When guests have more taste than management, luxury hospitality is in deep trouble
Across the industry, many so-called five-star hotels are now run by people who have never lived the standards they’re paid to uphold. They think a polished floor can substitute for taste and a checklist for service. The result looks expensive but feels cheap—a theater of luxury staged by people who have only watched it from the mezzanine. And to be clear, this isn’t about snobbery—it’s about financial performance.
Here’s an example from an adjacent industry. Step into a first-class cabin and you can tell in seconds whether its designer ever flew there. There’s nowhere to put your shoes when you recline. The table won’t hold a laptop and a drink together. The seatbelt digs into your ribs because the designer never sat in the seat—an expensive space that feels unwelcoming.
The same error defines much of modern hospitality. You enter a gleaming lobby that smells like a marketing brief, staffed by people on a script. And then you see it—a line at check-in. An actual line. Someone approved that. That’s not hospitality. That’s bureaucracy with marble floors.
Guests notice. They always do. They don’t complain; they simply disappear—to the inn where the welcome is unhurried, the room feels composed, and the service is effortless because it’s real.
This is not a service issue. It’s a leadership issue, at the investor level. True hospitality requires people who have inhabited the world they’re selling and know how things should feel, sound, and move. Over time, the chase for scale and the lure of easy capital pushed judgment aside. Safeguards vanished, and decisions once made by instinct became committee work. As the business grew, it forgot what made it worth growing. And the next thing you know, guests are being guided into a queue by velvet ropes.
But this isn’t a rant, because the diagnosis of the problem is also the solution. The way back is to restore judgment: put hospitality in the hands of people who understand it and back them with capital disciplined enough to protect what makes it valuable. When those forces align, returns will follow.
Today, institutional capital wants in. Funds chasing “experiential luxury” think they’re buying strategy when, in truth, they’re entering a world. But to be clear, this isn’t a warning—it’s a bright, unmissable opportunity. Institutions can redefine how investment meets taste—pairing capital with operators who know this world and protecting the qualities that create pricing power. Done well, this alignment of discipline and vision can redefine the category—delivering higher returns and a renaissance for guests. Done poorly, it will finance the next disappointment.
Luxury hospitality doesn’t fail when it loses its shine, but when those in charge forget what it feels like to arrive.
Thomas Brown – CEO at AD Altius Advisors
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