Master Key: Takeaways from a week meeting with luxury travel's top brands
I went to Las Vegas for Virtuoso Travel Week to bring back intel and offers for readers of the Upgrade. Industry thoughts on AI, Amanvari, Price Pressure, and openings...
Hello Upgrade Readers and Fellow Travelers -
News, hotel openings, and thoughts from a week spent with the top luxury hotel brands and travel advisors in our industry…
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.
Takeaways
On the revenue side…
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.
