Arnie Weissmann
At the International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM) held earlier this month in Cannes, France, presentations and conversations about luxury became boring. Repetitious. Predictable.
One got the feeling that the most creative marketers and sales staff turned to AI to find new variations on the most oft-repeated phrase, "the wealthy now no longer just want things, they want experiences."
Some, stretching, replaced the second "want" with "desire," "crave," "yearn for," "require" or "demand."
Is this really so new? For decades, we've endured a list of descriptors demonstrating how travelers' desires have allegedly evolved. First, they wanted "authentic" travel. Then, experiential, immersive, transformative and regenerative travel.
In part, these marketing buzzwords were swapped out because, through repetition and over time, they lost impact. But they also became meaningless because they were widely adopted by companies that could not deliver on the promise.
Still, there's a reason these words continue to surface. People may travel for relaxation or simply a break from routine -- why not? -- but the words that have become marketing cliches were chosen because they actually do reflect the essence of what is most meaningful and memorable: trips that instruct, inspire and illuminate.
The challenge for a traveler is to separate wheat from chaff. There are luxury tour operators and hoteliers who provide experiences that are true gateways to insight about people, cultures and places. And there are also luxury suppliers who, to the contrary, reduce the likelihood of an enlightening experience; the primary epiphany their customers are likely to realize while being endlessly pampered within a luxury bubble is, "I really like being pampered."
Now, there's nothing wrong with being pampered. I've actually had that epiphany myself. But when those same suppliers are telling you that their primary goal is to nurture meaningful emotional connections and cultural insights ... something feels off.
So, my ears perked up at an ILTM dinner hosted by the PR firm Perowne International when its CEO, Julia Perowne, said in her welcome speech, "Travelers are spending more than ever before, hotel rates are at an all-time high and yet ... something feels off."
Luxury, she continued, feels like it's in crisis: "It has lost its subtlety and its awe." Citing the Bezos wedding in Venice, she commented that "it just felt so out of date and tone deaf."
Later, she added, "I'm fed up with the obsession with the ultrahigh-net-worth traveler. What happened to the wealthy, the aspirational, the person who saved up, the lowly, one-off honeymooner? I'm all for a suite-only hotel, but I don't want to always just be in a hotel with only really rich people. This is not the great tapestry of life."
She identified part of the problem as a focus on growth at the expense of "those small details: the care and intentionality that connects us to the hand that actually made something.
"Scale seems to have become the narcotic of the industry: the need to build, expand and be bigger," Perowne continued.
And the true cost of the focus on growth for growth's sake? "So many of the brands have lost their novelty and now look the same. They have become beige," she said.
Although sentiment that's disparaging to travel industry segments has been expressed to me before -- off the record -- by other industry leaders, I can't tell you how unexpected a public speech of this type is from a PR executive, particularly at ILTM. While it was somewhat self-serving -- Perowne's hotel clients are, for the most part, independent properties or manage small collections -- it was remarkable nonetheless. Perowne herself admitted to feeling conflicted but felt the need to speak because "parts of our industry just don't feel good right now."
We are standing, she said, at the crossroads of overdevelopment and overtourism.
"We all here have an enormous responsibility as people that promote tourism, in which ever way we do it, as hoteliers, as sales reps, communicators, media, agents and operators, to do it right," Perowne said.
Who does it right? "The ones who reinvest and continue to evolve and pour love and passion into the places and the community they already have. It's not such a sexy headline to talk about no growth, I know. But the reality is that it's increasingly becoming the most admired approach," she said.
Could observations like Perowne's make a difference? Probably not in the boardrooms of large public hotel companies. Their investors would wonder what possessed a CEO who declared, "We've got enough hotels for now."
But what smart CEOs can do -- and some are doing -- is empower general managers to give meaning to corporate buzzwords. I've witnessed GMs who uphold brand standards and go out of their way to provide something rewarding for guests.
The growth that fuels the rise of "beige" hotels is a problem, one that's more whispered about than talked about. We just need a few more people to say the quiet part out loud.