Welcome to The Upgrade: Start Here

A luxury travel newsletter for curious minds and restless feet

Apr 08, 2026

Welcome The Upgrade | Weekly

I’m glad you’re here, because it means you are interested in:

The hospitality industry
My witty repartee
My travels

I started writing this newsletter as a tribute to my father, Richard Kelley, who wrote a weekly hospitality industry newsletter for 40 years. My family owned and operated the hotel company, Outrigger Hotels, for 3.5 generations prior to selling to private equity firm KSL in 2016.

I grew up in the hospitality industry and live and breathe all things hotel and travel. I own a luxury travel agency called Alpenglow Travel.

The Upgrade publishes three content streams

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

The Upgrade | Weekly. Everybody gets this. It’s free and arrives on Tuesdays in your inbox. Inside the Upgrade | Weekly: hospitality hot takes, industry deep dives, the Room Report of hotels worth a stay, and the Lobby Bar with hospitality industry tea and news.
Travel Dispatch. Available for a paid subscription. These are personal travel essays, destination guides, and real itineraries I’ve built for myself and clients over 18 years in the luxury travel industry. This weekend - you’ll receive my mother-daughter trip to Paris with my bougie bunny. These are not weekly - they will come out once or twice per month.
Hotel History. My father, Richard Kelley, wrote a weekly newsletter about the history of our family company, Outrigger Hotels, for 40 years. Paid subscribers will receive occasional editions of my father’s archived Saturday Briefing articles. I want him to live on through his work now that he’s gone.
Paid subscribers receive all three by default.
To customize what lands in your inbox, go to substack.com/settings, click on The Upgrade under Subscriptions, and toggle each section on or off.

Each Upgrade | Weekly includes three sections:

🗝️ Pre-Departure: hot takes on the hospitality industry, what I’m thinking about

🗝️ Room Report: Profiles of hotels I’ve visited, want to visit, or recaps of my own travels

🗝️ Lobby Bar: Hospitality industry news and gossip

Recent Articles Include:

Why should you care what I write?

I have been in the hospitality industry my entire life. I manage a fund of hotel investments (we are LPs in most of them), and view the hospitality industry world both from the owner/investor side and the agent side.

You are reading this newsletter because I know travel. I live and breathe it. I travel voraciously. I read everything about new hotel openings, go to industry events, devour instagram hotel room tours, read and post (far too much) on Reddit.

How did I get here?

I spent most of my career, starting 18 years ago, working for Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato, two luxury destination clubs where I helped create and run their experiential travel, small group trips, and bespoke custom travel departments.

I learned how to create an itinerary with proper pacing, what to look for in hotels, how to handle just about every travel emergency, and built a rolodex of global partners.

I went to business school and got my MBA from the Darden School of Business, so I could learn to run my own business.

I was at the peak of my career after Darden - building a team that was one of the most profitable departments of the company, doing what I loved.

What happened next

My parents passed away unexpectedly 4 years ago. It was devastating for me. I was very close with them. It was a wakeup call to start living my life on my own terms.

Two former colleagues from Inspirato approached me about teaming up to start a new agency, our own travel agency, with the culture and values we would have wanted from the beginning.

Alpenglow Travel Was Born

We are a high-touch, boutique agency headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with a hell of a team of a lot of countries and hotels under our collective belts. All three of us are moms. We have spent our kids’ entire lives traveling with them.

What else you should know about me

I love skiing, hiking, the ocean, and writing. I have written 24 children’s books as a ghost writer. I’m a published poet - I have this weird super power that I can write a rhyming poem in perfect meter in under five minutes. You’ll see my poetry occasionally on Substack.

I am obsessed with Agatha Christie and period dramas like Bridgerton and Downton Abbey. If I could, I’d retire to the Cotswolds in a honeystone cottage, take long walks, have geese and chickens, and write poetry all day.

I grew up in Honolulu, and still own a home there, where I visit most of my family. I’m the youngest of 7 kids.

I love puns.

I hope you enjoy my writing and reach out to learn more about how working with an Alpenglow Travel advisor can help you upgrade your next travel experience.

Have a trip in mind?

Reach Out Here

Happy Travels,

Anne Marie