🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown

1. What It Takes to Run a Retreat

Travelers,

Last week, I traveled to Italy to run the third edition of an annual poetry and yoga retreat I co-host with my friend and fellow writer, Christi Steyn. Christi and I met via early days of Tik Tok when she read my poem “Pretty” on the platform and it went viral. She now has 1.5M followers on the platform where she shares her poetry. (And I now no longer know my Tik Tok login.)

We have run retreats in Greece, Ireland, and Italy that include daily yoga and writing workshops. On our retreats, Christi teaches daily yoga and leads writing workshops. If ever there was a fairy in human form, it’s Christi. I swear she’s made of light and has this just magnetic personality. My undergraduate major was creative writing and I specialized in formal poetry. Thus, I teach classes on rhyme, meter, and poetic form during these retreats. I also handle all the finance, contracts, vendors, and logistics.

While at Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato, I ran small group journeys and chartered cruises of 12 to 20 people per departure, and I often escorted groups onsite. Running retreats operates similarly.

As more online creators have begun to monetize their audiences, retreats have become a popular option. I’ve seen boutique owners, antique collectors, wedding photographers, painting professors, life coaches, and more try their hands at running retreats. A strong creative personality does not necessarily empower people to handle group logistics, and I’ve seen these endeavors go south more times than I can count. These group trips take a great deal of work behind the scenes and can be full of financial, logistical, and legal pitfalls. Run well, they can still operate with thin margins and depend heavily on cost control, contract negotiation, and strong registrations.

This week’s Upgrade rabbit hole is a peek behind the curtain to show you what it takes to run these retreats as a professional.

Even a retreat leader needs a retreat. If you’d like to follow my experience onsite this week in the English countryside with Molly Carr of Belle Vie Retreats (as a retreat guest ad not a leader), check out my Instagram stories. I’m going to be interviewing Molly for a future edition of Master Key about what she has learned running her business.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

What It Takes To Lead a Retreat

The final night of our Italy retreat, we lit candles, read poems we had written for one another, and placed found items on a stone table like an altar in a clearing as the night fell. It was all quite witchy and felt like sisterhood. My heart burst with pride and love for this group that had come together just days earlier bonding in such an ancient location.

Running group trips such as these poetry retreats is one of the things I love most, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Hefty deposits are due well before any cash comes in, marketing takes months, and participants expect a lot onsite.

There are entire companies built around connecting online specialists and influencers with retreat venues and DMCs, such as Trova Trip, who position themselves as a marketplace rather than a tour operator. There are distinct financial liabilities involved in being a tour operator, and positioning as a platform can skirt those responsibilities - think like AirBNB vs a hotel.

Creative leaders are often not the people with the logistical and financial skillset to handle a trip on location, yet many creatives believe they must be all things at once - financial manager, accountant, marketer, trip designer, tour leader, coordinator, and onsite talent and host. This is a lot to ask of themselves.

In the retreats I’ve helped run, I advise that it’s good to have two people onsite to prevent burn out. One person handles logistics, the other handles the group interaction and creative aspects. I am both a teacher and coordinator for our poetry retreats, but only the coordinator on others, such as the Mahjong retreats I’m assisting with in Aspen, Sonoma, and Scottsdale.

No matter whether the trip is a $17,000 per person epic jaunt through Egypt, or a $3,200 retreat to Italy, the pricing part is always the most difficult aspect of running a group trip. That is, pricing a retreat so it’s approachable to a creator’s audience, while also covering all costs and our time. The time piece is the part most creators forget to factor in.

The fact is that retreats are not a get-rich-quick idea. At intimate group sizes less than 10 participants, margins are slim unless you price upwards of $6k per person for a five-star accommodation experience. Breakeven for four-star accommodations is typically priced around $3,200 per person. Larger group sizes or higher price points can yield more take home pay, but come with their own downsides.

This is the hardest part. It involves emailing venues around the world for pricing, putting the quotes in a spreadsheet to compare apples to apples because no two quotes use the same format, and confirming the space meets our requirements. With the advent of Claude in my life, this step has become easier - I used to spend hours generating these spreadsheets. Now, I can just drop emails into a project and say “Claude, dear, make a table comparing all these elements across these proposals to give me a per person price per day, and contract terms.”

What we look for are spaces where we can have all our meals in one place, a yoga studio, private living room areas where we can hold writing workshops, and flexible accommodations. Flexible means that rooms can either be twin beds or kings, which allows you to adapt more to whoever happens to sign up. It’s not a requirement, but certainly helps. Activities onsite are a plus so you don’t have to factor in more transfers or time spent off site.

Homes and hotels each have pros and cons. Rental homes have better group spaces, and allow you more control of the group dynamics. You can also bring your own chef and alcohol, which can lower costs. However, room categories are often uneven, which can cause dissatisfaction from the start and makes billing lumpy if you charge different price points. They typically lack yoga spaces, and they are a large fixed cost up front. You can’t drop a room if you don’t fill the trip. I find a lot of rental home spaces in Europe on Oliver’s Travels. Past locations I’ve loved: Temple House in Ireland, Frampton Court in England (currently here, gorgeous), Castello Santa Cristina in Italy (less lux but incredible spot).

Hotels allow for even room allocation and let you drop rooms through attrition clauses up to closer in. They also have more flexible bedding options. However, they cost more per room, the F&B rates are higher, and they often charge to privatize group spaces.

I estimated my time on the 2026 retreat at Castello Santa Cristina, October 6 to 10, at 180 to 230 hours over the year. That covers coordination only, not teaching two workshops onsite.

The hours ran from venue search and pricing through marketing, website creation, guest registration and communication, vendor coordination, 14 hour days on site, and financial close-out. That is roughly five full-time work weeks, mostly before guests even arrive. That’s about 10% of my working year designated to one trip. If we run trips in the same location across multiple years, or run back to back departures in the same location, that lift up front becomes easier.

On site

The prep work starts with packing. You need to bring things not only for yourself, but lots of “just in case” items like ibuprofen, Benadryl, cold medicine, bandaids, safety pins, sewing kit, multiple international outlet adapters because people always forget them, several phone banks… etc. I always set up a WhatsApp group a couple weeks in advance so people can ask last minute questions as they pack. You’ll become an amateur meteorologist, trying to predict the weather for each day.

Once the group arrives, I manage the daily schedule and timing (which often requires adjustments) and text the schedule out each evening, weather changes, communication with vendors the day before and day of activities, dietary restrictions, group dynamics, the balance of free time, lessons, and activities, and cash, including tips and meal payments, with every receipt logged. I also manage my own energy across days that run 12 to 14 hours. When the group has free time, I’m responding to my clients from my travel agency, Alpenglow Travel (my other work doesn’t stop just because I’m on location running a retreat).

Transition days are the hardest. Some guests do not know how to turn on international data, which leaves them without Google Maps or WhatsApp. Vendors run late. The transfer I expected to be a sprinter van shows up as a minivan (in this latest retreat hiccup).

There are always surprises and stressful moments, but I’ve learned to take them in stride. Not everyone reacts the same to stress, so know how your retreat partner reacts in various conditions and be open with each other if you get frustrated.

For example, on arrival day this year, everyone was due at our hotel 15 minutes before the van transfer. One guest’s taxi dropped her in the wrong spot, so she dragged her suitcase down cobblestone streets looking for the entrance and messaged the group for help. I was greeting the guests who had arrived and helping the driver load the bags like a game of Tetris, so I didn’t see her message. Christi was working on the lesson plan for the welcome workshop, and was frustrated I wasn’t answering the message. Everyone was stressed. We talked it through later and let it go.

This is why I argue for smaller groups, even if they are less profitable, and fewer stops. Questions and problems multiply as you spread your attention across more people and more vendors for activities. First-time retreat leaders often feel they need to include a ton of activities. In reality, they are the activity, and they need time for workshops and guest interaction between events, plus downtime, because not everyone is an extrovert (myself included).

The first number a host needs is break-even guest pricing, the price per guest at which the hosts earn nothing, but lose nothing. That pricing should be set at the minimum number of people you can run the retreat with.

Costs on a retreat fall into two groups: fixed and variable costs.

Variable costs, such as meals and activities, rise and fall with each guest.

Fixed costs are what you have to pay regardless of how many people are on the trip, such as a rental home, retreat leader flights, etc. Smaller groups mean fixed costs are allocated across fewer people.

Travelers often do not understand what a single supplement is. It covers the fixed costs that are spread out over one fewer person in the group by having only one person in a room vs two, minus the variable costs, such as food, that you do not pay when the group is one person smaller. Some retreat leaders also add the margin they lose with one fewer person in a room.

Our 2026 Italy retreat charged $600 more for a single room. A five-star retreat that I attended cost $4,225 per person in a shared room and $6,950 in a single room, a supplement of $2,725 for six nights. For a group size that small where rooms are few, I think that premium is more than fair.

Fixed costs stay the same whether 6 people come or 15, so price a retreat to cover them and the floor of what you are willing to make. Treat your time as a minimum host fee that is a fixed cost input in your pricing proforma.

Then, decide on your inclusions and stick to them rather than adding things after bookings open. I’ve hosted trips where costs kept being added late, like private rooms for dinners, which decreases margin.

Our retreat model covers rooms, all meals, a couple of external activities, gratuities, transfers, gifts, workshops and yoga led by us, and a contingency fund. Host costs include an economy flight, a pre-trip hotel night, meals, and a room for each of the two hosts.

For a four-night retreat, break even guest pricing looks something like this:

Pricing above break-even

Running a trip at breakeven doesn’t pay for the time of the coordinator or the creative leader, let alone add any profit to make it worth their time to travel away from home and spend 10-14 hours a day being onsite with guests. Remember, this is not a vacation for a retreat leader.

To take anything home, a retreat leader must add a markup of 25 to 30 percent on top of break-even. That pays each host roughly $30 an hour. Card processing takes 3.5 percent of every payment, so many hosts must remember to pass those processing fees on to guests.

At an $800 room rate, a group of six needs a price near $6,500 to pay the hosts for their time.

Some countries have lower accommodation, activity, and meal costs than others, so the same retreat has a lower break-even depending on your location choice.

Most Trova trips priced below $3,500 per person are in Thailand, Costa Rica, Bali, Vietnam, and Mexico. Around $4,000, the destinations shift to Patagonia, Peru, Sardinia, Europe, and Japan. No price includes airfare.

I find no matter what the price of a trip is, I feel like I need to defend it. Two retreats at the same price per night can include very different things, so check what each price covers.

Atlas and Scout also require travel insurance on top of the price. We also covered wine in our recent retreat, an added bonus.

I am not a lawyer, so hire a travel attorney before you sell any spots.

A retreat leader takes money months ahead, signs vendor contracts, and answers for a group’s safety abroad, so these are the legal exposures you are at risk for: guest injury, transportation, venue contracts that penalize a drop in headcount (ours went from 14 to 8), deposits and refunds, claims about the program, state seller-of-travel laws (California, Florida, Hawaii, and Washington are most cited), and the passports and medical notes you hold.

Carry insurance as a retreat business. Ask about general liability, professional liability, retreat or event packages, hired and non-owned auto, and event cancellation, and check each policy’s coverage territory, since many cover US activity only. Also check your vendors’ coverage.

Track down force majeure coverage: what happens if you can’t run a trip due to a natural disaster or global event, or if you or the creative leader gets sick or injured?

Many creative leaders don’t want to commit to a schedule in advance. What you list on any guest materials must match the inclusions guests experience, or you risk a false advertising claim. This is why we keep our schedule pretty vague. If you promise yoga daily and skip a day, a guest may be upset.

Guests should carry their own trip cancellation and medical evacuation coverage.

Before anyone pays, have a booking agreement, a liability waiver, a health questionnaire with emergency contacts, activity waivers for anything like horseback riding, a photo release, dietary forms, and contractor agreements for co-hosts and teachers.

A larger group lowers the break-even price point because host flights, the van, and the host rooms spread across more people.

Creative retreats tend to work better with smaller group sizes, because a writing workshop depends on every guest getting time and feedback. Antiquing, strictly yoga, or historical tours can handle larger groups because they need less one-on-one time.

You can protect the economics without enlarging the group by running two departures back to back. Two groups of six in consecutive weeks share one set of fixed costs, like host flights.

1. People will always ask for a discount or a payment plan. Put your answer in the booking terms before the first request and stick to it. If you have low sign-ups, fight the urge to discount; you end up running the same trip for less money. Every time I make an exception, it comes back to haunt me.

2. Set hard cancellation terms to protect yourself. Your terms need to line up with the venue’s. Some retreat leaders charge a cancellation fee to cover their admin time spent handling a cancellation and refilling that spot.

3. Add an emergency fund cushion to every budget. A trip always finds a use for it.

4. Pay for the little things. Guests do not want to feel nickel and dimed. Take out more cash than you think you need.

5. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applies. Guests need meals, sleep, and the right temperature before they can experience wonder.

6. Minimize the number of transition days.

7. Plan no more than one offsite activity every other day.

8. Build in free time.

9. Use a corporate credit card for on-site payments. It keeps them professional and trackable. Photograph every receipt.

10. Start a group WhatsApp chat the week before arrival.

11. People who are constantly late are the hardest guests in a group. Group trips require respect for others and showing up to things on time.

12. Plan for safety. Many creatives are famous and have their share of overzealous fans, so do not publish the retreat location on public sites.

Whether running $17,000 per person Exclusive Resorts trips or $3,200 per person poetry retreats, I invariably hear from guests that they don’t understand the pricing and could travel for less on their own.

My friends, a professional trip like this is not a bargain basement product. It is not meant to be less than you can build a trip for on your own. A retreat is often all inclusive, so comparing one to your average vacation where you aren’t tracking your spend on activities, meals, and transfers does not give you apples to apples.

Additionally, you are hiring professionals as a service to plan and run these trips for you so you can have maximum enjoyment. Sure, you can give yourself a root canal and it’s cheaper than going to the dentist, but are those really comparable?

In my table, a solo traveler spends about $5,345 for a six night trip in a hotel that costs $500 per night. The retreat I am attending for fun in England this week charges $6,950 for a single room, so that gap is close to $1,600.

Add the 230 hours I spent coordinating this trip, spread across six guests and valued at $30 an hour, and each guest is also getting $1,150 of planning labor. That is one host’s time, not both.

Whether you are thinking about leading a retreat, coordinating one, or attending one, or just curious what all my instagram stories were about this week (full of frolicking in front of a castle, lighting candles in a forest, riding horses through open fields, etc), I hope this article gave you more information than you wanted to know.

Join me on a trip in the future - I like to think I’m pretty good at my job. And, if a retreat at $3,500 for four nights feels expensive, remember the hours in this article and what goes into making the magic happen.

🗝️The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

1. Delano Puglia: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/announcement/41015184/ennismore-signs-delano-puglia-introducing-the-iconic-brand-to-italys-adriatic-coast

2. ULTRAs: https://einpresswire.com/article/947456172/the-2026-ultras-honour-the-best-of-luxury-travel-at-the-tower-of-london

3. Preferred Hotels Legend Collection: https://rustourismnews.com/2026/10/01/preferred-hotels-adds-11-luxury-hotels-to-legend-collection-in-2026

4. Influencer backlash: https://skift.com/2026/10/01/content-creator-backlash-travel-tourism/

5. Delta media network: https://skift.com/2026/10/05/delta-air-lines-building-out-its-own-media-network/

6. Leela Palaces CEO: https://skift.com/2026/10/01/leela-palaces-ceo-on-the-overlooked-detail-that-can-make-or-break-a-hotel-stay/

7. Shipwreck hunting (Robb Report): https://apple.news/AZ8pkyb8ASBu3d69WV8Dmkw

🗝️ Travel Dispatch - In Defense of Wonder

Or how to avoid becoming a jaded luxury traveler.

Travelers,

This week, I’m writing to you from a lovely agriturismo castle in Umbria, Italy, where I’m co-leading a poetry and yoga retreat. Today, we trekked straight up a largely vertical bridge into the most incredible town of Civita Di Bagnoregio, or “The Dying City.”

The fog had settled in pockets enveloping the medieval buildings, rising above a pastoral scene straight out of a puzzle background. Far below us, farms and wineries dotted the countryside. Bright villas and farm houses broke up the green expanse, occasionaly highlighted by slices of sunlight arcing through the clouds.

I was in complete awe.

Earlier in the day, I arose with my back aching from a hard mattress and I was grumbling about there not being enough hot water. Faced with that scene in front of me, my creature comfort belly aching abruptly seemed silly.

I’ve been ruminating on this concept for a while. In being a luxury travel advisor who spends an inordinate amount of time traveling, I have to remind myself to maintain perspective. Substack is full of accounts like mine that detail our reviews of hotels we’ve stayed in. Sometimes, we need a moment to see the forest for the trees.

I hope you enjoy this issue of Travel Dispatch, my personal travel essays for paid subscribers of The Upgrade.

-Anne Marie

My Substack and Instagram are filled with claims that St. Tropez is over.

According to these taste makers, St Tropez is being relegated to the likes of Iceland, Nantucket, Ibiza, and Tulum, that were cool until you realized they were cool, and then the minute you decided to go there, they were declared passé.

In kindergarten mom language, we call this “yucking someone else’s yum.”

This approach to declaring destinations as no longer worthy of one’s time, as if they were a consumable good and not the homes of actual people who choose to reside there, feels like the jet set version of Mean Girls. “On Wednesday’s, we wear pink. On Fridays, we go to Slovenia, but never Mallorca, because it’s so over.”

Read more

26. The Price of Prestige

Travelers -

Ciao from Rome! I’m in the “eternal city” for a couple of nights before heading to Umbria to lead an annual poetry and yoga retreat with poet Christi Steyn. Fun fact - the city’s nickname goes back to ancient Roman writers, with the poet Tibullus using it in the first century BC. The idea was that the city would outlast empires and time itself.

Co-leading this retreat is one of the great joys of my job, because it unites my two passions - travel planning and writing. Last year, we stayed at an estate in Ireland. The year prior, we went to Greece. This year, it’s La Dolce Vita in Italy!

It’s been years since I’ve been to Rome, and this time around, I spent a night at the relatively new Six Senses property. If you know anything about my maximalist nature and love for historical hotels, then you know a hotel with brand new construction and minimalist interiors is not usually my jam. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed my stay at the Six Senses. I’ve written up a short Room Report about my stay, including my new Hotel Scorecard, which will be an interactive feature of The Upgrade for you readers in coming weeks. I’m going to skip the Lobby Bar section this week as this is quite a long article as it stands already.

I’ve been working on this week’s article for a while, and hope I don’t tread on any industry publication’s toes (I’m looking at you, T+L), because I really do love reading Condé Nast and Travel + Leisure. The industry awards economic engine behind the Best Of awards lists is something that has caught my eye for years, so I wanted to write about it.

Ciao and happy travels,

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Price of Prestige: Inside the Business of Travel Awards

There has been much kerfuffle in the online discourse surrounding this year’s hospitality awards season. These “Best Of” lists spawn endless debate, hand wringing, and celebration from the travel industry and travelers alike.

For a few weeks if not a couple of months, these hospitality publications catapult themselves, and the hotels that either rise to or fall from grace within their glossy pages, into the center of discussion. As famed showman P.T. Barnum is rumored to have said, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” The discussion is the point.

Amidst the hand wringing, we ask ourselves, “Who are these awards for?” A comment on another Substack took a rosy view, noting that these awards provide hotels an opportunity to celebrate their teams.

While that is undoubtedly true, no business is altruistic, and these lists also generate ancillary revenue for the publications that issue them. I know you love an Upgrade rabbit hole, so here we go.

My thesis around these awards: different methods produce different winners, the 50 Best voting rules favor big city hotels with press budgets and don’t categorize their ranking by hotel type, and reader survey-based awards disproportionately favor hotels with large room counts. Finally, although many of these publications tote the fact that their awards are not pay-for-play, they do serve as an economic engine driving licensing, award ceremony dinners/galas, and sponsorships.

Do awards drive purchasing decisions?

Some advisors say they have never seen a client request a hotel simply because it made a list, but I have, and after the 50 Best and Michelin Key lists came out this year, I received at least four emails asking for properties that appeared on them. Hotels post the accolades on Instagram, websites, and email signature lines, sending a parade of celebratory notes from sales directors through my inbox as a luxury travel advisor. With AI search pulling from what’s published online, Answer Engine Optimized (AEO) prestige from these awards matters more every year.

I truly don’t believe anything nefarious is going on behind the curtain, but I do think these awards have a trust problem that is becoming more glaring each year. Each of these lists carries structural pressures that shape what they say about taste and popularity.

Each of these lists is compiled via different types of voting methods. Editors or inspectors choose some winners, readers choose others. Some programs require a paid application, others calculate winners from guest review scores. Unless you spend an unjustifiable amount of time and money on trade news, travel, and hotel research like I do, you probably haven’t examined the methodology behind each one.

Methodology 1) Reader surveys

Think of these awards as campaigning for hotel industry prom king and queen, where everything comes down to vote volume. Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast fall in this category.

The upside of reader survey awards is that readers vote without comped stays or press trips swaying the voting pool. The downside is that hotels with more guests collect more votes, so larger room counts and bigger marketing budgets can push past smaller boutique properties. While there are exceptions, (Passalacqua is tiny and has an extensive trophy case), plenty of much larger hotels dominate these lists.

This year more than 207,000 Travel + Leisure readers cast over 661,000 votes across 10,088 properties, which is an enormous undertaking. I do like that T+L sorts by category (resorts, city hotels, inns, safari lodges) and scores each on rooms, location, service, food, and value.¹ The 50 Best does not sort, and Sonja Stojcevski, who writes Hospitality Beyond the Deck, noted in my subscriber chat for The Upgrade that hospitality has grown too varied for one generic list to say much.² Different hotel categories have such distinct KPI’s (key performance indices) that ranking them against each other is like comparing apples to tacos.

Methodology 2) Pay for play

These awards aren’t pussy footing around, and state upfront that they are there to make money. Travel Weekly’s 2026 Magellan Awards charge suppliers $1,170 to $1,420 per entry, with a separate fee for each category and the seal included with the win.³ The awards honor design, marketing, and services, so a gold seal describes a campaign and the judges rarely, (perhaps never), evaluate a stay.⁴

Methodology 4) Review data

Tripadvisor picks Travellers’ Choice winners on the quality and quantity of reviews over 12 months, with no application required.⁵ The structural problem with review-data awards is that quantity is part of the formula, so the winners tend to be the hotels that can put the most guests through their doors and collect the most reviews from them. A 600-room resort generates far more reviews in 12 months than a 20-room lodge. Hotels train staff to ask for reviews, place QR codes in rooms, and email guests after checkout will outscore an equally well-run property with happy guests and no system for capturing their feedback. This gives me the ick.

The pool of reviewers becomes bifurcated, because you miss the middle. Reviews skews toward guests who are very happy or very unhappy, guests rate against what they paid, so a $250 hotel and a $2,500 hotel can both score a 4.8 on very different expectations. Additionally, a 12-month window punishes a hotel in a renovation or a slow season through no fault of its quality.

