23. The Upgrade | Weekly - The New Class of Celebrity Travel Advisors

How social media is minting travel advisors, and how successful advisors are using social media

🗝️ The Upgrade | Weekly by Anne Marie Brown

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)

Rosewood Mandarina

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

Happy travels!

Anne Marie

Other Upgrade Articles

• WTF is happening with US Airlines?

• How do you evaluate risk in travel?

• The great beige-ification of hotels

• Who owns your hotel?

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🗝️ Pre-Departure — Hospitality Hot Takes

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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.

The Travel Agent Is Dead, Long Live the Travel Advisor

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.

Influencers Becoming Advisors

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 Carson Griffith’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

Olivia Ferney

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.

Advisors Leveraging Social Media

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

Hao Tang, Besvisor

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 Advisors

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. Whitney Haldeman, 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.

Danielle Oteri 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

Zoe Schaeffer, 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

Ane, Luxury Travel Advisor 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. Colin Nagy 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.

Reddit Advisors

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.

Green Screen Experts

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

How to Tell Them Apart

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.

As a client, ask the following when deciding who to book with:

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.

Take Social Media Advice With a Grain of Salt

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.

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🗝️The Lobby Bar

Hospitality updates, promotions, gossip, and the occasional pun

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• “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)

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

The Economist@TheEconomist

Economic uncertainty has people spending less on fancy things, like high heels and handbags. Yet the rich continue to splash out on luxury travel. Can the boom last? economist.com/business/2025/…

8:40 PM · Oct 6, 2025 · 72.5K Views

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8 Replies · 11 Reposts · 65 Likes

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.