Train ride to celebrate my 40^th. I’m now absolutely dying to hop on the Pullman again to check out it’s new private car, Celia.

The Baz Luhrmann Train Carriage Is Exactly What You’d Expect

With purple velvet, marquetry walls, and a signature scent, Celia is in a class of her own when it comes to luxury train cars. Baz Luhrmann and his wife, Catherine Martin, designed a private train carriage for the British Pullman and it looks exactly like a scene from one of his films. The launch party was hosted by Anna Wintour and included Roger Federer and Tom Ford. I can’t believe they forgot to invite me.

The concept is built around a fictional 1920s West End actress who was secretly gifted her own Pullman car. The carriage seats up to 12 for exclusive group bookings, and the details are extraordinary: bespoke marquetry walls depicting flowers and fairies, a tasseled purple velvet sofa, custom glass, Hand and Lock embroidery, and a signature scent Luhrmann and Martin personally selected to complete the atmosphere.

A private transfer picks you up from your London hotel, a butler greets you at Victoria Station, and a dedicated chef prepares a fine dining menu in your private onboard kitchen. Your Guest Experience Curator handles every detail in advance, including excursion itineraries and live entertainment.

Celia is bookable through Belmond directly or through a travel advisor, like yours truly. If a private Belmond experience is on your list, email me at AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com.

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

Your New Passport Might Have Trump’s Face On It

The U.S. State Department is releasing a limited run of commemorative passports featuring President Trump’s portrait, timed to the country’s 250th anniversary this July. Between 25,000 and 30,000 available, against 160 million U.S. passports in circulation. If you’re renewing online or applying anywhere outside Washington D.C., you almost certainly won’t receive one. Check your expiration date before you book anything this summer. Most European countries require at least six months of validity remaining at the time of travel. [Read more]

The UAE Is Open

The UAE airspace has fully reopened with normal commercial operations restored. For travelerwho had Middle East travel on hold, this is the green light. We’re watching for governments to lift remaining travel advisories so the return can be complete. [Read more]

Hotel Earnings Season Is Worth Watching

Skift reports investors are closely watching April-May hotel earnings for signs that performance has improved after a soft 2025, with attention on energy costs, World Cup demand pacing, and margin resilience. For anyone planning group travel or high-end bookings over the next 18 months, this is one of the cleaner reads on where hotel pricing is headed. [Read more]

Hyatt’s Luxury Bet Is Paying Off

Hyatt posted first-quarter RevPAR growth of 5.4% year over year, led by its luxury brands, which recorded double-digit RevPAR growth in Q1. Pipeline of executed management or franchise contracts grew 9.4%, 3,996 rooms opened, and net rooms growth hit 5%.

CEO Mark Hoplamazian put it plainly: “If there’s any sign of weakness in terms of the high-end customer, we have not seen it.”

Rising airfares, higher oil prices, and geopolitical noise have done nothing to slow spending at the top of the market. For our clients, this confirms what we’re already seeing in booking patterns. Demand for the best rooms at the best properties is not softening. Book early. [Read more]

Spirit Airlines Is Gone

Spirit Airlines, the largest ultra-low-cost carrier in the U.S., is shutting down after its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy and failed bailout talks with the Trump administration. High fuel prices were cited as the final blow.

If you have outstanding Spirit bookings, contact your credit card company immediately to dispute charges. Spirit is not in a position to rebook or refund you. This is a good reminder of why booking through a travel advisor matters: when an airline folds, we are already on the phone working the problem before you even know there is one. [Read more]

The Travel Industry By the Numbers

The World Travel and Tourism Council put the sector’s contribution to the global economy at $11.7 trillion in 2025, representing 10.3% of global GDP, with projections to reach $16.5 trillion by 2035. The industry recovered from COVID and kept growing. That tracks with what we see on the ground: our clients are not pulling back. They’re planning bigger trips, booking further out, and spending more intentionally. [Read more]

🗝️ Anne Marie

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The pyramids, a Dahabiya cruise down the Nile, Abu Simbel, and why this is the moment to go

🗝️ This post marks the first of the Master Key series - comprised of actual itineraries I’ve built for luxury clients, my own travel guides, and in-depth brand history lessons from the hospitality industry. These posts are for paid subscribers.