Methodology 5) Inspection

These are structured as secret (or not so secret) shopper awards, and include the Michelin Keys, 50 Best, and Forbes as examples in this category. Forbes Travel Guide says it requires no fee, business relationship, or commission from rated properties. However, in the same breath, Forbes sells the winners partnership programs, assessments, and consulting.⁶ Michelin openly accepts payment from tourism boards to help fund their restaurant guide, and in 2019 Visit California paid it $600,000 to expand inspector coverage for its restaurant guide, with both sides saying the money has no connection to who appears.⁷ ⁸

Michelin launched its Keys in 2023, and the guide now covers about 7,000 hotels in 120 countries, with roughly 35% holding one to three Keys and full-time anonymous inspectors paying their own way, review hotels on five published criteria.⁹ The question becomes whether those criteria are the same we, as travelers and not professional inspectors, would look for in a stay.

Bella Darden, who writes Mind Holiday, tested the system against her own stays and landed on transparency as her main issue. Since Michelin will not say how many nights a rating requires, how many inspectors visit, or how a Key is ultimately awarded, readers are asked to accept that a hotel has earned a Michelin Key based on little more than trust and fairy dust. She also cites an analysis that found three-Key hotels scored lower with guests on average than one-Key hotels, with only 12 of 39 hotels studied making the top 50 by guest satisfaction.¹⁰

The methods produce different winners: T+L readers named Patina Osaka, which opened in May 2025, the best hotel in the world for 2026, while the 50 Best ranks it No. 33, and only one hotel sits in both top 15s, Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, with Capella Bangkok at No. 2 on the 50 Best and No. 80 on T+L.¹¹ ¹²

Who takes the top five changes with the year and the voting method, but the same hotels keep appearing. I’m not sold on consistent excellence as the explanation. The writer behind The Ben Edit called much of the 50 Best top 20 “very generic luxury city hotels.”² Darden counts 36 of the 50 as city hotels and 40 as part of a multi-property group,¹⁰ and Rosewood Hong Kong, Four Seasons Bangkok, Capella Bangkok, Mandarin Oriental Bangkok, and The Upper House all ranked in the top eleven in 2023, 2025, and 2026.¹² ¹³ ¹⁴

My problem with the 50 Best list comes down to voter composition. The voters are not publicly listed, but , a former Condé Nast creative director and an early North American Academy Chair for the 50 Best, has written in this article that each of 13 regions has a chair who recruits anonymous voters (writers, influencers, hoteliers, and luxury travelers, but “no one in PR or travel agencies”). Edwards notes that each voter gets seven ranked votes on hotels they have stayed at in the last two years, with about 850 voters taking part in 2025.¹⁵

I travel a lot for my job and for pleasure. It would not be a stretch for me to stay in seven luxury level hotels in a given year, but that’s not the case for the majority of my clients. Someone who stays at seven qualifying hotels in two years is most likely a hotelier, a travel writer, or a frequent business traveler, all of whom spend much of their year in city hotels.

Because press trips and comped nights count toward eligibility while voters do not appear to follow specific scoring criteria, I find the comped stays problematic.¹² From my experience, even when I’m paying full rates at luxury hotels, if the hotel knows I’m a travel advisor, they bring out the bells and whistles. Press trips and FAM trips (familiarization trips), are next level displays of a hotel’s best behavior.

As a result, the hotels that can host the most press trips are the ones most likely to show up in the votes; Ben Schlappig of One Mile at a Time points out that a 795-room hotel hosts far more invited guests than a 24-room one.¹² , who has taken press trips herself, says hotels treat hosted guests better because they have something to gain.¹⁰

Meanwhile, Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge in Canada and Tierra Patagonia in Chile, which are quite small and rarely host comped or press stays, each hold Three Michelin Keys and neither is on the 50 Best list.¹⁶ ¹⁷

A reader asked in The Upgrade subscriber chat how many winners are advertisers and called the arrangement “pay-for-play in editorial clothing.”² Most publications would categorically deny it, but I think a hotel written about favorably is more likely to advertise in that publication’s future issues, and the awards open several other revenue streams. of Skift writes that these lists will never be entirely objective and calls them “often commercial tools” for selling branded awards and gala tickets or driving page views when winners share them,¹⁸ and winning a list starts a second sale. Let’s take a look at all the ways a publication makes money on these award lists.

Licensing. Proving you won often means paying to use the badge, and T+L licenses its award logos and headlines through PARS International, which prices each package to the buyer and also sells reprints and PDF e-prints.¹⁹ The one public price I found came in 2023, when Savannah’s airport commission approved $50,395 for a T+L World’s Best Awards logo license before the results were out.²⁰

Galas and fees. Winning an award is cause for a celebration, and of course a hotel needs to have a table at the dinner in which they accept an award. I can guarantee that a sous vide steak and anemic green bean plated dinner does not line up with the price of the seat sold to accompany it at these galas.

Displaying the award. Of course when a hotel wins an award, their leadership wants to show the world. World Travel Awards sold a 2023 Asia & Oceania gala Bronze package for £1,000 and a Silver package with a full-page ad for £2,000, with a wall plaque costing £650 more.²¹

While this article is largely about the hotel ranking lists, the travel advisor and other industry awards also follow a pay-for-play model. For example, separate from its hotel lists, T+L began charging advisors $4,000 to appear on its A-List in 2018, payable after selection.²²

Sponsorships and bookings. As affiliate programs make it easier to compete with OTAs, these lists are getting into the booking business. The 50 Best Hotels lists partners including American Express Travel and SevenRooms,²³ and Michelin owns the booking site Tablet and earns commissions on hotel bookings, Darden notes.¹⁰ ²⁴

Distribution. This one is my inference since I have no circulation data, but I suspect hotels on a list are more likely to buy the awards edition and hand it out to guests.

Winning is great for team morale, and it can also change who walks through the door and their expectations, causing strain on a team that may not be prepared for. Colin Nagy describes new interest and search visibility alongside a guest base that shifts from die-hard fans to people checking off what is hot right now, who may be harder to please and less likely to return,¹⁸ and when Passalacqua earned its No. 1 crown in 2023 the award “took the metaphorical phone off the hook.”¹³ ¹⁸

Commercial activity around awards does not automatically create a conflict of interest, since a publisher can run a rigorous editorial process while selling sponsorships and a reader survey can produce useful results even when hotels campaign.

The issue is whether you know which type of recognition you are looking at and how much weight it should carry in your decision. In a past issue of The Upgrade, I noted that travel has become a question of who to trust. Trust was also a buzzword that came up frequently at Skift’s Global Forum this year.

Finally, I say consistently that who owns your hotel matters. When looking at the hotels on these awards lists, I was curious what the ownership breakdown is between owner/operator and family owned, sovereign capital, franchise, private equity, etc. I traced ownership across the top 50 of the 50 Best and the T+L World’s Best list for Master Key, and discovered that nearly three-quarters of the 50 Best turned out to be family-controlled, seven hotels trace to a government or a crown, and 17 of T+L’s 50 have undisclosed local owners.²⁵

Making money from these awards is not inherently bad. These publications are businesses, and the awards let teams celebrate a win in an incredibly difficult industry while also putting hospitality at the center of conversation each time a list comes out with much fanfare. The awards also provide content for those of us who rely on staying relevant to our travel clients, (I used one of the lists to make an IG post this week).

I simply caution my Upgrade readers, before you book based on a list, look at who voted, whether comped stays counted, and think about the economic engines driving these lists.

A list can narrow your options, but it cannot tell you whether a hotel suits the way your family likes to travel, or what you are looking for from a specific stay. That’s where working with an advisor who knows your personal travel preferences becomes important.

And, because hotels pay me a commission after you travel, I have a financial motivation too, weigh my opinion the way I have weighed everyone else’s.

🗝️ Room Report — Six Senses Rome

Before running a poetry and yoga retreat in Umbria, I splurged on one night here for the Roman Baths spa to recover from jet lag. I stayed solo without my kids.

Six Senses Rome opened March 16, 2023, in the Palazzo Salviati Cesi Mellini, between the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. The palazzo began as a cardinal’s palace in the 15th century, and this is the brand’s first hotel in Italy. IHG bought Six Senses from Pegasus Capital in February 2019 for $300 million in cash, and it runs the hotels while other investors usually own the buildings. Here, Orion Real Estate Fund V owns the redevelopment.

Rooms

• Upgraded to a Super Deluxe, huge for a city hotel.

• I heard nothing from the street and slept until noon.

• Light switches are complicated, and the phone buttons did not reach the front desk.

Spa

• I booked for the spa, and the Roman baths delivered. They are included in your room rate.

• Go in the morning. Afternoons get crowded.

Food and Beverage

• Breakfast earned full marks.

• Lunch at Bivium was slow. A photo shoot was running, nobody was at the host stand, and 30 minutes passed before anyone took my order.

Extra Credit

• I booked through our hotel booking portal. I got champagne, a note from the GM, a 1pm check-in, and the upgrade.

• No swimming pool, but the Roman baths have three plunge pools.

• The lobby bar is more zen garden restaurant than cozy martini den.

The Upgrade TLDR

• Score: 83.3 out of 100, a strong stay. I would send a client here.

• Best for: travelers resetting after a long flight who want the baths, large rooms, and a peaceful, organic, modern feel.

• Skip it if: you want a traditional, historical Italianate hotel. The decor felt Aman-esque. It’s not a lively bar scene, and it accommodates kids but isn’t kid-friendly.

• October is still high season in Rome, so don’t expect shoulder season rates.

Sources

1. Hilton, “Travel + Leisure’s 2026 World’s Best Awards Spotlight Hilton’s Luxury and Lifestyle Brands and Properties.”

2. The Upgrade subscriber chat, Substack, reader comments (Stojcevski, Gross, The Ben Edit).

3. Travel Weekly Magellan Awards, About and Contact pages.

4. Travel Weekly, “Entries open for the 2026 Magellan Awards,” March 25, 2026.

5. Tripadvisor, “Travellers’ Choice Awards: What is it and how does it work?”

6. Forbes Travel Guide, Media Center and Partner Services pages.

7. San Francisco Chronicle, “Tourism board gives $600,000 to Michelin for new California guide.”

8. Sacramento News & Review, “Culinary ambitions.”

9. MICHELIN Guide, “MICHELIN Guide Unveils Its 2026 MICHELIN Key Selection” and “The MICHELIN Guide 101,” September 15, 2025.

10. Bella Darden, Mind Holiday, “The hotel rating industrial complex is broken,” September 2026.

Mindholiday

The hotel rating industrial complex is broken.

Last year, I paid over $500/night for a birthday hotel stay that was supposed to be special—three nights at a hotel on the ocean in Puerto Escondido, where I imagined myself staring at the deep blue sea and being taken care of for 72 hours, without having to lift a finger…

Read more

a month ago · 64 likes · 21 comments · Bella Darden

1. Hotel Online, “Travel + Leisure Announces 2026 World’s Best Awards,” July 7, 2026; Osaka Highlights, “Patina Osaka named the ‘World’s Best Hotel.’”

2. One Mile at a Time, “The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026 List Published: The Winners, And My Take On The Rankings,” September 15, 2026.

3. Time Out Hong Kong, coverage of the World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023, September 2023.

4. The World’s 50 Best Hotels, 2025 results list (PDF).

5. Yolanda Edwards, Club Yolo, “Travel Awards Season,” November 6, 2025.

Club Yolo

Travel Awards Season

How many of you use lists to plan your travels? Restaurants with doors covered in decades of Pudlo and Johannsens stickers usually end up being great meals, albeit packed with others who’ve found their way there by following the same breadcrumb trail. Walking into a hotel you’ve booked only to see a red Michelin Key plaque or a Forbes star can feel reassuring, like you’ve really chosen the right spot. And if you’re torn between three hotels in an unfamiliar city, checking these lists can be a helpful tiebreaker. But given how much attention the lists get, it’s hard not to wonder: how are they made, and how do they shape how we travel…

Read more

a year ago · 99 likes · 32 comments · Yolanda Edwards

1. MICHELIN Guide, Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge, Three Keys. https://guide.michelin.com/jp/ja/hotels-stays/tofino/clayoquot-wilderness-resort-bedwell-river-12128

2. MICHELIN Guide, Tierra Patagonia Hotel & Spa, Three Keys. https://guide.michelin.com/gb/en/hotels-stays/torres-del-paine-national-park/tierra-patagonia-hotel-spa-6617

3. Colin Nagy, Skift, “Congrats, You’re the ‘World’s Best’ Hotel. Now Comes the Hard Part,” September 27, 2024. https://skift.com/2024/09/27/congrats-youre-the-worlds-best-hotel-now-comes-the-hard-part/

4. PARS International, Travel + Leisure licensing and reprints.

5. City of Savannah, City Council agenda item 34, logo licensing agreement with PARS International, July 27, 2023.

6. World Travel Awards, Asia & Oceania Gala Ceremony 2023: Tickets.

7. Travel Market Report, “Travel + Leisure A-List Controversy Is a Slippery Slope for Travel Media,” March 29, 2018.

8. The 50 Best Hotels, “Our Partners.”

9. Gulf Business, coverage of the MICHELIN Key launch; MICHELIN Guide, Hotels page.

10. Anne Marie Brown, The Upgrade Master Key

If you’re new here as a paid subscriber, this may be your first edition of Hotel History, one of the publications I send out for paid subscribers of The Upgrade.

My father wrote a weekly newsletter about the hospitality industry for 40 years called The Saturday Briefing. He died a few years ago, in 2022, after a battle with Parkinsons Disease. I decided to pick up his legacy and start publishing my own newsletter, which is how The Upgrade was born.

Hotel History consists of archived articles he wrote over those 40 years that I think you will find interesting.

I hope you enjoy this week’s piece, considering the hurricanes that have hammered Hawaii this year.

Happy Travels (and hurricane-free ones),

Anne Marie

Three Storms: My Father on Surviving Hawaiʻi’s Disasters

By Richard Kelley, from Paddling the Outrigger, with an introduction from yours truly, Anne Marie Brown

Read more

25. Experiential Luxury Travel is the Next Frontier

Travelers -

I’m getting ready to head to Rome on Friday! I’m co-leading our annual poetry retreat with Christi Steyn in Umbria this year. I’ll then spend a week in the Costwolds with my mother-in-law. I can’t wait to bop around to moody pubs and antique stores in little villages with one of my favorite women. I’m excited to have some unstructured time to read Agatha Christie books, write, and take a deep breath as I reflect on the past year.

I’m in desperate need of a break after hosting my daughter’s 8th birthday party, which was Parent Trap themed and a slumber party in which nobody slumbered.

Today’s article arose from several weeks of following recent M&A news in the experiential travel industry, which is essentially my home base. What is all this money flowing into experiences signaling for the travel industry? I’ll bring you along as a hospitality insider for a peek into what’s happening.

This week's Lobby Bar covers ownership and contract fights at Soneva, Sandals, Oheka Castle, and the Beverly Wilshire, plus Aman's first Colorado hotel and a new $44 insurance requirement for Tanzania.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Business of Experiential Travel

Experiences happen to be my area of expertise. My previous title at Inspirato (eleven years ago) was “Director of Experiences,” and my job was to create and run a portfolio of small group trips, expeditions, chartered cruises, events like the Masters, and custom FIT (free independent travel) trips for members of the luxury travel club.

This is why I find it hilarious that the hospitality industry is only now catching on to how huge an opportunity experiential travel presents.

The problem is, when the industry discusses experiences, everyone seems to be talking about different things. Some mean DMCs (destination management companies) and tour operators, like Abercrombie & Kent. Some mean all-inclusive luxury lodges like White Desert or Clayoquot. Some mean on-property activities at hotels. Others mean OTA (online travel agency) marketplaces like Viator and GetYourGuide.

For years, the luxury status symbol was the Rolex watch, the Birkin, the mid-life crisis Lambo in a ghastly color. Today, keeping up with the Joneses means cocktail conversation about which gorilla trekking lodge you dropped $5k per night at in Rwanda (it was One & Only Gorilla’s Nest for us).

My clients are dragging/bringing their kids and parents along for the ride. Gen X and Millennials are fitter than any previous generation, and the Silver Tsunami is every bit as excited to travel in retirement, so these families want luxury experiences in nature that work for all three generations.

Virtuoso surveyed 2,485 advisors across more than 50 countries for its 2026 Luxe Report, and 45% of them are seeing more requests for what they call “ultraluxe” travel, where every detail is included, up to full resort buyouts.^1,2 Three-generation trips are climbing too, with grandparents pushing grandkids toward hikes and rivers and away from screens.

The population of people with $30 million or more in assets is projected to grow 34% by 2030, which explains a good chunk of the growth at the top end (see my previous articles about the K-shaped economy).³

Part of it is generational. Millennials and Gen X watched their parents spend decades collecting things (search “millennial inheritance” on Instagram for an idea of what fills my storage unit following the death of my parents), and plenty of them have decided a week in the Amazon gives you memories that a Lladro porcelain collection cannot touch.

Part of it is Instagram, which made certain hotels recognizable on sight (Nihi Sumba, and Giraffe Manor, which I have yet to score a stay at).

Part of it is time. We don’t leave the office at the office the way our Boomer parents did, and we are getting colon cancer, among other fun maladies, at higher rates than any generation before us.⁴

Wealthy Millennials and Gen X want to “adventure max” the small amount of time they have off while they are still healthy and fit enough to hike the Camino or go gorilla trekking.

Hotels and investors see where the next generation of luxury travelers is headed. A hotel that controls the entire guest experience has a greater chance to wow them and captures a heftier share of wallet, and if the scenery or wildlife inspires rave reviews, it becomes a cult property in its own right.

I would define experiential travel as all-inclusive journeys, complete with meals, activities, guides, and luxury accommodations. These experiences can occur on a bespoke, FIT (free independent travel) itinerary put together by a DMC and a travel advisor, they can be on a small group departure by operators like Abercrombie & Kent or Backroads, or they can at a lodge, camp, or hotel.

Private equity (PE) is a good leading indicator in travel, because few firms focus on travel and hospitality alone, and PE is buying direct ownership stakes in safari operators. In 2018, TPG’s Rise Fund bought 34% of Wilderness Holdings, the parent of Wilderness Safaris, and FS Investors’ African Wildlife Holdings bought another 24%. Wilderness then became a buyer itself, acquiring Jacada Travel out of administration in 2020 and relaunching it as its own consumer-facing tour operator.^5,6,7

PE is also reaching into the ground-operator layer in East Africa. Egeria Private Equity agreed in 2025 to acquire Afrika Invest, the Netherlands-based company behind Tanzania Specialist and Africa Safari Trips, which sells direct to consumers and runs its own guides and vehicles on the ground.^8,9

The lodge rollup is also hard to ignore. KSL Capital Partners has been building out an experiential-lodge platform. KSL, who bought my family’s company, Outrigger in 2016, took a majority stake in Baillie Lodges in 2018, folded in Chile’s Tierra Hotels in 2022, and combined both under a new brand, Beckons, this past March, retiring the Baillie Lodges name in the process: nine lodges across Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Canada, backed by $100 million in recent property investment. CEO Michael Crawford, formerly president of Four Seasons, wants to double the portfolio in three years and has named Africa as a target market.^10,11

Auberge Resorts Collection is running a similar play, minus the KSL tie. Auberge sits under Dan Friedkin’s family office, The Friedkin Group, and this year it launched Auberge Safari, bringing nine Tanzania camps and lodges under its brand from Legendary Expeditions, which the Friedkin family already owned, and Chem Chem Safari.^12,13

Marriott is doing the Auberge play on a larger scale in Kenya, where it signed The Ritz-Carlton, Masai Mara Safari Camp and JW Marriott Mount Kenya Rhino Reserve Safari Camp under agreements with a local investor group, Lazizi Group.¹⁴

That makes two distinct plays: PE firms buying equity in the safari companies themselves (Wilderness and the operators Egeria is after), and hotel groups buying reach into safari through management contracts and brand rollups without owning the real estate (Beckons under KSL, Auberge under the Friedkin family office, and Marriott in Kenya).

I personally think the draw of experiential travel comes from a combination of the following:

a) Wanting to prove something to ourselves (such as hiking up to Machu Picchu or visiting all 7 continents)

b) Experiencing pressure to maximize our limited time off or limited with our children before they fly the nest

c) Seeking to create lasting memories

d) Existential climate dread (I wanted to see the mountain gorillas because so few are left in the wild)

e) Milestone celebrations

f) The desire to decrease the friction involved in accomplishing all of the above

White Desert is insanely priced and equally sought after. Its camps take no more than twelve guests each. In case you hate the Drake Passage as much as I do and have beaucoup cash to drop on seeing emperor penguins, White Desert flies you by private Airbus from Cape Town onto its own glacial runway.¹⁵

Pricing starts around $71,500 per person for six days, which could also fund an entire school in Africa for a year, so there’s that. I’m not judging.¹⁵

I haven’t been, but it’s on my bucket list solely for the audacity of that pricing and because I get seasick.

Everyone is getting into safaris! I’m a safari addict, and if I were to be reincarnated, I’d like to be a safari camp manager in Botswana. So, let’s start with the safari action we are seeing in the industry.

At the luxury level, safari camps are as posh as any five-star hotel, with incredible meals, a small tent count, and an all-inclusive stay where the lodge guides control the entire experience.

We spent time in January at two Great Plains camps in Kenya, Ol Donyo and Mara Nyika, after gorilla and chimp trekking in Rwanda. Mara Nyika gave us a private vehicle per family, a Masai guide who grew up on the concession before her tribe leased the land to the camp, and more leopard and cheetah sightings in three days than I’ve had anywhere else. They made me a happy camper.

Singita still reigns supreme in the luxury safari market, and it charges the rates to hold that crown: Sasakwa and Sabora at Grumeti in Tanzania, Lebombo on the Mozambique border, Kwitonda next to Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, and Elela, a new camp opening in December in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. It’s the gold standard for a reason, with near 1:1 staff-to-guest ratios and low-volume, high-value tourism that funds anti-poaching and habitat work directly.¹⁶

And of course there’s Wilderness and Great Plains, which are as luxurious as AndBeyond across their portfolios, with a heavy emphasis on conservation and experiences beyond seeing animals on a game drive.

Giraffe Manor in Kenya and Mnemba Island in Zanzibar are the Instagram-legible entries, and both are notoriously hard to book, which is its own luxury signal and the bane of my existence as an advisor.

Shinta Mani Mustang in Nepal took the top spot on Robb Report’s 2026 list of the world’s greatest luxury hotels less than three years after opening. Bill Bensley designed it in the Kali Gandaki River Valley, it has a five-night minimum, and the itinerary folds in high-altitude hikes, monastery visits, and a consultation with a resident practitioner of traditional Tibetan medicine.¹⁷

Bhutan’s Amankora lodges operate under the country’s high-value, low-impact tourism policy, which caps volume by design, one of the rare cases where the conservation ethic and luxury positioning line up.

