The Skift New Luxury newsletter is our weekly newsletter focused on the business of selling luxury travel, the people and companies creating and selling experiences, emerging trends, and the changing consumer habits around the sector.
Skift has expanded its scope of coverage into various sectors of travel, and we are now looking at the business of modern luxury travel.
Today's newsletter has a contrast of two dominant trends that permeate luxury travel these days: Experiences and Fundamentals.
You may quibble about the trendiness of either one and lean towards one over the other, both of them equally, or dismiss each out of hand. But when it comes down to it, these are not the worst trends to have. One is about consumers prioritizing at least attempting to experience a place deeper than they have in the past (whether or not they succeed, be damned). The other is about how brands work hard to tailor this or any other experience to a set of agreed upon very high standards.
We can live with both of these trends quite happily, and we think you can too: There have been much, much worse luxury travel trends in the past.
— Jason Clampet, Editor-in-Chief
P.S. If you want to share your expertise or insights into luxury travel, please don’t hesitate to email me at jc at skift dot com. Thank you to the many of you who did over the last two weeks and apologies to those I haven't answered. I'm not usually this popular.
The fundamentals have not changed. That’s the key takeaway from the panelists discussing luxury at the recent World Travel and Tourism Council Summit in Bangkok, Thailand.
According to Clement Kwok, Managing Director & CEO, Hongkong & Shanghai Hotels, while the luxury traveler still expects service, personalization, and pampering, “This idea of people wanting to be pampered, we don’t think will change very much. However, the channels through which you do your pampering or the trends and styles of how people want to be pampered may change.”
Skift’s latest research shows a clear shift in demand for more transformative travel experiences among upscale travelers, but we expect many brands will jump on this trend without offering anything significantly new in terms of product or programming.
Critics are eager to point out that personal transformation has always been inherent in travel. They argue that the transformative travel trend is more marketing-speak than anything else, forcing the theme upon a market always hungry for the next new thing.
There is a shadow hospitality infrastructure outside of the traditional hospitality sector that powers luxury consumers’ third or even fourth homes. It includes personal staffing agencies, smart home devices, private transportation providers, developers investing in spec homes, and, of course ,the economies where these home are located.
Multiple homeowners are a growing segment of the luxury travel market so learning to speak and appeal directly to their unique desires is a necessity for any luxury travel provider.
River cruising doesn’t just age problems, its brands are competing on the quality of their on-shore experiences in an effort to lure in a new generation of cruisers. For many years, river cruises were the stepchild of the cruise industry writ large.
But a few years ago, the sector hit its tipping point and now the vying lines are competing with each other in order to acquire new customers while retaining loyal clients. Upping the game in the river cruise industry these days is not so much about the destination as it is the expansion of the experience.
This Skift Trends Report, produced in partnership with International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM), explores the many disruptions in luxury travel where tired narratives about what upscale travelers want no longer suffice. The very definition of “luxury” is nebulous today, meaning different things to a widening arc of customers with myriad psychographic profiles, age brackets, and personal lifestyles, emerging from a continually expanding range of source markets.