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Egypt can feel intimating for travelers, yet is on most people’s bucket list. It was certainly on mine. Prior to my own trip three years ago, I didn’t feel comfortable building trips for clients in Egypt.

As a luxury travel advisor, I pride myself on my network of providers that I’ve built around the world, as well as bringing personal travel experience to my itineraries. In some areas, those connections have to be made in person. I wanted to make sure that I had traveled to Egypt in person - and this is the trip that I’ve now built for several clients with the connections I made there.

This is the right time to travel to Egypt. The Middle Eastern war has made many travelers wary of visiting the region, but Egypt remains a safe place to travel with the same travel advisories it had prior to the conflict. What the slowdown in arrivals has meant is smaller crowds, lower rates, and probably the best time to go to the country I’ve seen in years.

Additionally, The Grand Egyptian Museum finished opening its full collection in 2024. The small luxury dahabiya category on the Nile has matured into an incredible collection of ships. And for the first time in a long time, the crowds are manageable. Europeans who might otherwise go are choosing elsewhere right now, and that’s your opening.

I’ve built out a full sample itinerary, and I want to walk you through how I think about Egypt as a destination, what makes this trip work, and the specific places that make for an amazing first-time visit.

Yours truly in the Hathor Temple

Structural Overview

This is a 10-night trip - Cairo, Luxor, cruise the Nile, Aswan and Abu Simbel, then back to Cairo.

You need 3 nights in Cairo on the front end to see Giza, Saqqara, and the museums without rushing.

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Travelers,

If it seems everyone is heading to the Cotswolds to forage for wild garlic, visit storybook villages with wisteria-covered cottages, and drink overpriced lavender coffee while arranging flowers at Daylesford, you are witnessing the Farm Hotel marketing push.

The generation who turned to feeding their sourdough starters during Covid lockdown is going all-in on countryside living (but not in a Tradwife way). Farm Hotels went from “have you heard of this?” to fully booked six months in advance.

Confession – I’ve just started reading Lydia Millen’s Evergreen Journal and own several Holland and Cooper tweed ensembles, so I absolutely am the target market.

For example, this week The Room Report covers my 40th birthday trip through the English countryside. Very on-brand. Read on for my deep dive into the Farm Hotel zeitgeist.

Happy travels!

Anne Marie, Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel

Yours truly at Estelle Manor on my 40th birthday trip in the British Countryside.

🗝️ Pre-Departure – Hospitality Industry Hot Takes

The Farm Hotel Moment

There’s a Plum Sykes piece making the rounds about the American-Sloane Aesthetic movement – the Barbour-wearing, countryside-romanticizing set that has moved from a British niche to the “quiet luxury” signal filling my Instagram feed. Sykes described throwing a dinner for American writer Chris Black in London, horrified that he wore a Barbour jacket to the affair in full view of the other guests. Sykes, the voice of the Cotswolds luxury ladies, observes that “the British country thing will always be romanticized because it’s so classy.” (P.S. by Plum Sykes, April 2026)

In 2022, U.S. private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, which has invested exclusively in travel and leisure for over 30 years (and which purchased my family’s company, Outrigger Hotels, in 2016), acquired The Pig Hotels, the UK’s defining farm hotel group. At time of acquisition, The Pig portfolio was running 91% average occupancy. The most recent filings show turnover at £50.6 million across nine properties for 2024, with ADR (average daily rate) growth even as occupancy softened slightly to 77% amid broader UK hospitality headwinds.

Meanwhile, across the broader hotel industry in 2025, luxury hotels posted 5.3% RevPAR (revenue per available room) growth while the economy segment slowed by 1.8%.

Farm Hotels capture more of each guest’s wallet than city hotels because their guests are essentially captive.

You’re eating all three organic meals on property, booking local honey facials at the spa, paying for falconry jaunts, buying jam from the farm shop, doing the biodynamic wine tasting – all without leaving.

Industry data puts full-service hotel TRevPAR at 1.3 to 2 times RevPAR. Farm Hotels with a captive audience and five revenue streams sit at the top of that range.