Shinta Mani Wild in Cambodia, same architect as Mustang, sits inside a private wildlife reserve in the Cardamom Mountains. Guests zipline into camp. The tents are all-inclusive and butlered, and you can join rangers on active anti-poaching patrols if you want your stay to double as fieldwork. (And no, they don’t entrust you with weapons to take out any poachers you manage to track down!)

Nihi Sumba appears on every major best-of list, Robb Report, Travel + Leisure, and Condé Nast, year after year. It has 2.5 kilometers of private beach, 93% local staffing, and some of the world’s best surfing and diving on the doorstep. You can ride horses on the beach, so I’m sold.¹⁸

Amangiri in Utah is the domestic property most of my clients already know and lust after. I should have stayed there when it was less than $3k per night, but hindsight is 20/20.

Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge on Vancouver Island is reachable only by seaplane, helicopter, or boat, inside a UNESCO biosphere reserve on Clayoquot Sound. It has 25 canvas prospector-style tents with heated floors, and this season added nighttime bioluminescence kayaking and a private floating sauna in the Tofino inlets.¹⁹

I’m going to try to hit this one up next year if I can stomach the price point, because it’s absolutely gorgeous and has one of my favorite GMs.

Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado is an 1880s mining ghost town, restored shack by shack along the Dolores River between Telluride and Mesa Verde. It has two Michelin Keys, 13 cabins plus one tent, and natural geothermal hot springs, including one hidden inside a teepee.²⁰

Awasi distills the whole trend into one property group. The lodges require a ton of upfront planning and coordination from the travel advisor, but they are super cool. Every villa gets its own guide and its own 4WD, and sorry, football fans, there are no TVs.

• Awasi Patagonia: 14 timber-and-glass villas on a private reserve facing Torres del Paine, each with a private wood-fired hot tub looking at the Paine Massif.

• Awasi Atacama: a 12-suite adobe lodge in San Pedro de Atacama with some of the clearest night skies on earth.

• Awasi Iguazu: 14 stilted villas in the rainforest on the Argentine side of the falls, turning what’s normally a day trip into a three- or four-night stay.

Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica in Peru is the Amazon’s answer to the safari camp. You can canoe at dawn, go wildlife spotting with naturalists while dodging mosquitos the size of B52s, and spend nights on the Madre de Dios River searching for piranhas (while hoping they won’t find you).

What used to be the Baillie Lodges portfolio, folded into Beckons this year, covers more of this trend within one country than almost any other group.

• Silky Oaks Lodge, Daintree, Queensland: treehouse suites over the Mossman River in the world’s oldest rainforest, Gourmet Traveller’s #2 resort in Australia for 2025, First Nations-led Kuku Yalanji experiences.

• Longitude 131 Degrees, Uluru (aka Ayers Rock): tented pavilions facing the rock itself, degustation dining under the stars, guided walks with Anangu traditional owners.

• Southern Ocean Lodge, Kangaroo Island: rebuilt after the 2020 bushfires, a dramatic clifftop setting.

• Capella Lodge, Lord Howe Island: a remote UNESCO World Heritage island with very limited capacity.

Blanket Bay in Glenorchy has thirteen rooms on Lake Wakatipu at the foot of the Humboldt Mountains, and it is a Relais & Chateaux and Virtuoso partner property. It works as a base camp for the Routeburn Track, heli-hiking, jet boating, heli-skiing, and a private dinner in the Wine Cave. I’m obsessed with New Zealand, and this hotel never fails to deliver an extraordinary experience.

Huka Lodge sits on the Waikato River outside Taupō and is part of Beckons. Alan Pye opened it as a trout-fishing camp in 1924, and Queen Elizabeth II visited four times. A roughly NZ$25 million centenary renovation reopened it in March 2025 with a doubled dining room, a new outdoor terrace, and wellness grounds built from huts modeled on the Kiwi bach. I sold Huka Lodge for years to avid fly fishermen and women, and then the rest of the world caught on to how special this place is, even if you’re not an angler.^21,22,23

Gleneagles in Perthshire predates this whole trend and is getting rediscovered because of it. Plenty of guests come for the golf (my husband will be one next summer), and the rest come for the 850-acre estate: falconry, gundog training, off-road driving, salmon fishing on the Tay, and one of the best clay shooting schools in the world. It isn’t all-inclusive, so be prepared to dust off your wallet.²⁴

Estelle Manor in Oxfordshire is building out its experience options to capture more share of wallet. You can take a falconry forest walk, fly fish on Blenheim Palace’s own lake, go off-road in INEOS Grenadiers, or abandon your children at the kids club like we did and bliss out at the Eynsham Baths, a Roman-inspired thermal spa.

The same logic is showing up on the water with Explora Journeys and the yacht lines from Ritz-Carlton, Aman, Orient Express, and Four Seasons. UHNW clients who charter actual yachts get offended when you call these vessels “yachts,” so perhaps we should call them micro luxury cruises. The jury is still out about how well these capital-intensive projects have turned out for their financial backers. I think the most successful one will be those who actually own the entire experience. I’m not sold on the idea of outsourcing shore excursions - and the feedback from several of these ships have shown that those haven’t always been handled in the best way.

If you read The Upgrade, you are a luxury traveler, a hospitality industry insider, or a fellow advisor. Maybe you are one of my friends or family members that I bribed to join my paid tier because writing is my first love and there’s something intoxicating about being paid to do it.

As a former Director of Experiences who is now, as I like to think, Master of Experiences, I love seeing the hospitality industry finally take luxury nature-based travel seriously. I’ve been saying for years that the smartest hotels will copy the African safari lodge model and capture more of their guests’ wallet and emotional experience, instead of hoping they book a mediocre-but-exorbitantly priced day-boat charter through the concierge.

🗝️The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• A Singapore court cut Steele’s Soneva debt from 18% to 15% and set a November 15 start for a sale. Steele, the KSL Capital and GIC vehicle that holds about 74.9% of the group, issued up to $37 million of debt securities in August 2025 at 18% compounding with a 2x payout on exit, and the judge found the group needed far less and that Steele did not seriously look for other lenders. The court removed the 2x term, declined founder Sonu Shivdasani’s request for a buyout, and told Steele to begin the sale process both sides agreed to in 2025 by November 15 unless it can show that date is impracticable. (Singapore International Commercial Court)

• Royal Caribbean is buying half of Sandals and Beaches for about $3 billion. Guess you could call it a deal with…real sole.

  The deal values the resort business at roughly 10 times forward EBITDA and is expected to close in early 2027, with Sandals executive chairman Adam Stewart keeping a leadership role in the joint venture. Existing reservations and loyalty programs continue as usual. (Yahoo Finance)

• Oheka Castle goes to bankruptcy auction October 27. The Long Island wedding estate from Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” video is selling with its hotel, event spaces, and condo development rights, and its website still advertises rooms and weddings until then. (LongIsland.com)

• The Beverly Wilshire is suing a sports travel company over 300 World Cup rooms. The hotel alleges Jet Set Sports contracted the rooms for six nights at $594,000 before taxes, then told the hotel on January 23 to release them, and says it could not resell any. It is asking for $636,000, and none of it has been decided in court. (California Post)

• Aman is building its first Colorado hotel at the base of Aspen Mountain. A construction sequencing plan finalized July 31 puts more than four years of work ahead for Aman Aspen, a hotel with four full-ownership residences, and the neighboring Chalet Alpina, with about three years before the new lift starts spinning. (Aspen Journalism)

• Tanzania now requires $44 travel insurance for foreign visitors to the mainland. The policy comes from the National Insurance Corporation, covers emergency medical care, evacuation, repatriation, and lost luggage for up to 92 days, and visitors without one can be denied entry. Zanzibar has its own separate policy at the same price, and Kenya added a similar rule in July. (Citizen Digital)

Sources

1. Virtuoso, 2026 Luxe Report, October 2025

2. Seatrade Cruise News, Virtuoso 2026 trends, October 7, 2025

3. Altrata, World Ultra Wealth Report 2026, June 2026

4. ecancer, American Cancer Society colorectal study, February 2017

5. Tourism Update, Wilderness Holdings stake sale, July 2018

6. Travel Weekly UK, Jacada revived by Wilderness, 2020

7. Egeria, Afrika Invest acquisition, October 2, 2025

8. PitchBook, Tanzania Specialist profile

9. Travel Weekly, Beckons launch, March 11, 2026

10. Luxury Travel Advisor, Beckons launch, March 11, 2026

11. Auberge Safari, Travel Professionals FAQ, May 2026

12. Hotel Online, Marriott and Lazizi Group, 2025

13. Luxury Travel Advisor, White Desert Whichaway upgrades, 2025

14. Aspire, Singita Elela opening date, 2026

15. Travel Noire, Robb Report 2026 greatest hotels, 2026

16. NIHI Sumba, 2026 factsheet

17. Beckons, Clayoquot 2026 season release, May 26, 2026

18. MICHELIN Guide, Dunton Hot Springs

19. Luxury Travel, Huka Lodge renovation plans, August 1, 2024

20. Gourmet Traveller, Huka Lodge reopening, 2025

21. Newstalk ZB, Huka Lodge renovation, March 16, 2025

22. Abercrombie & Kent, Gleneagles

Travelers -

The travel industry is comprised of incredible people, and one of the aspects of my job I love the most is getting to meet so many of these experts around the world. I credit the woman I interviewed for this week’s Master Key with my discovery of Substack, and I love reading her articles on this platform.

spent almost a decade in advertising before a layoff sent her on what she calls her adult study abroad. She started blogging about where she went, friends started asking her to plan their trips, and a friend in the industry pushed her to join an agency. Today, she owns Blonde Atlas and Atlas Adventures, runs a team of more than 15, and does it from London, where she moved in 2020.

I had the chance to meet Whitney in person this summer when my family was in London for a few days. I wanted to pick her brain about being an agency owner of a luxury agency similar to our own, because it’s a tough job to navigate at our stage in life.

Read my article in this week’s The Upgrade Weekly on the Paradox of Being a Female Leader in Travel for my thoughts on why there are so few women at the upper levels in our industry.

I think Whitney has me beat for trips taken on an annual basis. In 2025 she took more than 50 flights and spent 110 nights in more than 45 hotels.

I’ve always believed that we should support each other in this industry, and learn from one another. I hope you enjoy reading this interview with one of my favorite fellow Substackers and an incredible agency owner.

-Anne Marie Brown, Co-Founder of Alpenglow Travel

Whitney Haldeman on London, Letting Go, and Women-Only Travel

The founder of Blonde Atlas and Atlas Adventures on building a 15-person agency from London, and the hotels she can’t stop talking about.

I actually came to luxury travel in a fairly roundabout way. I spent almost a decade in advertising after university, working across both tourism and destination accounts and, later, in the luxury space as the social media lead for Infiniti. So I had experience in both worlds, but it really never occurred to me that they could become a career together. At the time, I still thought of travel agents as something slightly antiquated.

The turning point came when I was laid off at the advertising agency where I was working. I took my severance and decided to do something I had always regretted not doing at university: study abroad. I jokingly called it my “adult study abroad.” I started traveling extensively and blogging about the places I was discovering, mostly because I loved sharing them. Friends and acquaintances began coming to me for recommendations, and eventually those recommendations started turning into itineraries and early travel-planning work.

My friend Chelsea Martin had already entered the travel industry and kept telling me, “You need to do this properly. You need to join an agency.” She was really the person who helped me understand that there was this entire modern luxury travel-advisor world that I hadn’t known existed.

Through Chelsea, I eventually met Jack Ezon while we were scouting hotels in Greece. I was immediately drawn to the way he operated: incredibly knowledgeable and direct, but also warm, generous and magnetic. I had a very instinctive sense that these were people I wanted to build alongside.

That ultimately led me to Embark Beyond, which is based in New York and has been my host agency ever since. They’ve given me the infrastructure, relationships and support to build my own businesses while still allowing me the independence to create something that’s mine. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that I ended up here: the advertising background, the luxury experience, and most importantly…my obsession with travel. All were pieces of the puzzle… I just couldn’t see the picture yet.

The funny thing is, I started talking about moving to London before I had even visited. I was going through a period of enormous personal and professional change, and I had a growing feeling that I wanted to spend more time abroad. Even before some of those changes happened, I remember looking into maternity-leave cover roles in Europe or anything that might let me try living somewhere else for a few months without completely uprooting my life.

Then, when a few of the things that had been keeping me rooted started to fall away, Europe suddenly felt much more possible. London seemed like a natural place to start: it was international, incredibly well-connected and, most importantly for a first move abroad, everyone spoke English.

I actually visited London for the first time already wondering, “Could I live here?” Initially, I thought I might transfer through my advertising agency and get sponsored that way, but a few months later I unexpectedly lost my job. That plan disappeared, and I went off on what I called my “adult study abroad” instead.

But London kept pulling me back. I spent the entire month of September 2016 here, essentially trying on a life in the city, and that was when I really fell in love with it. I came back again for November and December, so by the end of that year I had spent three months here. Without realizing it, I was already planting the seeds of the life I have now…making friends, learning the neighborhoods, building a community and beginning to feel at home.

It still took me another four years to actually move. Brexit was happening, immigration rules kept changing, and I would start down one visa route only to have the goalposts move again. I was also building my travel business, but I was a very early-stage independent advisor, which didn’t exactly make me an obvious candidate for sponsorship.

Then COVID happened. I had always dismissed the idea of coming over as a student because the visa restrictions around running my business made it impractical. Suddenly, no one was traveling anyway. I thought, “If there were ever a moment to do this, this is it.” So I enrolled in a master’s program in International Events, Leisure and Tourism Management and finally moved to London in September 2020. By then, I had spent more than a year here cumulatively, squeezing every possible legal day out of my visits.

Six years later, it’s still my favorite place in the world.

What I love most about London is that it feels like the best of both worlds. There is an incredible energy and ambition here. It’s a city full of interesting, entrepreneurial people doing interesting things…but I find the attitude toward life outside of work much more aligned with how I want to live. People take their holidays. The pubs spill onto the pavements at the end of the workday. There seems to be a greater acceptance that having a full life outside your career isn’t somehow at odds with being ambitious.

And as someone whose entire life revolves around travel, London is extraordinary. It feels as though the world is at your fingertips. But you also don’t necessarily have to leave London to experience it: the city is such a collision of cultures, nationalities, food, art and ideas that you can feel transported simply by crossing town.

There have also been plenty of smaller cultural adjustments. I arrived assuming it would rain constantly; I’ve learned that London is much more likely to give you four seasons before lunch. I am considerably more conscious of the volume of my American voice than I used to be. I wear far less athleisure. And I’ve become very good at appreciating the sun the second it appears. I could probably write an entire essay on the tiny differences between American and British life, but I think that’s part of what I love about living abroad. Six years later, I’m still noticing them.

The team has hugely evolved over the years. I started as a team of one, and today there are over 15 of us across two distinct sides of the business: our bespoke travel-advisory business, where we plan individual trips for private clients, and our group-travel company, which creates and operates hosted trips around the world.

We currently have four dedicated travel designers, a team of planners who develop and lead our group trips, and several people across operations and administration (plus outsourced teams for taxes, finance, etc). As we’ve grown, my own role has naturally shifted from executing every detail myself to setting the creative direction, nurturing our industry relationships and making sure we’re continually raising the bar on what we’re recommending and creating.

A significant part of my job now is being the tastemaker for the business. I travel extensively, attend industry conferences and trade shows, meet with hoteliers and representation companies, and do as many site inspections as I can. I spend a lot of time maintaining relationships with everyone from hotel sales teams and GMs to owners. Luxury travel is an incredibly relationship-driven business, but it’s also one where firsthand knowledge really matters. I want us to know not simply that a hotel is good, but exactly who it is good for.

We’ve built an extensive internal knowledge-management system so that what I learn doesn’t stay in my head. I’m constantly sending the team voice notes, contacts, photos and observations from the road: which room category I’d book, who the GM is, what has changed since our last visit, which client immediately came to mind when I saw a particular property.

On the client side, my travel designers increasingly project-manage the relationship: the onboarding, communication, research and itinerary development…while I work closely with them on the creative direction. I’m often involved at the inception of a trip: understanding what the client is really asking for, helping shape the itinerary and making sure we’re matching the right person with the right places. Then my team can take that vision and bring all of the details to life.

Our group trips work similarly. I tend to start with the big picture: Where should we go? Which hotel feels right? What would make this trip distinctive? What experiences are worth building around? What price point are we trying to achieve? From there, the team takes that framework and develops it into an actual trip, with me continuing to weigh in at key points along the way.

I’ve had to learn that delegation doesn’t have to mean completely removing yourself from something. For me, it’s much more collaborative. My job now is to stay close enough to protect the taste level, relationships and point of view that built the business in the first place, while giving an incredibly capable team the ownership to actually run with it. That’s probably been one of the biggest evolutions for me as a founder: realizing that my highest-value contribution isn’t doing more of the work myself, but creating the direction, standards and knowledge that allow everyone else to do their best work.

I think anyone in this industry who tells you they have perfect boundaries is probably lying! I’m still figuring this one out.

I’ve become much more intentional about protecting my attention, rather than simply protecting certain hours. I use an app called Opal to block particular apps at different points in the day. Social media, for example, is an important part of our business, but I’ve largely delegated the day-to-day management of it. If I open Instagram to do one specific thing, it’s incredibly easy to look up 15 minutes later and wonder why I went on there in the first place. So during much of my workday, I actually block it.

I’m experimenting with doing the same thing with my inbox where I create periods when email simply isn’t available to me. With a team spread across different time zones, calls can inevitably creep later into the evening, and sometimes the most difficult boundary is simply forcing myself to close the laptop.

Having a very capable team has made a huge difference. I’m no longer the person who needs to personally respond to every client email or keep every deadline moving. But I’ve also had to accept that there is simply more incoming communication than I could ever respond to: partnership requests, people asking if we’re hiring, people wanting advice about getting into the industry, requests for recommendations, invitations, introductions. I’ve had to learn that someone having access to my inbox doesn’t automatically mean they have access to my time. I truly want to be generous and helpful, but I also have to accept that I can’t respond to everyone and still have the kind of life I want outside of work.

Ironically, though, one of my biggest challenges with boundaries isn’t that I resent the work…it’s that I love it! I love my team, I love coming up with ideas, and I find the industry so fascinating. It’s very easy for one idea to turn into another and suddenly we’re still going hours later.

Travel blurs that line even further. Even when I’m traveling personally with my husband, I might want to see a hotel while we’re there, meet the GM or send my team a voice note because I’ve just discovered something I know a client would love. But I’ve stopped thinking that a perfect boundary means work and life can never touch. This career is inevitably woven into my life, and for the most part, I really enjoy that.

So for me, the goal isn’t perfect separation. It’s making sure work is integrated into my life without being allowed to consume it. Some weeks I’m better at that than others.

I think if you told me ten years ago what my life would look like today, there are parts of it I definitely wouldn’t have believed. I never imagined I would build a business of this scale, live in London, have the financial independence I have now, or spend my life traveling to and staying in some of the most extraordinary places in the world. On paper, so much of my life looks beyond what my younger self would have known to dream for.

But I also think she’d be surprised by some of the things that haven’t happened yet. I’m approaching 40 and I don’t have children yet. We’re only just now in the process of buying our first home. There are milestones I probably assumed, without ever really questioning it, would have happened by a certain age.

My friend Annie once said to me that by 40, almost every woman could write a book called Not Exactly How I Thought Things Would Turn Out. That stuck with me, because I think it can be true in both directions. Some things don’t happen when or how you thought they would, and that can be painful. And then other parts of your life become bigger, richer or more interesting than you ever had the imagination to plan for.

So I think what I’d tell my younger self is actually something I’m still trying to tell myself now: hold the vision for what you want, but hold the timeline and the exact picture of it a bit more loosely.

I’ve always been someone who works incredibly hard and has a very clear idea of where I’m trying to go. That has served me very well. But life isn’t a checklist, and I’ve learned (and am still learning) that you can do all the “right” things and still arrive somewhere different from where you expected. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve arrived in the wrong place.

I’d tell her to keep showing up, keep working hard, keep being curious and keep building a life that feels meaningful. You don’t have to know exactly what it’s going to look like. There will be things you desperately want that take longer than you hoped, and things you never thought to ask for that turn out better than your wildest dreams.

And I suppose I’d tell her that you can be incredibly grateful for the life you have built while still deeply wanting the things that haven’t arrived yet. Those two things are allowed to be true at the same time.

I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer to this, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot because travel is an interesting industry when you look at where women are represented versus where they’re still underrepresented.

On the travel-advisor side, women are an absolute force. In the U.S., eight in ten travel agencies are women-owned (ASTA 2025 Fact Sheet) and I’ve watched the profession grow tremendously in recent years. Anecdotally, many of the newer advisors I meet are women, and one of the things that attracts them to the profession is the ability to build a career with some degree of autonomy and flexibility. You may be answering an email at 9 p.m., but perhaps that means you could do school pickup at 3 p.m. There is an ability (particularly as an independent advisor or agency owner) to design your working life in a way that more traditional corporate structures don’t always allow.

Where I still notice a disparity is as you move into some of the more traditional power structures within hospitality. There are incredible female GMs, owners and executives whom I admire, and I absolutely see that landscape changing. But senior hotel leadership, ownership, investment and certain executive roles have historically been much more male-dominated.

Part of the challenge, I suspect, is the structure of some of those careers. Hospitality can require huge personal flexibility. It can ask you to relocate for the next opportunity, to be responsible for a hotel 24/7, or to spend a significant amount of time traveling. Those demands can become complicated during the same years when people are building families. And in a society where women still frequently carry more of the responsibility at home, I don’t think we can talk about the leadership gap without acknowledging that context.

What’s fascinating is that women already power so much of this industry. Travel and hospitality are fundamentally about relationships, communication, attention to detail, problem-solving and understanding people. We all know there are extraordinary women doing that work at every level.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether women have the skills or ambition to lead…they obviously clearly do. It’s whether we’re continuing to create structures that allow talented women to progress into leadership without requiring them to choose between professional ambition and the rest of their lives.

I’m optimistic because I do see it changing. I encounter more female founders, owners, GMs and senior executives now, and I think visibility matters. The more women see other women building companies and occupying those positions, the less exceptional it feels—and the more it simply becomes another version of what leadership in this industry looks like.

It really ebbs and flows. On average, I’m probably taking one or two trips a month, but the reality is much less evenly distributed than that. I’ll have stretches when I’m barely home and then deliberately carve out longer periods when I’m not traveling at all.

To put it into perspective, in 2025 I took more than 50 flights, flew approximately 72,000 miles, spent 110 nights in more than 45 hotels and traveled across 13 countries. I’m on track for a fairly similar year in 2026.

The flow tends to be somewhat seasonal. I often travel less during peak summer because that’s when everyone else is traveling, destinations are more crowded, and London is amazing at that time of year anyway. Then I’ll have periods like March through May was this year, when I’m barely home. September onward can be busy again, then I usually slow down around the holidays. But it truly depends on the year.

