Inside Beckons, the KSL-Backed Lodge Platform Built on the Experiential Travel Bet

An interview with Chief Financial and Development Officer Alex Cameron on remote lodges, ownership, and where experiential luxury goes next

In September I wrote about the amount of institutional, sovereign, and private capital moving into experiential travel (Experiential Luxury Travel is the Next Frontier).

Private equity has been buying into the category for several years. The Rise Fund, managed by TPG Growth, bought 34 percent of Wilderness Holdings in July 2018, and FS Investors bought another 24 percent through an affiliate.² In October 2025, Egeria agreed to acquire Afrika Invest, the holding company behind Tanzania Specialist and Africa Safari Trips.³ In May 2026, Auberge Collection launched Auberge Safari, which brings nine Tanzanian camps and lodges from Legendary Expeditions and Chem Chem Safari under one umbrella.⁴

Beckons is the lodge platform in that story I wanted to examine more closely, so I interviewed its Chief Financial and Development Officer, Alex Cameron. Disclosure: KSL Capital Partners, the firm behind Beckons, bought Outrigger Hotels, my family’s company, in 2016.

About Beckons

Beckons launched in March 2026, bringing Baillie Lodges and Tierra Hotels under one name. The portfolio has nine lodges: Southern Ocean Lodge, Longitude 131°, Silky Oaks Lodge, Capella Lodge, and The Louise in Australia; Huka Lodge in New Zealand; Tierra Patagonia and Tierra Atacama in Chile; and Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge in British Columbia. The lodges average about 25 keys each, and Huka, Silky Oaks, and Clayoquot have been some of my favorite properties to send clients to.

Baillie Lodges began in 2003, when James and Hayley Baillie opened Capella Lodge on Lord Howe Island. KSL, a Denver-based private equity firm focused on travel and hospitality, entered a joint venture with the founders in 2019, according to Beckons.⁷ ⁸ Baillie Lodges took a majority stake in Tierra in 2022.⁵

Michael Crawford leads the company as CEO, after 25 years at Four Seasons and a tenure at The Walt Disney Company. The company has spoken about doubling its portfolio within three years, and its Chief Commercial Officer has named Africa, additional Canadian properties, and further Asia-Pacific lodges as priorities.⁵ ⁶

Recent Recognition

The 2026 MICHELIN Guide Australia Key selection, announced in September, moved Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island from Two Keys to Three, and Longitude 131°, Silky Oaks Lodge, and Capella Lodge each appear in that selection with Two Keys.⁹ Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge has held Three Keys since the Guide’s October 2024 announcement.¹⁰ Tierra Patagonia earned Three Keys in 2025 and kept them in the 2026 selection.¹¹

The lodges collect other honors as well. Southern Ocean Lodge made the extended World’s 50 Best Hotels 2025 list.⁵ Beckons says Huka Lodge joined it on the extended list and that both Tierra lodges appeared on Travel + Leisure’s 2025 T+L 500.¹² Tierra Patagonia ranked second-best resort in Central and South America in the 2025 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards.¹¹

The Upgrade Interview: Alex Cameron

Alex Cameron is Chief Financial and Development Officer at Beckons and works from the company’s Denver headquarters. He joined in February 2021, when the business operated as Baillie Lodges, and his role expanded in early 2026 to include the development and capital expenditure teams. He is part of the executive team alongside Crawford, Chief Commercial Officer Courtney Reagan, and Chief Operating Officer Craig Bradbery.¹⁵

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Master Key

Follow the Money:

Who Owns the Hotels on the Best-Of Lists

Families, crowns, and a few patient funds. What the ownership behind the world’s top-ranked hotels says about where to stay.

Following my article last week on travel industry awards and best of lists, I wanted to further investigate the ownership structure of the top hotels and brands on those lists.

Rosewood Hong Kong kept its place at No. 1 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels for a second year running, an award decided by more than 800 industry voters.¹

A week later, Michelin released its 2026 Key selection: 2,832 hotels worldwide, 155 of them at the top rating of Three Keys.² In July, Travel + Leisure readers named Patina Osaka, which belongs to Japanese developer NTT Urban Development, the best hotel in the world.³

I always say in The Upgrade that who owns your hotel can have a large impact on your experience during your stay, but most people aren’t aware of hotel ownership structures. I detailed them in my article “Who Owns Your Hotel.”

So, I followed the money to look at how many hotels in each of those lists are owner-operator models, vs Private Equity owned, vs sovereign investment, etc. I was curious what we’d find.

Happy travels,

Anne Marie Brown, co-founder of Alpenglow Travel

How I did this

I pulled the top 50 from The World’s 50 Best Hotels and the top 50 from the Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards. For each hotel, I traced who owns the land and the building, then sorted the owners into five buckets: sovereign or state, owner-operator, family office or private individual, private equity, and listed or institutional. Michelin does not rank its Three-Key hotels against each other, so I checked all 155 of them as a separate group. Most Michelin owners come from widely reported ownership without individual verification, so treat that group as the roughest of the three.

This piece tracks who owns the property, and every hotel on these lists has up to three layers of capital behind it.

• The brand is the name on the door.

• The operator runs the hotel day to day under a management contract, often for decades.

• The property owner holds the land and the building, pays for renovations, and keeps what remains after the operator takes its fee.

• Of course, there are multiple other complex layers of financing involved in most properties as well.

Bill Gates’s Cascade Investment holds the majority of Four Seasons, but that doesn’t tell you who owns Four Seasons Bangkok (a Thai developer) or Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo (a Mexican family).

Some owners sit behind holding companies, and a third of the T+L list are held in trusts and LLCs that are tough to penetrate, so I marked those hotels unconfirmed. This is sheerly a fun research project, so treat every number here as preliminary.

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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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Market Analysis: The Five Year IPO Reckoning

The Economics of Festive Week

What I wish I knew before gorilla trekking

The Upgrade

Hotel History: My Grandfather, Roy Kelley, The Architect Who Built Waikiki's Hospitality Industry

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

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3 months ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · The Upgrade | Anne Marie

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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