Across hospitality broadly, repeat guests contribute 41% of revenue despite occupying only about 8% of the beds. Community engagement is what drives Farm Hotels’ loyalty and repeat business. Their revenue streams extend well beyond the guest stay.

For example, The Pig sources within 25 miles of each property, building a strong local reputation for those looking to support local business. Babylonstoren – in South Africa – runs a wine club for people who’ve never set foot on the property. Heckfield Place hosts movie nights for Hampshire locals in their basement theater.

The community flywheel is harder to put a number on than RevPAR, and thanks to that, it’s harder for bigger brands to replicate.

People are exhausted from over-stimulation. Travelers are looking to put their phones on silent, read an actual book, pick some flowers, and listen to the birds. Throw in gathering eggs and a giant soaking tub and I’m in.

One note for families: these properties aren’t universally engineered around children. Thyme and The Pig both welcome kids, but if you need a kids’ club and a pool, hit up Estelle Manor.

The category has a few clear leaders in the UK.

The Pig started it. Robin Hutson failed his O-levels. He started as a waiter at Claridge’s, worked his way through hotel management, co-founded Hotel du Vin (the boutique brand that rewrote British hospitality in the 1990s), and sold it for £66 million. In 2011, he opened the first Pig in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, built around a kitchen garden and a rule he called the “25-mile menu”: every dish sourced from the property or from producers within 25 miles. He deliberately eschewed Michelin stars. The ethos is abundance displayed in gloriously unkempt kitchen gardens, potager menus, foraging walks, and wood-fired ovens. There are now ten Pig hotels across England, each following the same rules.

A failed O-level student proved that farm-to-table hospitality could scale without losing its soul.

The Pig

Thyme, outside the village of Southrop in the Cotswolds is a more architecturally oriented version of the same idea. Spread across multiple barns, cottages, and structures centered on a medieval manor house, Thyme boasts curated interiors, serious food, a cooking school, a farm shop, and a proper spa.

Caryn Hibbert was an obstetrician in London when she spotted Southrop Manor in an issue of Country Life and decided she was ready to midwife something different.

She moved her family to this 16th-century manor in 2002, with a vague notion of growing vegetables and raising her children in the countryside. The derelict farm buildings on the property needed a purpose, so her father, an engineer, said he’d restore them if she’d build a business. And has she ever!

Thyme

Heckfield Place. I visited this lovely little gem on my 40th birthday jaunt through England last year, and immediately decided to redecorate my entire house in that aesthetic, much to my husband’s dismay.

Dr. Gerald Chan, a Hong Kong-born billionaire and co-founder of Morningside Group, bought a 400-acre Georgian estate in Hampshire and spent over a decade restoring it before opening its first room in 2019. The farm is 100% biodynamic certified, the first hotel in the UK to achieve this distinction. Biodynamic reaches beyond organic: the farm operates as a self-sustaining ecosystem, planting and harvesting on lunar and cosmic cycles. Seven climate-controlled greenhouses grow sixty to seventy vegetable crops and forty to fifty varieties of cut flowers that grace its guest rooms. The farm also supplies the spa, which uses only estate-grown botanicals.

Skye Gyngell, who previously held a Michelin star at Petersham Nurseries Café, runs the estate restaurant, Marle. There we enjoyed a long, luscious dinner during which we imbibed a bit too much organic wine and spotted an Instagram influencer wearing a green tulle ballgown being photographed in the gardens. In February 2025, Marle earned a Green Michelin Star for sustainable gastronomy. The full field-to-fork experience, with a cozy, sunlit lobby lounge, feels like a magazine version of my living room.

International versions:

Blackberry Farm in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains is the original. Wildflower Farms in New York’s Hudson Valley (Auberge Resorts Collection) is the new option.

Babylonstoren in South Africa’s Cape Winelands – a working farm dating to 1692 with a 3.5-hectare garden growing over 300 edible and medicinal plants, two farm-to-fork restaurants, a wine estate, and renovated historic cottages. I’m going in January, stay tuned.