I’m also increasingly trying to stack trips together. I’d sometimes rather do trips back-to-back, accept that I’ll be exhausted by the end of them, and then come home for a longer stretch rather than constantly doing three days away, four days home, three days away again. I’ve realized I really value having enough time at home to actually settle back into my life.

A lot of my schedule is dictated by what the business needs. I’m already thinking about destinations we may want to use for Atlas Adventures in 2028, which means working backwards: Where do I need to scout? When do I need to experience it? How can I see it outside peak season while still understanding what it feels like at its best?

Then there are trade shows and industry events. I don’t necessarily attend the same ones every year. I might do ILTM one year and PURE, DUCO, Experience Africa or something else. I’ll also travel for hotel openings, hosted trips, site inspections and occasionally to join one of our own Atlas Adventures trips.

And then sometimes an extraordinary invitation lands in my inbox two weeks beforehand and completely destroys whatever sensible travel schedule I thought I’d created! So there’s definitely no neat formula. I’m trying to be increasingly intentional about why I’m getting on a plane, but one of the privileges of this career is that sometimes the answer is simply: this is an opportunity I really shouldn’t miss.

AN IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION! (I really do struggle with absolutes… it depends on the day you ask me and my mood! I was also just debating the World’s 50 Best Hotels list with some friends and asking: what exactly makes something “the best”? Some of my favorite hotels in the world weren’t even on it! I also think there’s an important distinction between a hotel I can objectively recognize as exceptional and one that I personally feel deeply connected to. The latter is usually what makes my favorites list.

Passalacqua, Lake Como is probably number one for me. Valentina De Santis has become a friend, and she’s also someone I admire greatly (especially as a female hotel owner.) There is such warmth to the entire experience, and the attention to detail is extraordinary. Nothing feels generic or overly manufactured. It has personality, soul and a real sense of generosity. The more closely you look, the more you notice amazing details (where often, that’s where you’d start to see the cracks).

Singita is technically cheating because I’m choosing an entire collection rather than one hotel, but I’ve never been to a Singita property that didn’t feel incredibly special. Their commitment to conservation and the communities surrounding their properties is fundamental to what they do. And then somehow they pair that sense of purpose with spectacular locations, incredible teams, beautiful design and exceptional food. I find what they’ve built incredibly inspiring and I will always be evangelical for the brand!

I’m going to cheat again and say Belmond. I have such an affinity for the way they approach hospitality. So many of their properties are intertwined with the history and identity of a destination, and I love the balance they strike between preserving the sense of place and making it feel relevant and luxurious today. There’s an old-world romance to Belmond that really speaks to me. Asking me to choose a single Belmond might be a step too far!

FORESTIS in the Dolomites has one of my favorite hotel views anywhere in the world. There’s something about being there that immediately grounds me. The food is extraordinary, but what I particularly love is that the luxury doesn’t feel “try hard”. It’s simple and connected to its surroundings. Everything feels thoughtful but without feeling overdone.

Apparently my criteria for a favorite hotel are becoming clear as I answer this: a strong sense of place (even if it’s an overused phrase in the industry), exceptional people, beautiful design, wonderful food and, above all, soul. The hotels I remember aren’t necessarily the ones with the most marble or the longest list of amenities. They’re the ones that make me feel something.

Our group trips are called Atlas Adventures, and they really came out of something I personally wanted and couldn’t find.

I was newly single at the time and really craving both travel and community. I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t necessarily have someone who could (or wanted to) go everywhere I wanted to go. When I looked at organized travel, I felt caught in this strange gap: I was too old for the Contiki-style party trip and far too young for the traditional retirees-on-a-coach model. I actually ended up going on a yoga retreat largely because it was the closest thing I could find to the kind of group travel I was looking for. But I didn’t necessarily want a yoga retreat. I wanted a really great trip, with lots of exploration and interesting people.

That’s ultimately what became Atlas Adventures. I made them female-only because I loved the idea of creating the kind of girls’ trip I was craving myself. I’m a huge believer in prioritizing female friendships and girls’ trips at every stage of life. There are so many reasons someone might not have a built-in travel companion at a particular moment: perhaps you’re single, your friends are having children, your friends have different holiday budgets, or you simply have different ideas about how you want to travel than your partner/friends. I never wanted someone to miss out on seeing the world because they were waiting for the right person to go with them.

We describe the trips as “by women, for women.” My team is female, and all of our trips are women-only. We have made the occasional exception though… we did run a New Zealand trip where women could bring their partners, which felt appropriate because my husband is a Kiwi and helped me lead it. But the heart of Atlas Adventures is still the girls’ trip.

And importantly, they’re not built around one particular hobby. You don’t have to be a yogi or a foodie or an art obsessive. They’re for curious women who want to experience the best of a destination and feel really alive while they’re doing it. That might mean an architecture tour in the morning, a cooking class in the afternoon and rosé by the pool afterwards. We want there to be substance, but we also want it to be fun.

The flow is something we’re incredibly thoughtful about, and it changes with every destination. One of our rules is that we only operate trips in places we’ve experienced firsthand. When I’m scouting, I’m constantly thinking about the eventual rhythm of the group: Where do we need to slow down? Is this somewhere people will want an afternoon by the pool? Is this experience actually worth getting up at 6 a.m. for? How much can we realistically fit into a day before it stops being enjoyable?

We’ve also learned a lot simply from operating these trips over the years. The first 24 hours have a completely different energy from day five, when everyone knows one another and friendships have formed. We generally find that around seven days is the maximum (you want everyone to leave while they’re still wishing they had another day together, rather than after they’ve had time to get sick of each other!) We can always offer an optional extension for those who aren’t ready to go home.

Hotels are a huge part of the equation. Obviously there are practical considerations like if rooms twin properly for women sharing… but I’m equally interested in how a hotel facilitates the social experience. Is there somewhere lovely to gather for a drink before dinner? A pool where everyone will naturally congregate? Can you walk out the door and explore? Does it have enough personality that staying there actually contributes something to the trip? My relationships within the hotel industry are hugely helpful because we can really understand a property before committing to bringing a group there.

Destination selection is probably equal parts strategy and instinct. I’m constantly discovering places through my own travels, trade shows and relationships with suppliers, and I’m paying attention to destinations that are evolving or particularly interesting at that moment. But I’m also asking: Would I actually be excited to take a group of women here?

And increasingly, our alumni help answer that question. We have a very strong repeat community (typically more than 30% of the women on a trip have traveled with us before) so we survey them about where they want to go next, and those responses often influence where I scout.

That’s probably the thing I’m proudest of. I started Atlas Adventures because I personally wanted community, and somewhere along the way, the community became the product as much as the travel itself. The destination may be what gets someone to book the first trip, but very often it’s the women they meet who bring them back for the second.

Honestly, the way my team is structured today is what makes that possible.

Most clients initially find me through Instagram, referrals or email, but I’ve been very intentional about communicating that planning a trip “with me” really means planning a trip with my team. I’m still very much behind the experience sharing my knowledge, directing the creative, making recommendations and meeting one-on-one with my travel designers. But we’ve built systems that allow that expertise to flow through the company without requiring me to personally be the conduit for every email or decision.

I actually think that makes us better at what we do. If I were trying to be every client’s sole point of contact while traveling extensively, I’d inevitably have to choose between being responsive to the person at home and being fully present in the destination I’m supposed to be learning about.

Instead, there’s strength in numbers. We have people managing the client relationship, others building the scaffolding of the itinerary and an operations team keeping everything moving behind the scenes. That frees me (and increasingly other members of my team) to be properly present when we’re on the road.

Because being present is really the point. If I’m inspecting a hotel, I want to notice which rooms I would actually book, how the breakfast experience is at 9 a.m., whether the pool gets sun in the afternoon, who on the team is exceptional, what the neighborhood feels like when you walk outside. I want to have dinner with the GM, meet our partners and ask the questions that aren’t answered on a fact sheet. Those are often the tiny pieces of information that eventually make a client’s trip better.

There is absolutely a place for great DMCs and local partners (we work with some wonderful ones) but we’ve also invested hugely in building our own collective knowledge. Between my travels and those of my team, we can bring a tremendous amount of firsthand experience to the planning process. So I’ve stopped thinking of my travel as time away from my clients. It’s part of the work I’m doing for them. The challenge is making sure the company is structured so that I can put my phone away long enough to actually absorb where I am, knowing that someone excellent is taking care of things at home.

Ultimately, every time one of us travels, the entire team should come back knowing more.

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24. The Upgrade | Weekly – The Paradox of Being a Female Leader in Travel

Travelers,

I have held various leadership and board positions in the travel and hospitality industry over my career. Yet, agency owner may be the most challenging, perhaps due to the time in my life that collides with this position.

Today’s Upgrade addresses an innate paradox I’ve noticed: the industry is dominated by women, yet structurally makes it difficult for them to run it.

On the surface, the travel industry is an attractive career path. Travel advising, specifically, allows us to combine ambition with flexibility. We can ostensibly work from anywhere, set our own hours, and in some cases, be our own bosses. That flexibility is exactly why 80 percent of advisors and 70 percent of agencies are female-dominated. However, scaling past solo-advisor size requires being the 24/7 person who takes calls on the weekends and family trips, often being a content creator or at least the author of a newsletter, and steps away for “just a second” from dinner. This isn’t a trade off many of us are willing to make once we have children, and for those of us that do try to juggle it all, the stress and guilt are often overwhelming.

The Lobby Bar this week covers Rosewood Hong Kong's repeat win atop the World's 50 Best Hotels list, Ritz-Carlton Residences’ conversion in Brooklyn Heights, the posthumous opening of Dolly Parton's SongTeller Hotel in Nashville, a look at how new luxury hotels get built in Venice, and PURE Life Experiences wrapping its four-day run in Marrakech.

Happy Travels -

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Paradox of Being a Female Leader in the Travel Industry

I was 33 by the time I had our daughter, and 35 when my son arrived, following years of unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant. My doctor told me I needed less stress. I was traveling most of the year for work. My pregnancies and deliveries were difficult. None of it was easy, but I reminded myself that I had chosen this and longed for motherhood for years. I had quit my corporate career in luxury travel in order to be a mom.

Today, I am 41 with two incredible children, six and eight years old. I love them, but I’m faced with a constant tension between wanting to soak up every minute with them while also being completely obsessed with, and proud of, what I’m building.

Case in point: I missed my son’s birthday this week for a work trip that I very much wanted to go on. Facing his tears as I departed, I smoothed back his hair and told him that mommy had worked very hard to earn this opportunity, and that I would celebrate with him at his party that following weekend when I returned. I could feel my heart ripping out of my body as I ducked into my Uber.

On this top-producer trip to Rosewood Mandarina, I’m surrounded by other millennial female agency founders who are also navigating motherhood and business ownership. These are some of the heavy hitters in our host agency, other affiliate agency owners who are putting up astronomical numbers and who have built travel businesses most agents won’t create in a lifetime.

At dinner on my final night, we discuss perimenopause, HRT (hormone replacement therapy), school sports schedules, and the push and pull of handling both parenthood and clients. It feels like someone always needs us. We answer client calls in the middle of the night, step away from family dinners, and work on every vacation. My daughter asks me why I’m on my phone on Labor Day weekend while we are at the lake. Under the dinner table at Rosewood Mandarina, I’m currently handling a client who was booked in a room category below what he thought he was getting.

Our dinner conversation turns to marriage. Some of us mention that our husbands aren’t happy with how much we travel and leave them to solo parent. I am reminded that my part-time job has quickly become a full-time obsession.

When we travel, we often operate as what Alex Barnes, another agency owner who has built a huge following on Instagram, calls “luxury backpackers.” We jump from hotel to hotel to squeeze in as many site inspections as possible. In between, we scramble to answer client emails and hop on calls with our teams to problem solve.

There is no “off” switch.

We all arrived at agency ownership by way of quitting demanding corporate jobs that we found unfulfilling, transitioning from law, finance, and sports management. Having reached the upper levels of our industries, we wondered if office life was all there was. We are the quintessential millennial overachievers who executed the playbook - straight A’s, college, graduate degrees, high-powered jobs, climbed the ladder.

None of us started out hoping to become full-time travel advisors. We quit the rat race vowing to fill our days with mahjong, tennis, and taking care of ourselves for once. I left to take care of my parents until they passed away and try to make a go of a writing career, oh and to have a family. I made it five years before I started feeling like I’d lost a piece of myself, my larger purpose in my days.

I'd already spent a decade in luxury travel before I tried to leave it the first time. I went back to work after my daughter was born, then built a travel tech platform with my husband that failed when Covid hit, then swore off the industry again, until a friend asked me to help expand her agency in 2025. It was supposed to be a part-time gig with a short timeline. I laugh at that now.

Around the table at Rosewood Mandarina, the women all agree: our second careers seem to have blown up into behemoths once we attacked them with the same drive we brought to our previous jet-fueled jobs.

Most of us work out of home offices with little privacy. My children come home from school, completely ignoring the Ritz “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door, and rush into the middle of client calls. I scoop them up for a quick hug before shooing them off to another room. I work for two more hours, our nanny shuttling them to after-school activities, before I step away to help with dinner and bedtimes.

My commission this year covers our nanny’s pay, with a respectable cushion to spend on our travel budget. The irony of spending most of my income on childcare when I worked so hard to become a mother is not lost on me.

Surrounded by these other badass female founders, I finally feel like I have a place to talk about all this.

This tension we are feeling is part of what drives the dearth of female leaders in the travel industry. Travel is a largely female dominated industry. Roughly 80 percent of U.S. travel advisors identify as female¹, and women own about 70 percent of the nation's agencies². However, that 70 percent is comprised mostly of solo operators or small teams working from a home office, like mine.

In the companies with scale, the numbers reverse. Women held 28.4 percent of board seats at publicly traded hospitality companies in 2025⁴, and, among Virtuoso's largest member and host agencies, the top job at only five of thirteen I checked (two of which now sit inside larger corporate parents). Executive committees are worse. AETHOS Consulting found female representation across hospitality leadership teams at 22 percent⁵, and a UK study of top FTSE 350 hospitality companies found only 4 percent had a woman as executive director⁶.

Women make up 74 percent of travel buyers and more than half of supplier and travel management company staff⁷. We're most of the industry's front line and its client base, and a minority of who runs it.

In Jacques Ledbetter’s and Forbes article about women in hospitality, he included the image above. “11 travel executives spanning hotels, airlines, casinos, cruise and online travel met the U.S. President in the Oval Office and stood shoulder to shoulder for a picture that’s been widely circulating across the travel and hospitality industries. There were no women among them.”

Is it a matter of opting out of leadership roles once we realize what they will take in the travel industry? Or is that opportunities that are more likely to be provided to male counterparts because of the perception that we as women would prioritize families over executive demands?

I recall fighting for a VP position that, in my mind, I had earned at a previous company through two years of demonstrated growth and leadership. Surrounded by male peers who had been promoted to that level with lesser accomplishments, I asked for title change. I was told that I was “too assertive” for the executives to recommend me for the higher role. Many women in similar positions have received feedback about being too “assertive, direct, emotional, cold, or hard”. Among my male friends from business school, none of them had ever received that feedback.

I think the answer is: all of the above. Yes, I have been thwarted from advancement at various stages in my life, and I have pivoted due to personal choices, such as stepping back for a few years to take care of my parents and kids.

The other female founders at the Rosewood Mandarina event and I discussed whether it’s possible to create boundaries with clients around work and personal time. The consensus was that it’s possible if you have a team of employees and perhaps pay for an after-hours service, but that almost inevitably, the buck stops with us. If we book using a DMC (destination management company), the client has an in-country contact during their trip, which adds a layer of protection. Yet we still receive the escalations.

, founder of Blonde Atlas, Atlas Adventures, and The Heart of Travel, and I sat down together when I was in London this summer where she allowed me to pick her brain about how she is handling agency ownership. I’ve been a fan of her Substack for a while, and wanted to hear her perspective on this topic.

Her full interview will be published as Master Key piece later this week, gifted to everyone, not just paid subscribers.

Yes, this job comes with great flexibility, and we can do it from anywhere. I worked from a pool last week. Alex Barnes is working from Switzerland this week. Whitney just got back from Morocco. The downside is that our work also follows us everywhere. My screen time is 11 hours a day, and my brain is half present at the best of times. It’s difficult to schedule time with friends because I’m often out of town, and many of my friends are my clients (which I greatly appreciate).

That leads to the next thing the group of leaders at Rosewood Mandarina kept coming back to, which is mental health. Most of us mentioned having a therapist (marriage or personal) and making specific time to exercise or take a daily walk at minimum.

In our former corporate lives, we had finance, accounting, marketing, legal, and support teams behind us. Now, we handle every stage of the booking and operations process, plus every business management and ownership role. We may outsource bookkeeping and social media, or have an offshore VA (virtual assistant), but even the most successful among us are handling many more facets of our businesses than we did in our previous roles.

I, personally, feel pulled nonstop in all directions, like there’s never enough time in the day. I wake up every night between 2 and 4 am, my brain going a million miles an hour. I used to answer emails in those hours, but now I use the time to write these Substack articles, which feels better for my mental health.

I’m trying to become more intentional about setting my out-of-office replies, blocking my calendar when my kids come home, and pushing clients from text messages to emails during work hours. I’ve begun using Calendly to schedule calls because that way I’m less likely to book them over my “dedicated” family time.

It's difficult to disconnect on evenings and weekends because travel planning at this level is personal, and clients make buying decisions over margaritas with friends on a Saturday night. When I am the brand they're buying, they want access to my brain exactly when I'm supposed to be at the dinner table. Rates change hourly, inventory disappears over a weekend, and something always goes wrong, a flight delay, a human error, somewhere in a hundred moving pieces.

One of the other agency owners, who doesn’t have kids, wondered aloud whether she could dedicate more time to clients than those of us who are moms. Kylee Glaser, my business partner at Alpenglow, and I answered that while we are intentional about our work time and home time, we don’t let our kids’ schedules affect our client service. We are, perhaps, more efficient with our time because we know it is limited. Bedtimes are sacred in our house. I go to sleep early, right after tucking in my kids, knowing I’ll wake up in the middle of the night.

On the positive side, my children see me doing something I love. If I need to, I can block time for a mid-day school meeting or Halloween party in the classroom. I’m not beholden to PTO restrictions. I tell my kids, Mommy doesn’t have to work. She chooses to work.

The second benefit of this career that I like to highlight is that my kids benefit directly from my work. When I held a corporate role, my home life and work life were quite separate. Had I stayed, I’m not sure how much my kids would have connected the work I did to anything in their own lives. As an agency owner, I tell my kids that the reason we get to travel as much as we do is because mommy works hard planning travel for clients. If they want to go back to Paris for their next birthday, mommy has to sell more travel.

Kylee put it this way: it’s important for her to expose her kids to what’s possible in luxury travel, and she hopes it inspires them to work hard and strive for a life where they can reach that same level.

I am raising tiny luxury travelers. My daughter accompanies me on site inspections if I meet with a hotel sales team on a family trip. My kids, the original Bougie Bunnies (check old posts on my substack for this cartoon series I created), have stayed in more five-star hotels than most adults will in their lifetimes. They have opinions on caviar and hotel check-in processes. Traveling with them for work also leads to interesting conversations, like why they see more cigarettes in Paris than at home in Colorado.

At the same time, they know that I gave up time with them after school to bring them to those places. I make sure they connect the two. If I have to bring my phone to the playground, I make sure to explain why to them. I’m not on my phone because I’d rather be scrolling Instagram than spending time with them. I’m answering emails because people are counting on me. I tell them about my clients’ trips, what those families are celebrating, and what I’ve built for them.

I must be doing something right, even if I feel like I’m dropping balls all over the place, because my daughter said recently that she wants to take over my business one day. As a kid who grew up wanting to be the CEO of my family’s hotel company, but never made it to that leadership position before we sold it, my little heart burst with pride realizing I’m building a company my daughter is proud of too.

TLDR:

Thank god for my husband, who is picking up the pieces as I try to hold it all together with duct tape and hope.

🗝️The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• Rosewood Hong Kong topped the World’s 50 Best Hotels list for a second year running. I have lots of big feelings about “Best Of” awards, and am working on article about the awards business in general. The TLDR for the lobby bar is that Capella Bangkok and Four Seasons Bangkok at Chao Phraya River took second and third, and fourteen properties are new to the list this year. Lots of city hotels. Some weird rankings.

• Marriott is turning a Brooklyn Heights landmark into residences. Because branded residences are all the rage, Marriott and developer SomeraRoad plan to convert the former Hotel Bossert into a standalone Ritz-Carlton Residences property, with completion targeted for 2029.

• Dolly Parton’s SongTeller Hotel opens September 29 in Nashville. RIP to the queen of Nashville, and one of my all-time inspirations. I grew up going to Dollywood and am absolutely going to visit this hotel. The property, built around her songwriting catalog through Herschend Family Entertainment, now debuts a month after her death on August 25.

• Every piece of furniture in a new Venetian hotel arrives by boat. Ok so this isn’t really news, but I think it’s a cool take on all the luxury hotels opening in Venice this year and how they came to be renovated. AFAR toured three new luxury openings, Airelles Palladio, the reopened Danieli under Four Seasons, and Orient Express Venezia, tracing how marble tables get lifted through windows by crane on a city with no roads to build on. (Laura Rysman, AFAR)

• PURE Life Experiences wrapped its four-day run in Marrakech. The invitation-only experiential travel show ran September 7 through 10, pairing roughly 1,800 travel designers and specialist operators through custom diaries of up to 45 one-to-one meetings each. I have not yet scored an invitation, because The Upgrade has 1,100 of you wonderful readers and is not yet an industry-wide phenomenon. A girl can hope.

Sources

1. Host Agency Reviews, “2021 Travel Advisor Demographic Report.” https://hostagencyreviews.com/blog/2021-travel-advisor-demographic-report

2. American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), International Women’s Day post, via LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/company/american-society-of-travel-advisors

3. Rachel Louise Ensign and Chelsey Dulaney, “The Rise of the Unstoppable American Tourist,” The Wall Street Journal. [ADD LINK]

4. Penn State School of Hospitality Management, 2025 hospitality leadership report, via Hertelier. https://www.hertelier.com/post/women-hotel-leadership-stalled-2025-penn-state

5. AETHOS Consulting Group, “Women’s Presence Growing in Hotel Boardrooms,” via Hotel Management. https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/aethos-report-shows-women-s-presence-hotel-boardrooms-up-but-not-enough

6. GBTA Foundation and WINiT (Women in Travel), October 2025 study, via Meeting Spotlight. https://www.meetingspotlight.com/research/gbta-study-shows-ongoing-barriers-womens-advancement-business-travel

7. Jacques Ledbetter, “The Women Hospitality Leaders Who Should’ve Been In The Room,” Forbes, September 8, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquesledbetter/2026/09/08/the-women-that-shouldve-been-in-the-room/

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Master Key is a publication by Anne Marie Brown of The Upgrade Weekly for paid subscribers. Master Key is an MBA-level look at the economics and mechanics of the travel and hospitality industry, from your favorite hospitality insider.