British countryside hotels

Last year I hit 40, and I decided the right way to celebrate would be cavorting around the English countryside with five of my closest friends. The itinerary: the Belmond British Pullman murder mystery train, Cliveden House, Four Seasons Hampshire, Estelle Manor, and dinner at Heckfield Place.

Belmond British Pullman. I’ve been dying to do the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express for years. However, the price led me to realize I could either spend three nights with my husband living that dream or take my five best friends on a different week-long adventure. The girls’ trip won. We did the Belmond murder mystery route – I am an Agatha Christie devotee – dressed in 1920s costume. We spent a full day nibbling through an endless meal while trying to decipher clues as characters made their way up and down the train. Nearly three quarters of the passengers dressed up which was half the fun. A long day with a lot of wine. Despite feeling clueless at solving mysteries, I highly recommend the experience.

Cliveden House. Built in 1666 by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham as a gift to his mistress, now a Relais & Châteaux property. The grounds are beyond gorgeous, and a public park surrounds the estate. Turns out it’s possible to get lost on the grounds when you’re a group of 40-year-old women whose Google Maps won’t load. We hired the vintage river boat for an hour-long tour of the property and its history. A candid caveat: for 17th-century authenticity, there was no air conditioning. We left the sash windows open and a very pleasant doorman spent part of the evening evicting bees from our suite. If you go in summer, know what you’re signing up for.

Four Seasons Hampshire. A restored 18th-century manor 40 minutes outside London, FS Hampshire felt like a Jane Austen novel, except the beds are Four Seasons, the best we slept in on the trip. Room 1107 is the heritage suite in the manor house – book it. The canal boat tour is pricey but entirely worth it. Croquet on the lawn with a bar cart and a local club member explaining the rules was the afternoon I didn’t know I needed. Guest Services Director Adam is from Oxfordshire and knows the countryside well. Pick his brain. I will be back here with my kids.

Estelle Manor. I had been stalking this hotel since it opened and was genuinely worried it would be a scene full of influencers with service that couldn’t match the aesthetic. But it exceeded expectations. The Enshym Baths Roman Spa Thermal Journey is just glorious, with 180 minutes of cold plunges, a Scottish Bucket, steam rooms with heated marble slabs, and Ayurvedic food in the tea room. Off-roading in the Ineos Grenadier through the back tracks of the Oxfordshire estate was a riot. Dining in the Japanese restaurant and the Dim Sum billiards room was excellent. The only hiccups: front desk made several billing errors and check-in was slow, a real pet peeve. Everything else was perfection.

The EU Border Change That’s Already Creating Four-Hour Lines

The EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) requires US passport holders to register biometrics at the border on first entry into any Schengen country, and processing times are up to 70% slower at peak airports. Reports from clients are that things are running smoothly at CDG and slow in Lisbon. Book a VIP arrival service if you’re worried.

Hotel Earnings Season

April-May earnings calls are shaping up as the industry’s clearest read on demand quality and pricing power after a weak 2025, with investors closely watching energy costs, World Cup pacing, and margin resilience.

Travel Had Its Best Year Ever in 2025

The World Travel & Tourism Council reported travel’s global GDP contribution hit a record $11.6 trillion in 2025, growing at 4.1% versus overall global growth of 2.8%, with Asia-Pacific climbing 8.1% and North America up just 1%.

U.S. Hotel Construction Is Contracting

CoStar data shows U.S. hotel construction has declined for 15 straight months to 136,990 rooms – the longest pullback since 2008 – with luxury the only segment growing (+4.5%) and overall supply growth at just 1.4%.

European Hotel Investment

Per Hospitalitynet, European hotel investment jumped 23% to €27 billion in 2025 even as RevPAR grew just 2% – investors are buying ahead of recovery, which means well-capitalized properties are actively improving product.

Belmond’s Villa San Michele Reopens

Villa San Michele reopened April 28 after an 18-month renovation with 39 redesigned rooms, a new Guerlain spa, and restored Fiesole gardens – full details here. If Florence is on the list this year, this is the property.

COMO Le Beauvallon Opens on the French Riviera

COMO just opened Le Beauvallon on the Riviera following a full restoration – worth flagging for anyone with the South of France on the radar this summer.