🗝️ Master Key - MARKET ANALYSIS - The Five-Year Hospitality IPO Reckoning

What the 2021 listing class got wrong, and what the market pays for a travel company today

In February 2022, Inspirato started trading on the Nasdaq at a valuation of roughly $1.1 billion. I watched my IG feed fill with triumphant posts of my former colleagues ringing the bell in New York. I ran their experiential travel and bespoke custom travel departments after business school, and worked at their sister company, Exclusive Resorts, before my MBA. That’s likely why I followed that ticker more closely than I usually follow a small-cap subscription company.

In December 2025, Exclusive Investments LLC agreed to buy the whole thing at $4.27 a share, about $59 million fully diluted.¹ The deal closed in February 2026.² For a per-share comparison: Inspirato didn't IPO at a clean per-share price since it came public via SPAC merger, but the stock did trade above $10 in the weeks after the February 2022 listing before grinding down to the $4.27 buyout price, which is itself its own steep decline on top of the valuation collapse (dilution from repeated capital raises means the valuation drop and the share price drop aren't the same math, but both tell the same story).

That’s the story of the last five years of hospitality on the public markets, told through one company.

I’m a luxury travel advisor, agency owner, and managing director of a real estate and hospitality investment fund. We invest in several VC and PE funds, including ones focused on hospitality and travel technology. Putting on my investor hat, the 2021 and 2022 class of hospitality IPOs was overvalued, badly. Those companies were priced on a story their operating models couldn’t execute, and the correction arrived.

I hope you enjoy this week’s Master Key about the IPO market for travel and hospitality -

• Anne Marie Brown

Soho House listed in July 2021 as Membership Collective Group, pricing at $14 a share and raising $420 million. Membership grew, but profitability didn’t follow. In August 2025, an investor group led by MCR’s Tyler Morse agreed to buy the outstanding shares at $9.00 in cash, valuing the business at about $2.7 billion including debt.³ Apollo financed the deal, Goldman Sachs Alternatives rolled its position and added equity, and Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa rolled its controlling stake to keep majority control.³ The take-private closed in January 2026.

Read more

23. The Upgrade | Weekly – The Rise of the Celebrity Travel Advisor: The New Class in an Old Industry

Travelers -

I am back from Mexico and enjoying a brief stint at home in Colorado before leaving to run a poetry retreat in Umbria and enjoy a week in the Cotswolds with my mother-in-law.

I spent last week with a handful of other advisors hosted under Coastline at the Rosewood Mandarina in Mexico. (Their rates are amazing this fall, and if you’re interested in booking, please reach out to me for a quote).

The interesting part of this trip was so much more than the hotel - it was that the group of advisors I was with were all top-producing advisors, and all women.

Naturally, we discussed several aspects of our jobs, the push and pull of juggling parenthood and entrepreneurship, as well as our love/hate relationship with social media. Social media has become a necessary part of the advisor world, so I decided to dig into what that means for the people harnessing it well.

In the Lobby Bar - families keep ditching the school calendar, SeaDream builds a new ship, Arnault's hotel empire is trending downward, Champagne gets stronger and scarcer, and airport tech moves faster while airfare doesn't get any cheaper.

(Quick plug - if you are enjoying The Upgrade, please consider booking your travel or hotel stays through me. I write this little publication for fun, but travel advising is my real job, and I’d love to have some Substack readers as clients. AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com)

Yours truly with one of my business partners, Kylee, at the Rosewood Mandarina last week

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

I love nothing more than planning travel for other people, whether friends, family, or clients. I have been in luxury travel for almost two decades, first at Exclusive Resorts, then Inspirato, and I co-founded our small agency with two former colleagues not quite two years ago. We quickly figured out that we are the brand, which meant putting our faces on social media to build trust with an audience that had no reason to know us yet. We are aware of our own industry experience, but proving that to strangers is the hard part.

I pitched the Bespoke Travel concept to the executives at Inspirato in 2015. Fresh out of my MBA program, I walked in with a full case study including market metrics, a staffing model, and one of the better P&L forecasts I have built, arguing that we should run a travel agency inside Inspirato. There were doubters in the room. These were people who had watched the OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) eat the travel planning industry alive. Eventually, I convinced them that travel advisors were not an extinct species.

Travel Market Report recently picked up an NBC News segment under a headline about online booking being “so nineties” and the humble travel agent making a comeback, tying it to survey data showing that the higher the ticket price, the more likely the traveler used an advisor.¹ TMR had covered the same comeback in 2018, quoting Virtuoso’s Matthew Upchurch and Ovation’s Jack Ezon on a wave of young, high-producing advisors entering the business. Ovation’s average agent at the time was 28 years old and writing $3 to $5 million a year.² The travel agent has been declared dead and reborn more times than I can count.

The eleven years since I built that case at Inspirato have proved my hypothesis right, thanks largely to social media. Social media has pushed certain advisors to the front of the trust matrix as we use Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack to widen awareness and earn credibility with people who have never met us.

Since the pandemic, American travelers have been on a tear, especially at the top of the market. In “The Rise of the Unstoppable American Tourist,” Rachel Louise Ensign and Chelsey Dulaney argued that a strong dollar and a supercharged US economy turned Americans into zealous international travelers.³ With a largely American client base, it has been a good stretch to be an advisor. I have written before about how the scores of newly minted millionaires have expanded the luxury travel market since people at that level already work with tax and financial advisors, so a travel advisor is a natural fit.

Internova’s North American traveler survey found more than 60% of respondents plan to use a travel advisor as their primary booking channel in 2026, particularly for international trips and anything with a high price tag.⁴ Virtuoso’s Luxe Report has nearly half of advisors expecting a slight rise in demand next year and 18% expecting a significant jump, with 55% predicting per-trip spend will climb as well.⁵ Virtuoso’s fall numbers push it further: the network is on pace for a 21% year-over-year sales increase, with 45% of advisors reporting rising demand for ultra-luxe stays such as hotels within hotels and private members’ clubs.⁶

Travel has become the flex. You keep up with the Joneses by scoring a summer stay at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc or vacationing at Badrutt’s Palace, not by buying a bigger TV or a Ferrari. The Economist made the same argument this year about where the rich are putting their money now – hotel nights, not handbags.⁷ The question is, how do you book the best trip for your money?

The influencers of the early Instagram years usually had a name like “Whimsy and Wanderlust” or “Cobblestones and Cardamom,” posted photos of themselves in breeze-blown dresses walking into a Santorini sunset, and scattered lots of emojis. They were in it for the free stays hotels handed out in return for “exposure.”

Now, the travel influencer is morphing into the travel advisor. As influencers and hotel reviewers seek to monetize their followings, they are running retreats and dropping affiliate links on their blogs, TikTok accounts, and websites. Or, they are becoming advisors via platforms like Fora.

Instagram has also gotten crowded. People are looking for a departure from the pastel single-shot scenes of the past decade and want to hear from someone who actually knows the properties. Or they want entertainment. Growing a following on Instagram is hard work, so my hat is off to any advisor who has managed it and turned it into qualified leads.

Influencers are becoming advisors, and advisors are becoming influencers.

Air Mail ran a piece recently on the wave of social-media-savvy operators entering the $2 trillion travel industry.⁸ Building trust is one thing, but converting interest into a booking is an entirely different matter. Done well, social media fame can move a young advisor into the top ranks within months, not years.

Here are a few of the rising names in that world.

Olivia Ferney. Her publicist is working overtime this month. Under the handle @travelwithlivii, Ferney has crossed 400,000 TikTok and 1.3M Instagram followers at age 25, mostly by reenacting (or faking) phone calls with supposedly wealthy clients,⁹ and it landed her on TIME‘s 2026 list of top creators.¹⁰ Off the app, she is CMO of Miami’s Top Tier Travel, profiled by The New York Times in August. Is she actually booking travel or just the top of the funnel and a marketing arm for the agents of Top Tier? TBD. As ’s RPS (Rich People Shit) piece on Becca Bloom proved last week, people can’t resist arguing about whether a wealthy person’s lifestyle online is staged. Top Tier Travel charges a $100,000 annual fee plus a $1 million yearly travel minimum, in exchange for same-day private jets or a giant croissant flown in for a client’s birthday.¹¹ Ferney told the Times that billionaires are her easiest clients while multimillionaires give her the most trouble because they spend big, get buyer’s remorse, and ask for refunds.¹¹ Secondary coverage added a Birkin overnighted to Capri and a Brabus sports car gifted for a Gen Z birthday.¹²

Mayra Bazavilvazo posts as @worldstompers under the banner “Luxury Family Adventures” to about 63,000 followers, with a companion site covering Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is a photographer and planner who positions herself as a travel journalist first rather than a content creator, but she is also booking travel.

Camille Larmoyeux Scherr posts as @luxurytravelermedia to 431,000 Instagram followers and runs a TikTok, @luxury_traveler, with another 203,000 and close to 10 million likes, mostly hotel walkthroughs and NYC-adjacent luxury content. She came out of airline consulting and built the following first, then became a travel advisor to monetize. She’s hosted under Fora Travel. She also runs a companion Substack under the same name, past 5,000 subscribers, publishing weekly. Granted, last week she used some of Alex Barnes’ content about Hotel Du Cap Eden Roc, including her photos of the House Rules, without crediting her, which is frowned upon in our world.

Some seasoned advisors are getting famous as they learn to utilize social media to grow their client base. These are some of the advisors who are handling social media well, and seeing their client base grow along with them.

Jennifer Byrne, Tropical Travelers. Byrne has 30 years in the industry, owns The Tropical Travelers, and has built a TikTok following approaching 400,000 on resort walkthroughs and breakdowns of which all-inclusive resort suits which traveler.¹³ On camera, she is blunt about the videos being marketing for the job – which is booking – and she tells followers outright that she is not a free source of custom itinerary advice.

Hao Tang posts on Instagram as @besvisor (a mashup of “Best Advisor” and “Bespoke Advisor”) and has been selling luxury travel since 2015. He has about 150,000 Instagram followers, and works as a Virtuoso advisor under Andavo out of Colorado. Maybe one day I’ll meet him in my home state. His bio pitches “Top 0.03% Global Advisor.” He came out of corporate at Ralph Lauren (a Fortune 500 fashion house), not the travel industry. He targets suite-and-villa, first-class-or-private travelers and says he caps his client count. He converts followers to inquiries by posting property content from his own stays

Eli Wagner, the founder of Wagner Bespoke Travel, is another heavy hitter. She was on the trip with me to Rosewood Mandarina, and was gracious enough to sit down for an interview with me that I’ll post in the coming weeks on Substack. She’s a former entertainment lawyer, having worked for Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. During the pandemic, she pivoted to selling travel, and is now one of the top advisors under Coastline. She was named a Travel + Leisure and ILTM (International Luxury Travel Market) Rising Star in 2023, with Hollywood and influencer clients in her PR bio. Her Instagram sits at 29,000 followers, but is growing steadily. Eli likes to say that she’s not a 20 year old in a bikini on Instagram. Her content is largely about building trust and displaying her in-depth knowledge of the luxury hotel space. She conducts interviews that I’ve come to love with hotel owners, like Valentina Desantis of Passalacqua and Grand Hotel Tremezzo. Eli can also now add tech founder to her resume, as she recently built a booking platform to streamline her business.

Alex Barnes, @alextravel.s on Instagram. She has grown her audience to 133,000 followers in a few short months by posting room tours and her advisor hot takes on Instagram. I was sitting in a tech incubator with Alex hosted by Coastline in March and she didn’t have Instagram for her business. It’s incredible she’s built such a following in a few short months, largely through “talking head” videos showing the inside world of advising at the UHNW level. Another recipient of the Travel + Leisure Rising Star Award, Alex has only been under Coastline for a year, and yet has quickly risen to their top advisor spot. Alex’s mother is an advisor, so she’s no stranger to the industry, but she came from tech previously and knows how to leverage it well. She predominantly books luxury hotels, and is also the moderator of the Chubby Travel forum on Reddit.

Substack has its own version of this at a smaller scale, and I am one of many advisors writing here to share what I know about hotels, travel, and the professional planning industry.

I joined Substack because I had been reading The Stanza and The Heart of Travel for a year. , an advisor based in London who writes The Heart of Travel, makes the case that Substack is the more durable model for anyone building an audience today. You own the newsletter, the subscription, and the consultancy, and the audience becomes the direct market for your expertise.¹⁴

Haldeman started as a travel influencer around 2016, built an early following, and became more influential once she began sharing which hotels clients kept raving about.¹⁴ In a recent article, she cites Deloitte research showing 77% of people follow creators to learn something or because they share an interest, and notes that audiences follow a small set of favorites across platforms no matter who has the biggest number.¹⁴ She concludes that authority now comes from knowledge, experience, and a track record rather than follower count. As she puts it, “the reader has become the editor of her own media ecosystem.”¹⁴ I have an interview with Whitney coming next week! I had the pleasure of having lunch with her in London this summer, and was blown away by her poise and expertise.

an art historian who books trips exclusively to Italy, has built a subscriber base of 5.2k on Substack around a newsletter and podcast that works as an ongoing trip-planning consultation for readers.¹⁵

, who has 4k subscribers, is a longtime beauty and wellness writer turned custom travel designer. She writes a weekly newsletter called Trippin’ mixing city guides, hotel openings, and product picks from a rotating cast of guest tastemakers.¹⁶

writes Luxury Travel, Unzipped, which pairs insider intel with downloadable resources, thus working as both a lead magnet and an editorial product.¹⁷

While there are many other travel advisors joining and posting on Substack, these are the ones who have the orange checkmark badge. And I can’t cover everybody. of Skift recently wrote that he is enjoying seeing “advisors lean into good travel writing and editorial work on Substack.” I’ll flatter myself and hope he’s including The Upgrade in that nod.

Several advisors have built entire client bases on Reddit. Now that Reddit feeds most of the AI search engines, a handful of moderators are ranking high in search based on their Reddit posts.

Answering questions or posting on Reddit is a way for an advisor to show their knowledge, which often builds trust with new clients, many of whom have never worked with an advisor before.

However, Reddit can also be a double-edged sword. While an advisor is equally likely to be able to demonstrate trust on Reddit, vetting leads that come from the platform can be time consuming and fraught with false starts. There are an equal number of people with real luxury travel experience and the budget to work with a professional advisor, and keyboard warriors, dreamers with a sparkling water budget and champagne taste, or trolls. The onus falls on the advisors who moderate those forums to keep discussion civil and productive, but can also lead to cries of censorship because no one wants to think their opinions won’t make it into a particular forum.

People are quick to pile on in those forums, and you have no idea if you are being dressed down by an actual luxury traveler or some person in their mother’s basement who has never left the country.

What matters is how you want to travel. Working with a professional advisor should help you arrive to the right recommendation for your own travel style, not the way someone else travels.

As a fascinating WSJ podcast noted last week, the Reddit community is largely allergic to being sold to. While Instagram content floods our feeds with sponsorships and recommendations for products from the mouths of influencers backed by brands, Reddit users want real personal opinions and will sniff out anything that feels too sales-y.

Sarah Lee moderates r/FATtravel and works as an independent affiliate of Departure Lounge. She spent nearly seven years in finance in Hong Kong before switching to travel, and she has built a large book of business. Her stated minimum is $250,000 per trip or a referral from an existing client. Her team also moderates FATsafari and FATcruise. “FAT” comes from the r/fatFIRE world, where fat means big budget. That crowd is mostly tech and finance people with liquidity who research obsessively and trust peer reports over marketing.

Tom Calahan, co-founder of Dorsia Travel, started r/FatTrips in response to r/FATtravel. His argument was that few dependable sources exist online for ultra-luxury travel, and the ones that do are either over-moderated or run by publications with a financial reason to stay polite. He built his name first through a blog called “The Good, The Bad and The Luxurious,” positioned as honest and free of PR fluff. That blog made him a name in hospitality circles before the agency existed. His co-founder Lucie came out of client relations at top London hotels. Their minimums start around $2,500 per person per day, five times our own agency’s $500 floor.

Karen Shelton moderates r/LuxuryTravel and founded My Path Unwinding Travel in Waxhaw, North Carolina, in 2015 after a career in clinical psychology. She runs a second brand, Luxury Travel PhD, and serves as an ASTA chapter president. Her business skews toward escorted tours and premium cruise, with Tauck, Abercrombie & Kent, Adventures by Disney, and AmaWaterways among the partners she leads with. r/LuxuryTravel has 68,000 members and “is an advisor worth it, and who should I use” is a recurring thread there.

Alongside the working advisors on social media, we have the rise of the Aman-splainer, or green screen expert. On TikTok and Instagram, a green screen video puts the creator in the corner of the frame with a photo or clip filling the background while they narrate. In travel, it usually means someone narrating a hotel room tour they did not take or reacting to somebody else’s viral post.

As for the YouTube reviewers who visit properties and earn on views (if you want a passionate defense of Ryan Walker from an Upgrade reader, check the comments on my piece “Who Do You Trust in Travel,”) remember that their incentive is not to find the best hotel for your budget and your family but rather to shock you, hold your attention, and get you to share their video.

Hotels are catching on that they may not want to be film sets. Forbes reported this month that some small ultra-luxury properties are fielding complaints from ultra-wealthy guests who would rather not find themselves serving as background extras in a content shoot.¹⁸

An advisor works like a broker, taking what you want and sourcing the right hotel, tour operator, or destination management company (DMC) to build it. DMCs are the region-specific companies who hire your guides and drivers, and finding ones we trust as advisors takes years. That is why it's fair to ask any advisor how many trips they’ve planned with a particular DMC partner.

Most of the time, we work with DMCs as a layer of protection and expertise as we can’t be experts in every single city, as much as we’d like to be. A DMC also gives a client an in-country contact during their trip on that time zone. Booking through OTAs (such as GetYourGuide or Viator) comes with lower costs, but higher risk in quality as DMCs vet vendors, but OTAs don’t – they operate as marketplace platforms.

Many new advisors don’t know their way around working with DMCs or have as many sales director relationships, but may have more capacity to be high touch for a smaller book of clients. A boutique agency built on years of property visits and DMC (Destination Management Company) relationships may not look any different online from an influencer with a beautiful Instagram feed, or a hotel reviewer with a green screen behind them.

Some of the new names have the credentials to back the following they have built. Others are a marketing engine serving at the top of the funnel, but may feed into a team of actual advisors. Do your homework.

1) How much time per week are they dedicating to creating online content vs working with clients? If that person’s focus is more on creating content, they may have less time to dedicate to working with clients.

2) Are they hosted by a hosted agency, and if so, which? Some of the major names are Coastline, SmartFlyer, Departure Lounge. See my previous articles for my thoughts on Fora.

3) What kind of sales volume are they handling as a company or individual? The advisor may not share this, but it’s a good barometer. If it’s above $1M, they have been doing this for a few years and are doing well. If it’s massively above that, you may just be another drop in the bucket for them.

4) How do they travel personally? How many countries have they been to? Do they stay in the same level of hotels you do?

5) Who will be your point of contact? Will you be working with other people on their team? What happens when they are out of the office or it’s after office hours (another reason to book with a DMC as an advisor is that clients have an in-country emergency contact while they are traveling).

6) How many years have they been an advisor (not an influencer, a professional advisor)?

7) Ask whether they know the sales director at the hotel you are traveling to.

8) Were they an advisors first or a content creator first? What was their pathway to becoming a professional travel advisor?

Expertise is built through personal travel, FAM trips, site visits, conferences, booking clients, and sitting down with sales directors. Social media is a good lead generator and an excellent way to lose a Tuesday.

Whichever way you source your travel knowledge, whether it is Claude or ChatGPT, friends, Instagram, Reddit, and advisor, or TikTok, remember that it doesn’t behoove you to take the trip someone else enjoyed. You should take the trip you will enjoy. And, as to who helps you book it? Do your due diligence before you give someone your business.

🗝️The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• “Unreasonable Hospitality” made everyone’s job harder, one restaurant worker says. Adam Reiner, who has worked dining rooms for over 20 years including Babbo, Carbone, and The Grill, argues the bestselling hospitality book set a bar no restaurant or worker can hold, and makes the case for the ordinary acts of service that actually keep a dining room running. (Adam Reiner, Bon Appétit)

• Most parents have already pulled their kids out of school for a trip. A new Omio survey found 67% of US parents have done it and 92% would if it saved money, and TravelAge West’s take for advisors is that a marketing calendar built around June and December is missing half the business. (Kelly Rosenfeld, TravelAge West)

• SeaDream is building its first new yacht in 25 years. SeaDream III debuts in July 2029 at 495 feet with room for about 200 guests, keeping the line’s roughly one-to-one crew ratio while opening up destinations the smaller fleet couldn’t reach, starting with a maiden season from Hong Kong to Tokyo. (Curated Travel Magazine)

• Champagne just got its alcohol cap raised for the first time ever. France’s record heat pushed sugar levels so high that regulators took the region’s limit from 13% to 15%, and cut this year’s harvest almost in half, one of the smallest in 30 years. (France 24 and Bloomberg, via AFP)

• The man who owns Belmond, Cheval Blanc, and Bulgari Hotels fell out of the top 10 richest people on Earth. Bernard Arnault’s net worth is down to $143 billion after losing $65 billion this year, the steepest drop on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and it’s the first time since the index launched that all ten spots are American. (Bloomberg)

• No more kiosks for Global Entry, maybe. CBP is trialing camera tech that verifies members while they’re still walking toward the checkpoint, no stop and sometimes no officer interaction at all, now live at six hubs including SFO, JFK, and Boston. (The Points Guy)

• The TSA liquid rule everyone keeps declaring dead is still standing. 3-1-1 hasn’t changed in 2026; what’s changed is the screening tech, with new CT scanners letting some lanes leave liquids packed, which is where the “rules are changing” rumor comes from. (TSA)

• Book your flights now, because they aren’t getting cheaper. Thanksgiving fares are already running 13% above last year and international routes are up 19%, and with airlines leaning harder on dynamic pricing, the old advice to wait for a dip matters less than it used to. (InsideFlyer)

  If you are enjoying The Upgrade and would like additional articles under Master Key, Hotel History, and Travel Dispatch, become a paid subscriber

Sources

1. Travel Market Report, “The Humble Travel Agent Is Making A Comeback, Says NBC News.” https://www.travelmarketreport.com/articles/The-Humble-Travel-Agent-Is-Making-A-Comeback-Says-NBC-News

2. Travel Market Report, “Travel Agent Comeback Continues to Confound the Public,” 2018. https://www.travelmarketreport.com/articles/Travel-Agent-Comeback-Continues-to-Confound-the-Public

3. Rachel Louise Ensign and Chelsey Dulaney, “The Rise of the Unstoppable American Tourist,” The Wall Street Journal. [ADD LINK]

4. Luxury Travel Advisor, “Rising Travel Costs Reshape How Americans Travel,” 2026, citing the Internova Index: North American Traveler Insights. https://www.luxurytraveladvisor.com/your-business/rising-travel-costs-reshape-how-americans-travel-2026

5. 2026 Virtuoso Luxe Report (PDF). https://static.virtuoso.com/division-marketing/PR/2025%20Press%20Releases/2026%20Luxe%20Report_Global_FINAL.pdf

6. Travel Age West, “Luxury Travel Trends: Fall Surge and Future Insights,” 2026, citing Virtuoso fall data. https://www.travelagewest.com/Industry-Insight/Business-Features/luxury-travel-trends-fall-surge-future-insights

7. FTN News recap of The Economist, “Why the World’s Rich Now Spend on Luxury Travel, Not Luxury Goods.” https://ftnnews.com/travel-news/luxury-travel/why-the-worlds-rich-now-spend-on-luxury-travel-not-luxury-goods/ and

8. Air Mail, “Luxury Travel Advisors Are Having a Comeback, This Time Geared Toward Social Media.” https://airmail.news/issues/2026-5-2/first-class-influencers

9. nss G-Club, “Olivia Ferney: the luxury travel agent turning billionaire demands into TikTok fame,” 2026. https://www.nssgclub.com/en/lifestyle/42441/olivia-ferney-luxury-travel-agent-tiktok-fame

10. TIME, 2026 TIME100 Creators profile of Olivia Ferney. https://time.com/collection/time100-creators/2026/olivia-ferney/

11. The New York Times (Style), “She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients,” Aug. 9, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/style/olivia-ferney-top-tier-travel.html Paywalled; details also confirmed via Entrepreneur, “Travel Concierge Booking Insane Trips for the Ultrarich.” https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/travel-concierge-booking-insane-trips-for-the-ultrarich

12. Daniel Scheffler, “They’re Rich, They Travel and They Love to Complain,” Without Maps. https://withoutmaps.substack.com/p/traveling-beyond-the-algorithm

13. TikTok, @thetropicaltravelers profile (Jennifer Byrne); follower count via Urlebird. https://www.tiktok.com/@thetropicaltravelers and https://urlebird.com/user/thetropicaltravelers/

14. Whitney Haldeman, The Heart of Travel.

15. Danielle Oteri’s Italy. https://www.danielleoteri.com/

16. Zoe Schaeffer’s newsletter. https://zoeschaeffer.substack.com

17. Ane Lowe, “Luxury Travel, Unzipped.”

18. Forbes, coverage of ultra-luxury hotels and content creators, August 2026.

Master Key is a publication by Anne Marie Brown of The Upgrade Weekly for paid subscribers. Master Key is an MBA-level look at the economics and mechanics of the travel and hospitality industry, from your favorite hospitality insider.

Travelers,

Festive, the week of Christmas and the week after, is the worst time to travel in the calendar year. It is also when hotels make an outsized portion of their revenue.

Most luxury travelers leave home that week because the kids are out of school, nothing much happens in the office, and the Christmas rush is over. If a school calendar does not dictate your dates, book any other week and stay home for this one. The numbers below explain why.

Demand keeps growing at an outsized pace

Legacy travel media keeps pointing to the rise of the “Fallcation” and other off-season trends, but demand for festive has kept growing at an outsized pace anyway. Here is the three-year picture from Virtuoso’s annual fall and festive reports:

Rates below are for Four Seasons Peninsula Papagayo, for the week before Christmas week (12/12-12/19), and the week after, which includes New Years. There’s a 33% increase in rates to travel during Festive.

Read more

22. The Upgrade | Weekly – Airlines Court the Jet Set, Downgrade Miles-Based Business Class Travelers

Travelers -

Hello from a beach at Rosewood Mandarina! This week, I’m checking in from a Coastline trip that happens to fall over my son’s 6th birthday. Cue the endless mom guilt. Happy birthday, Jack.

So far, we’ve conducted a site tour of all the room categories, had a delicious dinner, and massages. My business partner, Kylee Glaser and I are bunking together and hammering out a ton of work, because a travel advisor never truly vacations.

I also had the distinct pleasure of sitting next to Eli Wagner of Wagner Bespoke Travel, who is kind of a celebrity in our world. You can learn more about her in next week’s The Upgrade.

I flew here on a Southwest flight because oddly, there were no United direct flights to PVR this week. This week, I’m ruminating on the state of the US airlines, and bemoaning the recent rise of involuntary downgrades. Read my interview with Katherine of the @TheLuxuryWifeStyle regarding her recent downgrade experience, and what she and I both learned from being relegated to the back of the plane as points bookers.

Scroll to the end for The Lobby Bar: Virtuoso's numbers on fall overtaking summer, the Six Senses CEO taking over The Connaught, TSA letting non-flyers back to the gate, United's three-flight standby, Southwest's first lounges (not in Denver), kids at Michelin two-stars in San Francisco, and people flying across the world to run marathons.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

I am a giant travel and hospitality nerd, which means I get excited when hotels announce earnings and airlines announce new routes.

Over the past year, I’ve been learning from the points gurus who make booking Emirates first class look easy. My Instagram feed is full of points tutorials, and I did score a first class Emirates flight home from Kenya in January. I was happier than I’ve ever been on an airplane.

But something unpleasant keeps coming up in the airline forums I belong to: involuntary downgrades.

This week’s Upgrade covers the new routes from American, United, Delta, and Alaska, what they are telling us about how people are traveling, why involuntary downgrades are happening more often, and what to do if it happens to you.

American’s New Routes

American announced six new routes for summer 2027 last week:

American is also returning seatback screens to its narrow body fleet, adding 40% more premium seats across the network, and opening Flagship Dining to more business class passengers.¹ American, who posted $71 million in Q2 profit against Delta’s $1.6 billion and United’s $805 million,¹ is playing catch-up with Delta and United in Europe.

United

Denver is a United hub, and I’m a Million Miler. This will be the first year in decades I don’t make 1K status, because they moved the goal posts again. That doesn’t make me any less excited about the new routes. United announced ten new international destinations, the largest expansion in its history. Seven of the ten have never had nonstop US service.²

Most of this airlift is on the Airbus A321XLR, a narrowbody with the range to cross the Atlantic and a cabin built around 20 Polaris suites.³ A widebody needs roughly 250 seats a day filled to make a route work; a narrowbody needs a fraction of that. It’s the only reason an airline can justify flying to Ljubljana at all. (Side note: I have zero idea how to pronounce that.)

Delta and Alaska

Delta will fly Austin to Paris starting March 27, the first US airline to run long-haul service out of that airport, and it’s adding a second daily Newark to LAX flight.⁴

Alaska will fly Seattle nonstop to Paris and Athens starting May 2027 on 787s with lie-flat business class suites, making it the first oneworld carrier flying nonstop between the West Coast and Paris.⁵

Why these routes, and why now

I’ve said this before. The airlines are chasing the top half of the K-shaped economy, and these route maps prove it.

In Q2 2026, revenue from Delta’s premium cabins passed main cabin revenue for the first time in company history, $6.92 billion against $6.85 billion.⁶ United is retrofitting its 787 fleet to match.⁷

After a year of disruption from the Middle East conflict, luxury travelers want straight shots that cut the odds of a missed connection or lost bags. Newark to Ibiza or Valencia skips Madrid, Denver gets a nonstop to Paris (wahoo!!), Philadelphia gets Vienna, and Seattle families can reach Paris and Athens without touching the East Coast.¹ ² ⁵ ⁸

Last October, I was settled into my business class seat on a United flight to Dublin. I’d taken my sleeping medicine for the red-eye, stowed my carry-on, and was ready to go. Then a United employee woke me up to say I was being downgraded to a middle economy seat because they needed mine. I had bought that seat eight months earlier with miles and money, because I was teaching the morning I landed and needed the sleep a lie-flat seat gives you.

I pushed back and asked why me. I suspected a deadheading pilot was getting my seat. They wouldn’t confirm it, but I saw him hovering near the front of the aircraft, waiting for me to leave. A later flight meant missing my lecture. Nobody had been offered a voucher to give up a seat voluntarily; they went straight to me, apparently because I was the only one who had booked with miles.

United initially denied my compensation request by email. I took to the United subreddit to vent and was told to file a Department of Transportation complaint, which airlines have to answer within a set window. I then got back the miles I’d used for the upgrade plus $500 “as a goodwill gesture.” At least it was something.

Last week, the same thing happened to of The Luxury Wife Style, an influencer I follow who travels with kids about the same ages as mine. Her whole family except her 3-year-old was downgraded from Miami to Milan on American. They had also booked with points.

So I went digging to find out why this was happening more. First, Katherine’s side of it.

1. Anne Marie: How long have you been utilizing points for business class flights? How did you learn the system of points upgrades?

Katherine: I’ve been using points for 12+ years. One of my best friends was actually a pilot for American Airlines when I was in college, so she would let me use her buddy passes and I could sometimes fly First Class Miami to Europe for around $200. Once you get used to flying that way, there’s really no going back 😂 so I had to figure out how to do it without paying the crazy cash prices.

I basically taught myself. I’m super analytical and will research like crazy, so I just spent a ton of time learning how the different programs worked, how points transferred and where the best redemptions were.

There are so many more resources now teaching people how to use points, which is amazing, but I still think if you’ve never actually booked an airline ticket with points before, the whole system can feel incredibly confusing.

2. How frequently do you fly business class with your family, and how frequently do you use points for those tickets?

Katherine: My family of four (and our nanny when she travels with us) has only flown Business Class internationally (until last month 😆). We usually take anywhere from three to five international trips a year and we’ve only paid cash for Business Class tickets twice.

Finding four, or sometimes five, Business Class award seats together at what I consider a good points value can be extremely challenging, but at this point it’s almost like a game to me. I actually enjoy figuring out how to make it work.

Another huge reason I love booking with points is the flexibility. My husband’s job can be unpredictable and we’ve had trips where a client is coming into town or a deal is closing and suddenly we have to change plans a few days before we leave. I’m also the person who always buys travel insurance for that reason.

With many award tickets, the cancellation or change terms can be much more forgiving than buying an expensive cash Business Class fare, sometimes free or with a relatively small cancellation fee. That flexibility is incredibly valuable to me.

3. What most shocked you in your recent downgrade experience?

Katherine: Honestly, being downgraded at all was shocking because it had never happened to us and had never really crossed my mind as something that could happen.

We had checked in normally, gone to the Flagship Lounge in Miami and everything looked completely fine. It wasn’t until we were literally scanning our boarding passes and showing our passports to board the plane that we found out three of the four of us had been moved from Business Class to Premium Economy.

One of the strangest parts was that my three-year-old was the only one who had kept her Business Class seat. I was surprised there wasn’t some type of safeguard in the system recognizing that a three-year-old obviously couldn’t sit in a separate cabin from her parents.

A lot of people have commented, “Well obviously you or your husband could just switch seats with her,” which is true in our situation. But what if I had been traveling alone with my three-year-old and the system had kept her in Business Class while moving me to another cabin? It made me realize how odd the whole process was.

The compensation was another shock. We were offered a $600 travel voucher toward future American Airlines travel, while the cash price difference between Business Class and Premium Economy on our itinerary was around $8,500.

But probably the most frustrating part has been what happened afterward. I’ve submitted multiple complaints and still don’t feel like I’ve received a meaningful explanation of exactly why we were selected or a resolution that reflects what happened.

4. What did you learn from the experience?

Katherine: I learned a lot!

One of the biggest things was understanding how much passenger protections can vary depending on which airline you’re flying and where the flight originates.

For example, when you’re flying from the US to Europe, EU261 protections generally apply if you’re flying on an European carrier. On the return, when your flight departs from the EU, those protections apply regardless of whether the airline is American or European.

That was something I understood vaguely before, but I definitely understand it much better now.

I also learned that even after more than a decade of successfully booking award travel, there are still operational things completely outside of your control. I used to book a Business Class award seat and essentially consider the job done. Now I realize the cabin you booked isn’t necessarily guaranteed until you’re actually sitting in that seat and the airline door has closed.

It hasn’t changed my mind about using points because the value we’ve gotten from them over the years has been incredible, but it has made me much more aware of downgrade policies and passenger protections when deciding which airline to book.

5. Tell me more about how your family travels. How many international trips do you take a year? Do you use a travel advisor?

Lately we’ve been trying to take one to two international ski trips and one to two international summer trips each year, although sometimes it ends up being more depending on the year.

Until recently, I would say our European summer trips looked pretty similar to what a lot of Americans picture when they think of a Euro summer: Lake Como, where we’ve probably been a dozen times and actually got married in 2017, Southern Italy, the South of France, Paris, Tuscany, Provence, etc.

This past summer we spent time in both the Austrian and French Alps and they ended up being two of our favorite family trips we’ve ever taken. It completely changed the way I’m thinking about our future travel.

Now I’m almost more interested in finding the destinations people aren’t automatically thinking of, especially when traveling with kids. Sometimes the places that aren’t at the top of everyone’s summer list end up having incredible hotels, amazing family activities and much better value.

And yes, I always book our hotels through a travel advisor unless the hotel or destination is hosting us. There are just too many perks not to. Depending on the hotel that can mean breakfast, resort credits, upgrades, early check-in, late checkout and other benefits.

Recently I’ve started looking at what our hotel breakfasts actually would have cost if we hadn’t had them included through our advisor and some of them are around $300 for our family. I definitely do not want to be paying for the $300 breakfast 😂

I also think a good travel advisor becomes even more valuable when you’re traveling with kids because there are so many little details that matter, from room configurations and connecting rooms to transfers and knowing which properties actually work well for families.

The renewed Middle East conflict pushed jet fuel prices up sharply starting in late February, and in response, the airlines pulled capacity to protect margins. United cut about 5% of its scheduled flights this spring, concentrated on red-eyes. CEO Scott Kirby said that if fuel costs held through year end, they would add $11 billion a year to United’s bill, more than the airline made in its best year on record.⁹ Airlines worldwide pulled roughly 13,000 flights and 2 million seats from their May schedules alone.¹⁰

Fewer flights means fewer open seats to reposition crews, or “deadheading.” Every major pilot union has bargained language requiring the airline to seat a deadheading pilot in the highest cabin on long-haul segments.¹¹ I don’t fault pilots for negotiating this, because let’s face it, no one wants a tired pilot in the cockpit. American’s version came out of a $9.6 billion agreement with the Allied Pilots Association, ratified this year to bring American in line with United and Delta.¹²

When a long-haul premium cabin is full and a pilot needs the seat, the airline bumps a business class passenger.

Two years ago, my husband and I were flying home from Portugal when a gate agent offered us $2,500 each to downgrade to economy. Being a wuss, I declined. My husband took the deal, and I spent the flight next to a pilot.

That is how deadheading bumps used to work: throw money at the business class cabin and keep raising it until someone bites. That system has seemingly been replaced by an algorithmic ranking that puts points bookers on the chopping block first. Katherine’s family got a $600 voucher.¹³

American has said outright that it won’t disclose its downgrade priority rules, even in response to DOT complaints.¹⁴ A separate DOT complaint filed this year argues that American publishes specific procedures for oversales, but nothing about who gets bumped in a downgrade.¹⁵

How does is this ranking determined? As I often say in The Upgrade, follow the money.

Delta, United, and American all pay frontline employees a monthly bonus when the airline hits on-time departure targets. Station managers are judged on D0 (departure exactly on time, zero minutes late), so they push gate agents to close the door at T-10 no matter what. That rewards bumping someone over delaying a flight to run an auction for volunteers.

Document everything. When you book, screenshot the miles you paid, anything spent to upgrade, and the cash price of both economy and business class that day. If you’re downgraded, screenshot the current cash and miles prices for both cabins again, if you still can.

1. Get the gate agent’s name and the time. American won’t release its downgrade records voluntarily, so this may be your only record of who made the call.¹⁴

2. Don’t sign anything at the gate. Some airlines present a voucher as a signed settlement, and signing can waive your right to a cash refund later.¹⁷

3. Keep your original receipt and the boarding pass for the downgraded seat. On an award ticket, ask specifically for the mileage differential refund and the math behind it. Airlines owe it, even though a voucher is what they’ll offer first.

4. Ask whether premium is oversold or a crew reassignment caused the move. Write down who told you and when.

5. If the compensation doesn’t come close to the fare difference, file a DOT complaint at airconsumer.dot.gov/escomplaint/ConsumerForm.jsp.

Europe is more protective than the US, by a lot. On a flight covered by EU261 or UK261, meaning it departs the EU or UK, or arrives there on an EU or UK carrier, downgrade compensation is set by distance rather than by what you paid: 30% of the ticket price for flights up to 1,500km, 50% for flights within Europe over 1,500km and other flights up to 3,500km, and 75% for anything longer.¹⁸ ¹⁹ Airlines must pay within seven days, and the right only applies if you didn’t consent to the move.¹⁹ Again, don’t sign anything as that counts as consent. This is separate from the standard EU261 delay or cancellation payment, and a pure downgrade with no delay doesn’t trigger both.²⁰

US law works differently. DOT guidance says an involuntary downgrade is a “significant change,” and if you continue traveling, the airline must refund the difference between your original fare and the downgraded fare.²¹ If you decline to travel, you’re owed a full refund instead.²¹ However, the rule doesn’t define which downgraded fare counts, and the airlines have taken advantage of that language.

Paying in miles doesn’t change the underlying right. You’re still owed the fare difference, refunded in whatever currency you paid.²² ²³ On US carriers, that usually means miles, so use your documentation and show the airline how many miles the original award cost and how many the downgraded cabin would have cost.

United’s contract of carriage has no downgrade formula. It refunds a difference it calculates internally, usually against a same-day walk-up economy fare rather than a cheap advance-purchase fare, so the refund is often much smaller than you expect. Then, as with my Dublin flight, it adds a “goodwill gesture” in miles, a travel certificate, or cash. Goodwill means United admits zero fault but wants to throw you a bone.

American refunds a flat 40% of the ticketed fare on the downgraded segment. Two researchers filed a DOT complaint this month arguing that number badly understates what passengers lose. On one route they priced, the lowest business fare was $10,644 against a $949 coach fare, a gap nowhere near 40%.¹⁶ American has also started converting complimentary elite upgrades on select routes from business class to premium economy, which is a devaluation.²⁴

The good news is that airlines are adding more direct routes to secondary European cities and vacation hot spots for the luxury jet set, which means less risk of missing your connection.

The downside for those who book with miles is that these are all on narrow body aircraft, which have fewer premium seats and so less margin for error if a pilot needs to deadhead in a business class seat. Be careful about where you use your miles for a business class upgrade on these new routes.

As airlines pull flights in response to fuel costs driven by the Middle East conflict, there are fewer seats to absorb overflow, fewer flights to reposition captains, and a downgrade hierarchy that punishes travelers who booked with points. Your premium seat costs more than ever, and it still isn’t guaranteed.

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

• Fall is the new summer, welcome to the “Fallcation.” Virtuoso’s fall bookings are up 59% over last year and sales are up 69%, with September, October, and November each running 54% to 77% ahead, as travelers trade July crowds and heat waves in Italy and France for shoulder season. If you have been thinking about Europe in October, so has everyone else, so book it now. These people must not have elementary school children. (Morning Brew)

• The man who built Six Senses now runs The Connaught. Constellation Hotels named Neil Jacobs CEO of a new management company for its portfolio, which includes The Connaught, The Emory, and The Berkeley in London, Hackwood Park in Hampshire, a Paris hotel on the way in Saint-Germain, and a project in Marrakech. Jacobs took Six Senses from 8 properties to 27 with 30 more in the pipeline, so expect a wellness push in some very old buildings. (PR Newswire)

• You can walk your friends to the gate again. Gateside by TSA PreCheck lets non-ticketed PreCheck members apply one to three days ahead for a free, one-day pass through security at 13 airports, including LAX, DFW, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Salt Lake City. Denver is not on the list yet, but Pittsburgh has offered a version of this since 2017 and about 20 airports have followed, so it is coming. (The Aviation Circle)

• United will let you stand by for three flights at once. When a delay gets you rebooked onto a later flight, the United app now lets you join the standby list for up to three earlier departures, watches all three, and texts you when a seat opens while your later flight stays confirmed. Before this you picked one flight and refreshed the app yourself, which every one of us has done from a bar at Gate B41. (The Aviation Circle)

• Southwest is building lounges. The airline that spent 50 years without assigned seats will open its first four lounges in late 2027 in Austin, Baltimore, Honolulu, and Nashville, with at least seven more planned and access tied to a new premium Chase card launching next year. Denver did not make the first round, whatever you may have read elsewhere. (AFAR, Southwest Airlines)

• Six-year-olds are eating at Michelin two-stars in San Francisco. The San Francisco Standard talked to chefs and GMs around the city and found kids becoming regulars at the most expensive tables, including at Sons & Daughters, where chef-owner Harrison Cheney brings his own daughter. We see the same thing on our trips: families who want the tasting menu with the kids at the table instead of a sitter in the hotel room. My Bougie Bunnies love caviar. (The San Francisco Standard)

• People are flying 26 hours to run 26 miles. Vogue calls it “sweat-jetting,” Tripadvisor ranked it the top travel trend of 2026, and Accor reports a 50% jump in interest in workout vacations. The examples run from Langham’s Pink Run in 10 cities to a 37-mile ultramarathon through the Icelandic highlands out of Highland Base Kerlingarfjöll, which sounds like the least relaxing hotel stay on record. (Vogue)

  Upgrade Your Membership to The Upgrade to receive Master Key, Hotel History, and Travel Dispatch so my kids can eat more caviar.

Sources

1 Meghna Maharishi, “American Joins the Race to Add New European Routes and Premium Upgrades,” Skift, August 27, 2026.

2 Live and Let’s Fly, “United Airlines Announces Its Biggest International Expansion Ever,” August 2026.

3 “United’s largest-ever expansion: 10 new cities for 2027,” From the Tray Table, August 2026.

4 Delta News Hub, “Ooh la la, Austin: Delta launches first-ever service to Paris,” 2026.

5 Live and Let’s Fly, “Alaska Airlines Adds 787-9 Flights To Athens And Paris,” August 2026.

6 CNBC, Delta Air Lines Q2 2026 earnings coverage, July 2026.

7 CNN, airline seat reconfiguration explainer, 2026.

8 Travel And Tour World, “US and Europe Set for Major 2027 Flight Expansion as United, American, Delta and Alaska Add New Routes,” August 2026.

9 Business Insider, coverage of United’s spring 2026 flight cuts and CEO Scott Kirby’s statement on fuel costs, March 2026.

10 Air Cargo Week, “How Fuel Prices Are Affecting Aviation in 2026,” citing Cirium data on May 2026 global schedule cuts.