Sensei Lanai Is Expanding

Larry Ellison’s Sensei wellness brand is expanding beyond its original Four Seasons Lanai property into a global network, with a new partnership at Zadún, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve in Baja.

Uber Now Books Hotels

Uber launched hotel bookings this week through a partnership with Expedia Group, giving its 202 million monthly users access to over 700,000 properties worldwide. Uber One members get 20% off a rotating list of 10,000 hotels and 10% back in Uber credits. The company is also adding VRBO vacation rentals later this year and a room service feature that delivers to your door via Uber Eats.

🗝️ Anne Marie

Book your next trip with Alpenglow Travel

The service: this is really where they go above and beyond. From the friendly doormen who know the whole history of the place, to the front desk agents and concierge who will tell you which pub has Irish music that night, this hotel pulls off being five star without feeling stuffy.

The food: burgers at the carriage house, tapas in the Tack Room, tea in the Gallery, a Michelin-starred meal in the Oak Room, everything I eat there is scrumptious.

The grounds: they have an epic fairy garden onsite where I could explore for hours.

The facilities: the Ryder Cup is going to be here next for good reason - their golf course is gorgeous. The Padel Club is an incredible day spa with a private yoga room, fitness facility, jacuzzi facing the trees, steam room, sauna, and Padel courts.

Family friendly: a lot of five star hotels aren’t welcoming to little kids, but Adare goes out of their way to include them. They have family lodge style accommodations that are 2 and 3 bedrooms, and tons of family friendly activities. I took Malia two years ago and she loved the falconry and receiving a special fairy key.

If you’d like to check it out, reach to me at AnneMarie@AlpenglowTravel.com

Travelers,

I spend a lot of my time on hotels, touring them, reading about them, sleeping in them, listening to sales presentations in hotel ballrooms while nursing a cup of mediocre coffee. It blows my mind that a property can invest millions in its product and still get simple aspects of service wrong.

Happy travels, Anne Marie Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel

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🗝️ Pre-Departure – Hospitality Industry Hot Takes

What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong

Give me a martini, and I’ll wax poetic about hotels. Brands pour millions into the design, the press coverage, the sales director dinner with agents in their territories, and then drop the ball on service in ways that are completely avoidable.

The 1 Hotel in Hanalei is a good example. It’s a gorgeous property with an unbeatable location on Kauai. I had it on my personal must-see list. Then, the reports came in from fellow advisors and our clients: forgotten room service, housekeeping arriving mid-afternoon, slow pool service, concierge that responded with crickets. I stopped recommending it.

Part of my job is meeting annually with hotel sales directors and asking hard questions. These are the pet peeves that I see repeatedly ruining otherwise 5-star stays.

You never have to play The Chair Game at Four Seasons Naviva

1. The Chair Game

You peruse row after row of chairs after breakfast, heart sinking as you realize every single chair has a book, pair of sunglasses, or unfolded towel thrown haphazardly over it. You vow to wake up early tomorrow and claim your real estate before the other guests.

If you are paying upwards of $1,000 a night, you should not be setting an alarm for the poolside hotel hunger games.

Grand Velas Los Cabos handles this well: you give your name and room number when you claim a chair, which will be held for 30 minutes before items are removed if your chair remains unoccupied. Most importantly, they actually enforce this.

2. Light Switches That Require a Degree

There is an inverse relationship between a guest’s ability to turn on a light and the hotel ADR (average daily rate).

During a recent stay at the One & Only Mandarina, my family spent every evening in semi-darkness because we could not figure out the lighting panels. On our last day, we discovered a skylight with its own switch which had been there the entire time. Let there be (more) light.

3. Charging for Water at the Restaurant

Our hotel folio at a certain 5-star in Cabo had astronomical restaurant bills. The culprit was bottled water charges at every meal. We started smuggling plastic bottles from the room, which made my environmentally conscious heart die a little. If the tap water is unsuitable for guests, bottled water at on-property dining venues should be included.

4. Slow Pre-Arrival Communication

I work with hotel concierges constantly, coordinating welcome amenities, booking restaurants, arranging transfers. Legacy concierges are worth their weight in gold. When a hotel takes three days to reply to an email and answers only half my questions, I know they aren’t taking the advisor relationship seriously.