11 Aviation A2Z, coverage of pilot union contract terms for deadheading crew premium cabin seating, June 2026.

12 Simple Flying, coverage of American’s labor agreement with the Allied Pilots Association, June 2026.

13 InsideFlyer, “Family downgraded from business class for pilots,” August 2026.

14 Aviation A2Z, “American Airlines Passenger Downgraded After Business Class Seats Given to Pilots,” August 23, 2026.

15 TheStreet, “American Airlines policy change could cost flyers big,” June 2, 2026.

16 Aviation A2Z, “Pay $10,644, Get Coach: American Airlines’ Downgrade Refund Sparks DOT Complaint,” August 28, 2026.

17 Altitudes Magazine, “Airlines Owe You More Than a Voucher: How to Claim Cash Compensation After a Flight Cancellation,” April 6, 2026.

18 SkyRefund, “Your Air Passenger Rights Under Regulation EU261,” 2026.

19 AirTeo, “What Is Flight Downgrade Compensation in Europe?” February 2026.

20 ClaimEU261, “Downgrade Compensation,” 2026.

21 US Department of Transportation, Aviation Consumer Protection, “Refunds,” transportation.gov.

22 One Mile at a Time, “Downgraded On A Flight: What Are Your Rights?”

23 AirAdvisor, “Involuntary Downgrade Compensation: Understanding Your Rights.”

24 Live and Let’s Fly, coverage of American’s Premium Economy upgrade policy change on select domestic routes, effective August 25, 2026.

21. The Upgrade | Weekly – A Fora Follow Up

Travelers,

This morning finally felt like autumn in Denver, with a crisp quality to the air and last night’s rain lingering on our patio furniture. This is my favorite time of year, when the Aspens in the mountains are about to turn all shades of gold for a brief two weeks. With summer behind us, my bookings slow to a more normal pace, as clients start thinking about spring break and next year’s summer plans rather than two months from now. Kids are back in school, I’m home for a few weeks (until I head to Umbria to run a poetry retreat and Aspen to cohost a mahjong retreat).

I want to take a quick moment to celebrate 1,000 of you subscribing to The Upgrade.

I started this little newsletter 21 weeks ago as a way to honor my dad, who wrote a weekly newsletter about the hospitality industry for 40 years. He passed away four years ago, and while I haven’t been able to locate the full archives of his articles, I’ve found a few and have been sharing them occasionally under Hotel History for paid subscribers. I never imagined that my Substack would grow to this point, and I’m constantly amazed by the fact that you all want to read my hospitality hot takes every week. This is to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading my work.

This week’s newsletter is a follow up to my July 21 article about Fora. It was my most widely read and commented on piece, which took me by surprise. One of the Fora executives reached out to me and agreed to spend some time with me at Virtuoso Travel Week to address my concerns I voiced as a legacy travel advisor in the industry.

In the Lobby Bar, we have rumors that Rosewood may be selling its London flagship, Paris trimmed its Palace list (see who got cut!), Hilton is bringing LXR to Costa Rica, Four Seasons named a new Serengeti GM, Italy's luxury pipeline is stacking up for 2027, Bulgari's second UAE property has a shape, and hotel tech darling Mews just picked up a banking license, does that mean an IPO is around the corner?

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Yours truly, with my daughter, loving autumn

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Fora Responds to my Article

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for The Upgrade | Weekly about my take on Fora following their unicorn status and $1B valuation.¹

My article got some traction and was shared by several people in the industry. It eventually made its way to Paul Tumpowsky, CRO of Fora. Paul reached out to me and offered to provide his perspective on the company, responding to some of the concerns I raised in the article. We sat down at Sadelle’s during Virtuoso Travel Week, (which sparked a flurry of text messages the next morning asking if Alex Barnes, who joined me for the discussion, and I were moving from Coastline to Fora. Answer – we don’t have any plans to move our host affiliation, settle down ya’ll).

A quick recap –

Firstly, who am I and why am I weighing in on this topic? As a member of the professional luxury travel community for 18 years, growing up in a family that owned hotels for 3 generations, sitting on the advisory board of a venture capital firm, and having created a travel tech platform called Itinerate (a two-sided marketplace connecting DMCs and advisors that we launched in 2020 and pulled the platform shortly after due to the pandemic’s impact on travel), I live and breathe the travel and hospitality industry.

The result has been a handful of different platforms that solve one or two aspects of our job well, and fail at others. Fora seems to be the one technology platform that solves multiple problems smoothly. Leading to the question, are they a tech company or a host agency?

My pitch deck for Itinerate in 2018 included a lot of the bets that Fora has proven right – that travel advisors would make a comeback as people sought flexible careers and influencers looked to monetize their follower bases. Needless to say, Fora has captured my interest since launch, both due to their technology and astronomical growth. However, like all new entrants and disrupters in an established industry, Fora has caused some waves.

I’ve sat through enough travel industry leadership meetings over the years where senior executives bemoan that the travel advisor role was previously on the path to extinction. They worried that young people were not attracted to the job, and senior advisors were retiring with no one to take over their books of business.

Flash forward to 2026, where being a travel advisor is number 18 on LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise for 2026,² largely because of Fora. The company has removed a lot of the traditional barriers to entry for new advisors, and made it possible for just about anyone to access an IATA number in order to receive commission from hotels, (with some vetting, of course).³ This has led to an influx of new travel advisors learning the ropes and booking travel.

As with any company that grows quickly, there have been some questions about what that growth and scale mean for the rest of the industry.

• Training and mentorship gaps: I noted that the path to professional advising is slow by design, essentially an apprenticeship. Fora gives people access to information and an IATA number immediately. Their training also seemed to me to be largely self-driven with access to videos etc, but I wondered if they had any kind of mentorship program to hold the hands of new advisors. I also wanted to know about the gates in place to help ease this transition for new advisors. I expressed my concern with the fact that the majority of their advisors are new to travel sales,⁴ and was curious how they ensured consumer protection and service quality.

• Strain on the supplier side: With their rapid growth bringing scores of new advisors to the industry, I expressed concern that the volume of inexperienced advisors might create more errors, more escalations, and more work for hotel sales teams.

• Self-booking and hobbyists: I also expressed concern that I, and other advisors, have seen a handful of my clients become Fora agents themselves, not as a professional career path, but so they could self-book their own trips and essentially receive a commission back for their own travel. I don’t want to see widespread cannibalization of our client base, so I wanted to understand what protections they have in place to prevent people from just becoming a “user” vs an “advisor.” Should a user have the same access as an advisor?

• AI vulnerability. Putting on my VC investor hat, I noted that their business looks more exposed to replacement by AI platforms than traditional host agencies, at least at the lower end. I was curious if they are going to try to go direct-to-consumer with their AI planning tool, or license their technology to other host agencies, because frankly, it’s the best in the industry and we could all benefit from it.

Paul was kind enough to address these questions, and provide his perspective on how Fora is tackling such concerns.

Anne Marie: Can you please share your background and what led you to Fora?

Paul: In 2014 I founded Skylark, which was the first luxury OTA with full-service support from advisors. Prior to COVID, I had known Evan Frank, one of Fora’s co-founders, and we had tried to work together in his previous roles. Henley, one of the other Fora co-founders, and I have sat on several industry advisory boards together. In 2024, after I had stepped down as CEO of Skylark, the Fora founders approached me about joining as Chief Revenue Officer, and I was happy to accept. At Skylark, we had a few independent contractor advisors who worked with us. However, I underestimated the importance of community in that offering. By the time I joined Fora, it was very clear that the advisor community would be one of the key pillars to the success of this business.

Anne Marie: Tell me more about the mentorship and training opportunities for new Fora advisors - you mentioned in our conversation that once a Fora advisor has established a strong booking record, they have access to these opportunities outside of the self-guided training available. What does that threshold look like?

Paul: Fora offers new advisors a mix of structured and on-demand training so they can ramp up on their own schedule. The training starts with the fundamentals, and then opens up to a whole world of destination, supplier, and niche-specific training. Fora currently offers 700+ hours of on-demand training content and 28+ hours of live training per week.

As advisors progress in their advisor journey and earn higher status (e.g., Certified, Advanced, Pro, X), they are also able to access dedicated programming alongside their peer group, exclusive in-person events (e.g., Intensives, Roadshows, and Momentum, a two-day, regional, in-person sales enablement program for advisors focused on growing their businesses.

It builds on the Sales Accelerator and combines status-based tracks, practical workshops, peer learning, and business-growth strategy), and priority access to industry conferences and events.

When new joiners finish the intro course, they join a New Advisor Cohort — one week of live coaching with an HQ instructor, then monthly sessions with the same peer group going forward.

Fora X is Fora’s invite-only agency-within-an-agency for elite advisors who’ve built standout travel businesses.

Fora X advisors get access to retreats, business coaching (1:1, business reviews, growth plans, more focused team calls/specialist support, etc.

More on Fora’s tiered system can be found here. These offerings evolve as an advisor’s business grows to meet the needs of that level.

With our “Path to Pro” and “Path to X” programs, Fora has small coaching programs for high-momentum advisors. Fora also generates and shares business analyses for every Fora X Advisor, that analyzes the Advisor’s goals versus production to give an clear assessment of where the advisor is relative to their goals and their peers, and concrete, tactical, actionable take-aways that the Advisor can execute upon.

Anne Marie: Some of the concern I raised was that there are people who are signing up for Fora to just book their own trips at a discount, essentially a “user” of the platform and not an advisor. You noted there are some safeguards around using the platform just for self-booking purposes, can you expand on that and how that is monitored and enforced?

Paul: Fora was built to create opportunities for people to build and scale travel businesses. While we do allow advisors to book their own travel, our Self Booking policy is there to ensure advisors are building a client-based advisory business.

Because Fora has historically attracted many new-to-the-business advisors, we have intentionally restricted them from overwhelming hotel sales teams with agency-rate requests—something we have always considered inappropriate.

At the same time, we recognize that firsthand experience with a product can meaningfully improve an advisor’s ability to sell it as they build their business. Since Fora advisors who have not yet reached the Pro level do not qualify for FAMs, these stays are generally booked through the Fora platform as full-price self-bookings rather than through agency rates.

That said, Fora does not allow advisors to book travel primarily for themselves. All advisors must maintain a legitimate client practice. Our Trust and Safety team monitors advisors whose booking activity is predominantly personal, and if that pattern continues over time, the advisor is first warned and ultimately removed from the platform.

Anne Marie: Another concern in the industry is that Fora will go direct-to-consumer with their AI planning tool, essentially eliminating the need for clients to book with a professional advisor at the mid-level (I believe a luxury client will lean more towards human interaction). How do you see Fora’s AI as supporting the advisor world rather replacing it?

Paul: Built directly into the advisor workflow, Via is our embedded AI assistant, currently in beta with Fora’s top advisors. Via helps advisors work efficiently, from researching hotels and destinations, managing CRM tasks, and formatting itineraries—all from one conversational interface within the portal. This new ecosystem for advisors is coupled with AI training for specifically for our advisors.

Fora’s mission from day one has been to modernize this career path - creating the tools, tech, training, and community advisors need to be the best at their jobs. Now with AI, the thesis is not “AI replaces the advisor.” It is “AI makes the human better, faster, and more efficient, and the network gets smarter as it grows.” And - we’re already seeing it play out. Fora advisors who are daily AI users are booking more trips, more often, compared to non-AI users.

Anne Marie: How do you serve both luxury-level advisors and entry-level hobbyists equally?

Paul: Fora is the technology platform powering a new generation of travel entrepreneurs. 97% of Fora advisors are new to the profession, and Fora advisors include ex-doctors, lawyers, stay-at-home moms, retirees, and more. Fora has advisors who book over $10M a year alongside advisors who work part-time and make $60K a year. The career path itself is having a moment, independent of Fora. In 2025, LinkedIn ranked travel advisor as the 5th fastest-growing job in the US.

Anne Marie: Tell me more about the gates that open at each tier to ensure that new advisors who don’t have an established booking record aren’t immediately accessing things like Virtuoso benefits and advisor rates?

Paul: Industry access expands alongside an advisor’s demonstrated experience and engagement. As advisors progress to Fora Pro and Fora X, they unlock access to benefits such as Virtuoso accounts and conferences, TA rates, and many partner logins. These tiers recognize advisors who have completed required training, achieved booking milestones, served a minimum number of clients, and received a minimum number of client reviews. This helps ensure industry benefits are extended to advisors who are actively building their businesses.

Anne Marie: What is next for Fora? What are you most excited about on the horizon with this new round of funding?

Paul: Fora is focused on Via, growing into new markets, expanding our offering in categories like cruise and flights, and continuing to hire across teams to better support our advisors growing their businesses.

If you look at the overall travel market, luxury travel advisors make up 5-7% of hotel bookings overall. It’s just a huge amount of room we all have to grow to gain ground on these other channels.

Anne Marie: You spoke about how host agencies should not view each other as the competition, but rather the credit companies as the direct competitors for our client base. How would you like to see host agencies work together with Fora in the future as a supportive and united group to ensure that professional advisors are the preferred booking channel for travelers vs a credit card portal?

Paul: If you look at the overall luxury leisure travel market, the travel advisor has still only penetrated between 20% and 30% of this market. The rest of the market includes big players with big balance sheets, like major OTAs and credit card companies.

As I see the industry developing with more and more technology to support advisors, I believe the best advisors will continue to thrive by creating highly customized advice, building trust, and tailoring vacations to their clients’ tastes and needs. An advisor’s curation, judgment, and insider information continues to be a big advantage for clients over credit card companies and certainly the OTAs.

There are a lot of travel industry professionals and fellow advisors who read The Upgrade. Knowing there were probably a few Fora advisors in that group, I asked to hear from Substack readers what their experience with Fora as an advisor had been like.

Several advisors shared their own reasons for joining the platform.

Tori Carter - https://www.foratravel.com/advisor/tori-carter

“As a Fora agent, I found it really interesting to see this viewpoint on the agency from the outside. I’m about a year into my travel advising career and hit “Pro” status with Fora after about 10 months. Currently working on my continued education to maintain Pro status and “unlock” additional resources for my clients.

I’d describe Fora as a “choose your own adventure” platform as you noted: if you want to push toward becoming a top-level advisor, the resources and community are there to support that. If you’d rather keep it as a side hustle and just break even on the subscription, that’s an option too.

I’ve found great mentorship during my time here, though it looks different from a traditional host agency. I meet with my local city chapter a few times a month for co-working sessions, happy hours, and site visits, and I’ve connected with local mentors that way. I’ve also applied for and been accepted into a few in-agency cohorts, where you’re paired with a top-producing advisor for several weeks for lessons and 1:1 mentorship time.

For the cohorts, you will get an email when you are selected to apply! I am unsure how they select, but my first cohort was when I was an “advanced” advisor (the second level you can achieve after getting accepted into Fora) and was invited to join a cohort that would focus on growing advanced advisor’s business to the next level. The application questions asked me about my current clientele, who my ideal client would be, the type of trips I want to book, my goals for my business in the next year, how I like to learn and what I want to learn from my mentor! From there you find out if you got accepted and get matched with your mentor and group.”

Emily Johnson – Elevate Wellness

“I joined Fora early, when there were only a few hundred advisors globally, because it positioned itself as a modern agency and genuinely delivered on that promise. The technology was and remains excellent, the training was included rather than sold as another layer, and the accessible entry point allowed me to begin while I was still working full-time and hustling in hotels. For someone with decades of hospitality experience but a new travel-advisor business, that mattered.

The issue is what happened next. At 15,000++ advisors now, many with limited personal travel or industry experience, the Fora name no longer signals the same level of expertise it once did. In my view, that growth has diluted the brand and made the individual advisor’s niche, experience and judgment far more important than the host affiliation. Included training is valuable, but doesn’t replace being an experienced traveler or hospitality professional.

From the hotel side, however, I still understand the commercial logic. Paying a 10% commission to an advisor who knows the client and can generate well-matched, repeat business is generally more attractive than paying 20% to 25% to an OTA with little relationship or context. The industry created those distribution economics; Fora simply made the game more accessible. Standards and education matter enormously, but perhaps this is still a case of don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

Aliza Bodzin - The Whole Journey

“This is a great read! Your point about Fora being a tech company that operates as a travel agency is my view as someone who uses the software and connections to enhance some of my pet travel and relocation consultancy’s client experiences. Also, another reason I signed up for Fora to earn a little extra income for bookings I was already helping my friends and family with.

Hot take but based on my conversations & seeing discussions in Fora advisor groups, some people don’t fully understand that Fora is more like a SaaS company than a host agency...”

Bridget Christine - About Little Things

“When I first was accepted to the Fora community, I let it sit dormant for a year. I had established my travel consultancy with an almost anti-agency mindset... I felt I could make more thoughtful recommendations with a focus on the traveler and promoting meaningful, purpose driven travel, rather than commissions driving my advice (I focus primarily on Italian travel). I spent years building my own relationships (with guides, hotels, experience providers, drivers.. etc) with self-funded research trips.

I ended up joining for the credentials, training and research capabilities. I’ve always been curious about the brand perception. I hit “Pro” status within 2 months of putting effort into the Fora-backed side of my business and, for me, I noticed an immediate difference in the caliber of advisor talent and elevated resources at the Pro-network level. As I move towards taking my business full-full time, I really appreciate that I have my affiliation to Fora for the technology and better monetizing my work, but/and I am interested to see how the brand continues to evolve post series D.

By the way, I DID get rejected on my first application, and I honestly think this is a good practice to ensure those who are re-applying are serious.”

My husband always asks me, “Ok, so what?” after reading my article drafts. He reminds me to add a “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read) to each of my pieces.

I will say that I feel better about knowing more about Fora’s restrictions around self-booking. I’d be interested to see how many violations it takes before an advisor is kicked off the platform for primarily self booking, and will probably follow up with my three clients who decided to become Fora advisors for their own travel in a year or so to see if they are still using the platform that way. To prevent this kind of loss of client, the onus is placed on us as advisors to really step up our game and make sure that we are providing luxury service above and beyond just being a booking portal with access to Virtuoso amenities and preferred partner benefits.

I do think Fora’s mentorship opportunities are better than I had believed, and it sounds like there are opportunities for new advisors to receive support and training, should they wish to engage those services. It does fall on the new advisor to take advantage of those programs, which is a difference between an affiliate agency like ours where we require new Sub ICs to complete training before they are allowed to book anything.

From the sales director side, the sales directors I spoke to during Virtuoso Travel Week were largely happy with the volume that Fora advisors have been sending their way, and they’ve learned to manage the increase in requests. As to the conversion rate of those requests, that’s a question no one was willing to answer, or didn’t have enough data to weigh in on.

Do I think we will see some regulation from the consortium side and the government side? Yes, I believe we will see a push for more official licensing for travel advisors beyond an IATA number, which used to serve as a stand-in for an industry license. It will take a few high dollar mistakes, or perhaps we will see Errors and Omissions policies become more expensive to obtain for host agencies.

On the consortium side, Virtuoso is adjusting.

Virtuoso restructured its membership categories in March 2025, its first overhaul in nearly twenty years,⁵ adding regional, multi-region, and global membership tiers, and created an “Associate Agency” category aimed at large independent contractors and entrepreneurs.⁵ Cheryl Cheney-Bunker, VP of Member Relations, credited three forces for making this change: globalization across the partner and member base, the rise of the independent advisor as an entrepreneur building a larger book of business, and the need to support those businesses through a shifting landscape.⁵

Some framed this as closing “back door entry” into the network, while keeping quality standards intact.⁵ What does “back door entry” entail? I believe they are referring to host agencies providing access to Virtuoso rates and benefits en masse. At Fora, Pro level advisors and above (a portion of the 15,000 advisors among its ranks)⁴ can access Virtuoso rates, amenities, and preferred status through Fora as their host agency.⁷

The Associate Agency category means a high-producing independent advisor can now hold membership directly, which puts their production and their standards compliance in front of Virtuoso.⁵ I don’t think that Virtuoso has necessarily closed that “back door” so much as created a door alongside it for independent contractors to more easily join Virtuoso on their own, without a host agency. The Associate Agency category gives high-producing independents Virtuoso membership tied to what they sell rather than to what host agency they book under.

At the 2025 Virtuoso Travel Week (VTW) opening session in August, Matthew Upchurch still called the problem unsolved.⁶ He asked how you determine quality when advisors sit at different career stages, and he framed it in numbers that anyone who manages a team will recognize: “Is there a difference between an advisor that’s stuck at $50,000 in commission but they’ve been an advisor for 10 years versus an advisor that’s at $50,000 after only 18 months?”⁶ He offered no solution beyond a commitment. “We have to do something.”⁶ Cheney Bunker, by then Senior Vice President, Global Memberships, said Virtuoso is working with its advisory boards “to modify membership standards globally,” weighing sales figures alongside professional stage and commitment to ongoing development.⁶

A year later, and I’m not quite sure how Virtuoso is addressing this, but I know hotels are paying attention thanks to their sales volume. As of that this year’s VTW, Virtuoso had published no thresholds, no timeline, and no mechanism for addressing this further.⁶ Until it does, the fastest route to Virtuoso rates and benefits for new advisors still is by joining host agency like Fora.

Watch what happens to the Associate Agency tier over the next two years. If Virtuoso keeps pulling top producers into direct membership, the consortium access that makes a host agency attractive becomes less of a reason for ICs and affiliate agencies to join a host.

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

• Rosewood’s owner may be selling Rosewood London. Gencom is reportedly in talks to buy the property at a valuation north of $400 million, as Chow Tai Fook Enterprises works to raise cash against the debt load at its New World Development arm. This is through the rumor mill, so TBD on whether this plays out.

• Six hotels made Paris’s Palace list this year, four got cut. Cheval Blanc Paris, Bulgari Hotel Paris, and Four Seasons Resort Megève joined the roster, while Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme, Hôtel Byblos, Hôtel du Palais Biarritz, and Mandarin Oriental Paris lost the designation. (Luxury Travel Advisor)

• Hilton is bringing LXR to Costa Rica. Maravé Manuel Antonio will take nearly 40 acres and 650 feet of Pacific beachfront when it opens in 2029, with branded residences built alongside it.

• Four Seasons put a 25-year company veteran in charge of its Serengeti lodge. Mary Bowens is the new GM of Four Seasons Safari Lodge Serengeti, after a quarter century inside the brand.

• Italy’s luxury pipeline just got a lot more crowded. Cheval Blanc is bringing a property to the Costa Smeralda, Raffles is opening on Lake Como, and Capella, Park Hyatt, and Six Senses are all landing in 2027, on top of two new Mandarin Orientals this year and the Danieli’s reopening.

• Bulgari’s second UAE property has a shape now. The Eagle Hills-developed project will bring around 90 private mansions and estates plus a marina to market by 2030.