In contrast, you have the concierge team at the Lanesborough, who are on it. They reach out proactively, they remember my clients, they provide service you didn’t even know you needed. Recently, they sourced sold-out V&A Marie Antoinette exhibit tickets for a client, and that won them my business until the end of time.

5. Housekeeping After 1pm

I worked housekeeping for two summers at my family’s hotels. A well-staffed team does not need until 3pm to turn a room. We travel with kids who are up at 6am, eat breakfast early, and want to be back in the room by noon. Returning to an unmade room when you want clean sheets and towels for a shower is disheartening. The Amans of the world notice you’ve gone to breakfast and turn the room without being asked.

What You Said

I asked my network for their hotel pet peeves:

• Waiting 90 minutes for luggage they insisted on bringing to your room (Hotel Arts Barcelona holds this record in my personal experience)

• A long check-in spiel after 12 hours of travel with screaming children – I don’t need to know about “Star Gazer” lounge access

• Missing check-in time and not making up for it

• Slow pool service

• Resort and destination fees

• Exorbitant laundry pricing

• Not enough hangers

• Hidden outlets, or none by the bed

What Others Are Saying

• Gina Jackson, a London-based hotel writer whose work appears in Conde Nast Traveller, The Times, and the Evening Standard, recently published her own take on hotel pet peeves, and a few of her points are worth adding to the conversation.

• Expensive yet boring minibars. Gina makes a strong case that minibars should be complimentary. She points to Heckfield Place restocking daily with house-made biscuits and cordials, and NIHI Sumba personalizing the minibar entirely based on a pre-arrival preferences form.

• Non-alcoholic options that are actually worth ordering. This one I hadn’t thought enough about, but Gina is right. A hotel with a thoughtful wine program but just two token mocktails is failing to serve a meaningful portion of its guests.

• A general lack of generosity. Gina’s broader point is one I think about a lot: when a hotel is charging four figures a night and nickel and diming its guests, even the most affluent travelers feel taken advantage of.

🗝️ The Room Report - Personal reviews from my own travels

A love letter to my favorite hotel in London, a luxury hotel that gets it right

The Lanesborough, London

When clients ask for a London recommendation, I always land on the Lanesborough. I studied abroad in London, fly through Heathrow whenever I can, and have sent enough clients there to know exactly what they’re getting.

The service is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. When my clients tested positive for Covid mid-stay, Sameer (the Sales Director) and the team upgraded them to a suite so they could sleep in separate rooms, sent soup up, and arranged for a doctor. When I brought my daughter, Malia, for her 7th birthday, we arrived at a room with a teepee full of books, a stuffed cat (she loves the hotel cat, Lilibet), a tea party set up for her doll, and enough treats to make Marie Antoinette swoon.

My daughter, Malia, with the Lanesborough cat, Lilibet

The lobby bar is my favorite haunt in the city: tableside martinis with blue cheese olives, piano at night, a bartender who remembers your name, and a crowd that’s half guests and half locals.

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

The Hotel Pipeline Is at an All-Time High

With the Middle Eastern conflict, I’m frequently asked about the state of travel in our industry at the moment.

Nadine at The Stanza shared the following data that I will now be writing on a cocktail napkin and producing from my purse when asked this question.

Per Lodging Econometrics, the global hotel pipeline just hit a record: nearly 16,000 projects and 2.4 million rooms in development worldwide. The growth is concentrated in luxury and premium categories, now the fastest-growing segments globally. Developers are building more rooms, and those rooms are more expensive.

Hotel conversion projects are up 13% from last year, also an all-time high, which tells us that the supply of sites that lend themselves to a true luxury property is finite. You can’t manufacture a clifftop on the Pacific or a palazzo on a Venetian canal, you have to take it over and rebrand it. Developers are responding by repositioning existing buildings under stronger flags rather than building from scratch.

What this means for travelers: more new luxury inventory is coming, but the truly singular properties will only get harder to access and more expensive to book.

To book any hotel, visit our Booking Portal or email Info@alpenglowtravel.com.

🗝️Anne Marie