• Hotel software just became a bank. Mews (unicorn status, hotel technology company valued at over $2.5B after their series D in January), picked up an e-money license from the Dutch central bank on August 11, putting it in position to run payments and financing for the 15,000 hotels already on its platform, right as luxury rates keep pushing past €3,000 a night with no ceiling in sight. (Jacques Ledbetter, Forbes )

  ---

Sources

1. Dennis Schaal, “Fora Travel the Unicorn: It Raised $60 Million at a $1 Billion Valuation,” Skift, July 16, 2026. https://skift.com/2026/07/16/fora-travel-the-unicorn-it-raised-60-million-at-a-1-billion-valuation/

2. Jamie Biesiada, “LinkedIn again lists travel advisor as a job on the rise,” Travel Weekly, January 19, 2026. https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Travel-Agent-Issues/Insights/Travel-advisor-LinkedIn-job-on-the-rise-2026

3. “How to Get an IATA Number as a Travel Agent,” Fora Travel. https://www.foratravel.com/join/resources/how-to-get-iata-number

4. “Fora Announces $60M Series D at $1B Valuation,” Fora Travel newsroom, July 16, 2026. https://www.foratravel.com/newsroom/fora-announces-series-d-funding

5. Anne Majumdar, “Virtuoso tweaks membership categories to halt ‘back door entry,’” LATTE, March 18, 2025. https://latteluxurynews.com/2025/03/18/virtuoso-tweaks-membership-categories-to-halt-back-door-entry/

6. Matt Turner, “Virtuoso could crack down on independent contractors,” LATTE, August 16, 2025. https://latteluxurynews.com/2025/08/16/virtuoso-could-crack-down-on-independent-contractors/

7. Markus Busch, “Fora is inside Virtuoso, and just raised $60 million at a $1 billion valuation,” Hospitality.today, July 17, 2026. https://www.hospitality.today/article/fora-is-inside-virtuoso-and-just-raised-60-million-at-a-1-billion-valuation

I grew up in a family that owned a hotel company, and I spent much of my childhood hanging out in hotels while I waited for my dad to finish up work in his office, traveling to hotels as I tagged along on sales calls, or staying in hotels for family trips.

After 18 years in the luxury travel industry, first running the experiential travel programs for Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato, and now as a luxury travel agency owner at Alpenglow Travel, I have stayed in some incredible properties around the world.

I am a planner. I plan my travel two to three years in advance, and I always know what my next big trips will be, both on my own and with our kids.

I divide my bucket list into two types of travel. The first category is experiences I want to have. The second is hotels I want to stay in.

I post hotels worth a stay and room reports on Substack in The Upgrade Weekly and in my map pin posts.

In this week’s Master Key, I am sharing the hotels on my bucket list, the ones I would absolutely go back to that belong on your list, and a crowd-sourced list from my subscriber chat of hospitality industry people and fellow hotel obsessives.

If you’d like to book any of these hotels, please reach out to me at AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com

Kisawa Sanctuary, Benguerra Island, Mozambique. I specialize in safaris and have been to Botswana five times, along with South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda. I have not made it to Mozambique yet. I like to add a few days of beach time to my clients’ itineraries after a safari so they have time to recover, and this is a spot I send clients often. Kisawa covers 300 hectares in the Bazaruto Archipelago, and the team built the residences using a patented 3D-printing technique alongside island artisans. That is barefoot luxury done right.

Read more

20. The Upgrade | Weekly – How Do You Evaluate Risk in Travel?

Travelers,

I’ve been in the luxury travel industry professionally for 18 years. My colleagues used to joke that I had the worst luck, as the small group trips I was assigned to run at two luxury destination clubs would invariably be the trips that encountered emergencies. While stressful, these early experiences in my 20’s managing evacuations, extreme weather, lost passports, etc taught me how to stay calm in just about every situation abroad, and gave me an interesting perspective on evaluating travel risk.

Today, as an agency owner and advisor, I am still the person handling those emergency calls. Every few months, I open my news feed and know my day is about to be highjacked by hurricanes or other news.

That is the nature of travel - we leave our safety zones and venture out into a world where we don’t have as much control over our environment.

In today’s The Upgrade Weekly, I evaluate various risks we take in luxury travel voluntarily, and the ones out of our control.

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Yours truly, taking a helicopter to land on a glacier in New Zealand

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Helicopters, Bush Planes, and Hurricanes

Two helicopters carrying travelers went down within about 48 hours of each other this week, leading me to ruminate on risk in travel.

On August 17 a Bell 206 JetRanger crashed near the Greek island of Sifnos, killing Marie Ebert, 30, and Alexander Cromie, 31, a British couple on their honeymoon, along with their pilot, Giorgos Raikos, 53, a former air force officer everyone described as highly experienced. Greek investigators are examining a possible tail rotor failure, and the civil aviation authority pulled Bell 206s from service pending review.¹ ²

Two days later, a Eurocopter EC130 B4 operated by Lady Lori Helicopters went down in the foothills of Mount Ololokwe in Samburu County, northern Kenya. It was carrying six guests of luxury safari company &Beyond from Loisaba Conservancy toward the Ewaso Nyiro area.³ Seven people (including the pilot) died, five of them Americans.⁴

Evaluating risk and creating a game plan in the form of a “worst case scenario handbook” was part of my job at Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato. Over my career in the luxury travel industry, I’ve had to deal with just about every sort of disaster. I’ve evacuated a chartered cruise of 400 clients in the middle of Greek austerity riots, found an emergency dental surgeon on an island when a client knocked his teeth out, rescheduled chartered flights in the Galapagos when volcanic ash clogged the air, and repatriated the body of a client who suffered a stroke in Antarctica.

Let’s talk about how to assess risk, the likelihood of encountering an emergency, and how to cover your bases so you are as prepared as possible should you experience one while traveling.

There are risks outside of your control, like weather or political violence, and then there are risks you choose, such as your mode of transportation.

I want to like helicopters – they seem like an adventurous choice and often, the easiest route to get from point A to point B. But, for as many times as I’ve flown on them, I’ve never felt comfortable.

From a business standpoint, I’ve always been concerned when a client books one, and in my previous two companies, we were not allowed to include them as part of any client itinerary. As I’ve gotten older and had children, I’ve started evaluating the risks I take differently. I’ve flown in four helicopters in my life, and I think the one we flew on in Kenya last January was the last one I will take.

Many of my clients are fearful of the small bush planes used to get from safari camp to safari camp. Are they riskier than helicopters, or about the same?

Both the EC130 and the Bell 206, the helicopters involved in last week’s crashes, have one engine. The working pilots who weighed in after the Kenya crash in a Reddit thread on ChubbyTravel kept noting that fact, along with the following information.

An airplane that loses power still has wings and becomes a glider, buying the pilot some time to seek a potentially safe landing spot. A helicopter that loses power enters autorotation, using airflow through the falling rotor to keep the blades turning and somewhat soften the landing. Autorotation is helpful, though it is a demanding maneuver with a very short window, and its success in saving lives depends on altitude and terrain.

One commercial pilot in the Reddit thread said he can lose both engines on a jet and still land safely, but that he does not want anyone he loves in a helicopter for any reason. Another kept returning to the number of moving parts in a rotor system, and said what he trusts least is maintenance he cannot verify in a country whose oversight he does not know.

In a typical year, the US records 95-130 civil helicopter accidents, with between 17 and 30 of them causing fatalities.⁵

Non-commercial fixed-wing airplane accidents came in at 5.67 per 100,000 hours in the most recent full AOPA (Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association) analysis, with 0.87 fatal.⁶

NTSB data, via AOPA’s Air Safety Institute (formerly the Nall Report), shows helicopters have a higher accident rate than fixed-wing GA.

Here’s the apples-to-apples comparison between helicopter accidents and small, fixed wing airplane accidents for 2023, the most recent complete year, non-commercial category for both:⁷

• Non-commercial fixed-wing: 3.86 accidents per 100,000 flight hours (0.65 fatal)

• Non-commercial helicopter: 4.86 accidents per 100,000 flight hours (0.69 fatal)

That’s about 26% higher for helicopters on total accidents. In 2022 it was 4.30 (fixed-wing) vs 6.48 (helicopter). In 2021, 4.28 vs 6.75.⁷ Separately, NTSB data cited by TorkLaw puts general aircraft at 7.28 crashes per 100,000 hours vs 9.84 for helicopters, a 35% higher rate.⁸

How about Hawaii?

In the US, one of the most dangerous places to take a helicopter is Hawaii, where I was born and raised. Thousands of tourists a year take helicopter rides in Hawaii, and every year as I grew up, we would see a crash make the news.

The Islands have recorded 38 tour helicopter accidents since 2000 and 45 deaths, 25 of them on Kauai, while tour flight volume climbed roughly 67 percent since 2010.¹² This past March, a Hughes 369D built in 1979 went down off Kauai’s Na Pali Coast, killing three people.¹³

Now, let’s compare that to the odds of dying in a car crash.

• The National Safety Council puts lifetime odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash at 1 in 101.

• Lifetime odds of dying in an air or space accident, general aviation included, are around 1 in 5,051.⁹

• Death by lightning odds are roughly 1 in 79,746.

• Being killed by a shark: about 1 in 4.3 million.¹⁰

  Comparing Africa to the US

It’s hard to find much clean data for bush flight crashes in Africa, so treat this with a grain of salty skepticism, but it gives us a place to start.

Between 2015 and this month, I count five fatal accidents on light fixed-wing aircraft carrying tourists in sub-Saharan Africa, killing 33 people¹¹.

Over the same period, I count two fatal accidents on helicopters carrying tourists, killing 12.

OK, how does this compare with the volume of flights?

Wilson Airport in Nairobi handles about 120,000 aircraft movements a year. Maun logged 46,747 in 2023, Kasane another 11,042, and Arusha 27,050 in 2024. Those four hubs alone generate over 200,000 light fixed-wing sectors annually, even before counting any camp airstrip-to-airstrip legs.

There are far fewer helicopter flights. Kenya’s entire civil helicopter register held about 67 aircraft as of 2020, most privately owned, with just a handful flying tourists.

Therefore, based on the volume, helicopter accidents are somewhere between three and eight times more likely than small fixed-wing aircraft per flight in this setting.

The accident databases typically undercount, excluding aircraft under six seats and leaving helicopters out almost entirely, and crashes that kill only local nationals draw a fraction of the coverage of Western tourist deaths.

Now that we’ve covered helicopters and bush planes, let’s zoom out and talk about general risk. In my masters program at Darden (UVA), we discussed the role of biases in decision making. I see two biases play out as my clients evaluate risk around their travel plans.

Recency bias weighs whatever just happened far more heavily than everything before it. When my clients have just read about a helicopter crash in the African bush, they are more likely to believe this will happen to them should they go on a safari.

Vividness bias (aka availability heuristic) judges likelihood by how fast an example springs to mind. Vivid, recent, emotional examples arrive instantly. For example, if you just read an article about a horrific shark attack, you’re more likely to think sharks are a greater danger than getting struck by lightning.

Flight disruption

It’s completely reasonable to be worried about your flight being cancelled or delayed, and missing part of your trip. This is probably the likeliest travel risk of all.

In a normal month, about 1% of scheduled US flights are canceled and roughly 76% arrive on time.¹⁴ This year has not been normal.

The Iran conflict that began in late February and the subsequent disruption to the Strait of Hormuz interrupted the global oil supply, raising the cost of jet fuel by 31% in a single month. US airlines spent $2B more on fuel this March than in March 2025.¹⁵

Faced with rising costs, airlines shrank their routes and in May alone pulled 2 million seats out of global schedules to conserve fuel.¹⁶

What happens when your flight is cancelled? Fewer flights reduce rescheduling options. Travelers who used to get rebooked within hours now wait a day or two because the empty seats that absorbed them last year have evaporated.

How likely are storms to interrupt your trip?

The Atlantic and Central Pacific hurricane seasons both run June 1 through November 30.

The Atlantic season peaks around September 10, with the highest likelihood falling mid-August to mid-October.

Looking specifically at Mexico, a major hurricane makes direct landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula roughly once every four to five seasons, and Cancún has taken only two major direct hits in the history of modern tourism.

In April, the Colorado State University forecast for 2026 predicted 13 named storms, six hurricanes, and two majors (Category 3 and higher) that might affect the Cancún area, below the 30-year averages.¹⁷

This summer, Hawaii got hit hard by back-to-back Kona Low storms in the spring and, less than two weeks ago, a hurricane (Lala). As I write this, another tropical storm (Moke) is expected to affect the Islands.

In more than 70 years of reliable records, only three hurricanes have made direct landfall on the Islands, all on Kauai: Hiki in 1950, Dot in 1959, and Iniki in 1992. Iniki arrived as a Category 4, killed six people and damaged or destroyed about 14,000 homes.¹⁸ I was 7 when Iniki blew in. I remember leaning into the wind on our seawall (on Oahu, which got off lightly) and being held as if in suspension.

Three landfalls in seven decades is a very different exposure from one every four or five years. Hawaii’s realistic weather risk is heavy rain and high surf, but rarely an entirely spoiled trip.

With rising temperatures across Europe, fire danger has become a true summer travel risk.

So far this year, France has experienced widespread fires. Spain has seen more than 350,000 hectares burn. Portugal evacuated three districts, and a single Coimbra fire disrupted over 2,000 kilometers of road. France also experienced massive wildfires, and over on this side of the Atlantic, Canada counted 1,747 wildfires by June 10.¹⁹

On February 23, Mexican authorities killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The cartel’s retaliation shut down parts of western Mexico. The US embassy told Americans in Jalisco to shelter in place, roads to the Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara airports were blocked, four major carriers suspended flights, and cruise lines canceled port calls.²⁰

I had a lot of clients in Puerto Vallarta or heading there for spring break. I fielded multiple requests for cancellations, rebooked people for Hawaii or San Diego, and stopped taking any new bookings for other clients the entire week. People worried about putting their children in harm’s way for a vacation by traveling to an area they saw as suddenly unsafe.

When they asked my opinion about whether they should still go, I told them that I’m not the best barometer for risk. Because I’ve worked in this industry for so long and seen (and dealt with) so many emergencies abroad, I just have a much higher risk tolerance for certain things than others. I also have a flexible job that I can do from anywhere, so flight disruption doesn’t bother me much. I still took my family to Punta Mita for spring break.

As much as my client would like to believe I have a crystal ball, I can only provide information and context.

Let’s examine the actual risk profile.

No violence was reported at major Mexican resorts. While taxis stopped and the military patrolled the beaches, guests stayed on property with amenities running. Cancún, Tulum and Los Cabos were untouched, and within days airlines were flying again. The worst my clients experienced while there was an extra day – comped by their hotels.

Events like this tend to be local, short, and experienced as a logistics problem.

The largest risk here was flight disruption, not violence affecting tourists. However, that means little coming from me when my client is worried about their children getting hurt on vacation – that’s the vividness bias rearing its incandescent head again. No one can tell you to spend your money on a vacation to a place you are going to feel uncomfortable in.

You cannot lower the odds of a hurricane, a fire, or political unrest. The fact is, that you can experience travel emergencies just about anywhere in the world. People often overestimate how close incidents are to the areas they will be traveling, and the news thrives on sensationalizing such events. If there’s a shooting in New York, does that mean you won’t travel to New Jersey?

I’ll bet the people planning to travel to Minnesota this spring hardly imagined that clashes with police and ICE might interrupt their trips when they were booking their flights.

However, there are ways to protect against the costs of disruption when you do experience it.

Cancel For Any Reason Travel Insurance (CFAR)

I will not book travel insurance for my own travels without this policy coverage. CFAR raises a policy’s cost by 40 to 50 percent and reimburses 50 to 75 percent of prepaid, non-refundable trip cost. You must purchase it within 14 to 21 days of your initial deposit (depending on the plan), insure 100 percent of your prepaid cost, and cancel at least two to three days before departure.²¹

I recommend this for any trip whose cost is larger than a client is comfortable losing, especially when the trip hinges on one nonrefundable element like a villa or a mobile camp, or when we book hurricane season. For a $3,000 trip on flexible rates, it’s not worth it. $15K? Absolutely.

Storms

Standard policies cover weather, with one catch: once a storm has been named, it becomes a known event, and coverage for it can no longer be purchased. Good Caribbean and Mexican resorts publish storm policies covering closure or evacuation during your dates. Ask for one before you plunk down your deposit.

Buffer days

Book one night in the departure city ahead of anything you cannot miss, like a cruise departure. It’s the cheapest protection money can buy.

Evacuation coverage, especially for Antarctica and Africa

In East Africa, AMREF Flying Doctors membership covers air evacuation to Nairobi, and I encourage clients to carry Global Rescue or Medjet on top of it. Standard travel insurance often will not pay for a helicopter lift out of the bush.

I tell my clients that if they are going to be stressed out about the level of risk they imagine they are taking during their trip, it’s not a vacation. However unlikely a small plane crash, cartel event, or natural disaster is to affect your trip, it matters little if you aren’t going to enjoy the experience because you’re terrified the entire time.

Even if you are aware of cognitive biases and know there is little likelihood of an event impacting your trip, you should still recognize that perceptions of risk can feel powerful.

However, if you can be calmed by data, be aware that major disruptions are extremely rare and with good planning your experience will be fairly smooth.

Personally, I do not mind risk. Travel carries risk. But so does driving to the grocery store.

What I will not do is put clients on a helicopter. That is a choice they have to make themselves.

🗝️ The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

• United is adding Denver to Paris. Daily 787-9 service to Charles de Gaulle starts March 27, 2027, which makes Paris the fifth nonstop European city out of DIA behind London, Munich, Frankfurt, and Rome. (9NEWS) I’m forever a United girl, so this makes me unreasonably excited.

• Black Tomato’s founders sold 75% of the company to their own staff. Altruistic move or liquidity play? The deal closed in early July and employees found out August 24, with Tom Marchant and his co-founders holding 25% through a new share class that keeps decision-making with them, so an operator that posted £3.09 million in operating profit in 2024 stays out of private equity hands. (Tasmin Lockwood, Skift)

• Investors are buying tired hotels and fixing them. US hotel sales rose 28% in the first half of the year as owners who will not fund renovations sell to buyers who will. (The Wall Street Journal)

• Rosewood strung four of its Mexico properties into one eight-day trip. Guided by Rosewood Mexico moves you through Mayakoba, Mandarina, San Miguel de Allende, and Las Ventanas al Paraíso with cenote swims, artisan workshops, and desert dinners, and there is no published rate, so every itinerary gets priced on request. (Paula Conway, Forbes)

• The resort behind “Dirty Dancing” is coming back. Don’t put Baby in a corner. PPG Development, a Florida firm that paid $14.75 million for the overgrown Grossinger’s site in Sullivan County in June 2025, wants a year-round luxury resort and residential community on the old Borscht Belt property. Family summer camp? Sign me up! (Times Union)

• Travel Substacks are pulling readers away from the glossies. Colin Nagy argues a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers who book trips is worth more than a feature seen by millions, with the catch that the writing only holds up when the person has stayed in the room. (Colin Nagy, Skift) As a bonus, listed The Upgrade in his Substacks to read! My little publication keeps chugging along. Thanks for reading it.

Sources

1. Mechanical issue suspected in Greek helicopter crash that killed honeymooners, pilot, UPI, August 18, 2026

2. Sifnos Helicopter Crash Kills British Honeymooners; Tail Rotor Failure Probed Amid Greek Safety Gaps, Tech Times, August 18, 2026

3. Seven killed in EC130 helicopter crash during Kenya safari flight, AeroTime, August 2026

4. Seven people, mostly foreign tourists, killed in helicopter crash in Kenya, Al Jazeera, August 19, 2026

5. FAA Rotorcraft Accident Dashboard, U.S. Helicopter Safety Team, FY2025

6. Nall Report, Non-Commercial Fixed-Wing, AOPA Air Safety Institute

7. McSpadden Report figure view, AOPA Air Safety Institute, https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/richard-g-mcspadden-report/mcspadden-report-figure-view

8. TorkLaw

9. Odds of Dying, National Safety Council Injury Facts, 2024 data

10. Annual Risk of Death During One’s Lifetime, Florida Museum, International Shark Attack File

11. No survivors in Mombasa Air Safari Grand Caravan crash in Kenya, AeroTime, October 2025

12. Tour Helicopter Crashes, And Flights, Have Escalated In Recent Years, Honolulu Civil Beat

13. NTSB releases preliminary report on Kauaʻi helicopter crash, Maui Now, April 19, 2026

14. Air Travel Consumer Report, U.S. Department of Transportation

15. Jet Fuel Shortage 2026: Flight Cancellations, Surcharges and Your Passenger Rights, AirHelp

16. Airlines Cut 2 Million Seats Worldwide in May Alone, IBTimes UK

17. Cancún Hurricane Season 2026: Forecast, Risk and Smart Travel Tips

18. Hawaii Hurricane Season 2026

19. Wildfires 2026 and Travel Disruptions, Riskline

20. U.S. Embassy Issues Shelter-in-Place Order for Travelers in Puerto Vallarta Amid Cartel Violence, Travel Market Report

21. Cancel For Any Reason Insurance Is Having a Moment In 2026, Squaremouth via PR Newswire, March 2026

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

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🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown

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

Travelers,

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

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

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

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

In case you missed it:

• Master Key: Takeaways From Virtuoso Travel Week

• The Great Beige-ification of Hotels

• Micro and Macroeconomic Factors Reshaping Travel

• Who Owns Your Hotel

• Why I Write This

The Upgrade

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

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

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · The Upgrade | Anne Marie

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

Who Can You Trust?

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

The typical players in a travel booking are:

· Traveler

· Hotel

In a luxury booking they may be:

· Traveler (and/or assistant or family member)

· Hotel, DMC (destination management company)

· Travel Advisor

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

The Trust Matrix

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

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

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

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

This is a relatively straightforward trust matrix.

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

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

Trust in the UHNW community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The YouTube reviewer or online personality.

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

The credit card booking channel.

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

The advisor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel writers.

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

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

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

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

Online Posters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this case, Amanvari should have:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

🗝️ The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello Upgrade Readers and Fellow Travelers -

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

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

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

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

Why do we put ourselves through this?

The short answer is that industry is changing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travelers still think pricing is the same as 2019.

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

Read more

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

Travelers,

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

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

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

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

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

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Your truly, a maximalist, in Paris with my daughter

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

The Great Beige-ification of Hotels

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

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

My mom, the OG maximalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FF&E Procurement

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

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

Manufacturing

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

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

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

In sum, the supply chain is narrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗝️ Industry Insider Interview: Carolina Ramirez Herrera

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

What is your background and current role sourcing furniture for hotels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are your top three favorite hotels?

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

🗝️ Industry Insider Interview: Emily Mattucci

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

What is your background and current role sourcing furniture for hotels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are your top three favorite hotels?

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

🗝️ Room Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ---

  Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

Travelers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

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

because what says luxury travel more than this background?

🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

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

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

Wealth Concentration

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

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

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

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

Where are these newly minted millionaires spending their travel budgets?

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

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

The K-Shaped Economy Is Structural

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

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

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

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

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

Intergenerational Wealth Transfer Is Accelerating Demand

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

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

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

Goods vs. Experiences: A Structural Reordering

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

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

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

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

International Inbound: A Headwind for US Hotels

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

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

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

Destination Patterns

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

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

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

Booking Windows Are Compressing

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

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

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

Geopolitical Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clients Want Flexibility

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

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

Traveler Wants Have Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗝️ Substack Writers You Should be Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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