I had something completely different in mind for this week’s letter, but I came across this piece of hotel news:

In short, Hilton is launching its new longevity-oriented spa offering which is planned to debut in January 2027 at Signia Hilton Indianapolis.

Now you’re like ’ok Emma, an entire newsletter because Hilton something wellness something?’

Let me explain!

Hilton buying into the very much in-demand wellness optimization boom gives me uncanny-valley vibes. The mockup image could be from any spa; they all look the same. The programming of infrared, sauna, cold therapy, and a soundscaped lounge is also very copy-paste.

This predictably is to be expected from a global brand such as Hilton. In fact, it’s a function of being a global chain to produce something scalable and palatable. But does it always have to mean unexciting choices?

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends

In this letter: SHEIN vs. Marriott, lack of integrity, and hotel brand inflation.

Are global chains the fast fashion of hospitality?

The fast fashion giant SHEIN adds more than 7,000 and up to 10,000 new styles of clothing to their site per day1 and has, like many other fast fashion companies, built an empire on the principles of:

1. volume

2. consistency (hey, at least you know what you’re getting is not great)

3. global reach

Marriott International operates over 10,000 properties under 30 of their proprietary brands.2 Oh and would you look at that, the same principles apply.

Global hotel chains and fast fashion have a lot more in common than you would think, as in one way or another, both have democratized the business they are in. Fast fashion made clothing affordable, and global chains made the hotel experience consistent and widely available.

However, we all know that with the birth of fast fashion, something died. Call it integrity or meaning, it doesn’t really make a difference. But is hospitality suffering the same symptoms?

Diagnosing the hospitality industry

Here are more parallels if the above wasn’t convincing enough.

1. Mass production of identical products available in every market

A Hilton in Tokyo and a Hilton in Madrid will offer essentially interchangeable experiences, and the same is the case with the offering at the Zara in Stockholm and the Zara in São Paulo.

2. Trend-chasing without original design DNA

Boutique hotels were the OG properties selling lifestyle, and when the big players caught on, the distinctively global chain -backed lifestyle hotel category was born (you know my feelings about this by now).

I think Moxy (by Marriott) and Canopy (by Hilton) are the hospitality equivalent of H&M’s conscious collection where something that’s fundamentally standardized and not conscious gets a surface level facelift. Personality-washing?

3. A race to the bottom of labor

Fast fashion is built on exploitative supply chains, and luckily, this is not (always) the case in hospitality. THAT SAID, there is a chronic underinvestment in people in the industry with come companies publicly stating that salaries are their biggest challenge.

4. Perhaps the worst of them all: disposability

Fast fashion produces garments that are in and out of your wardrobe as fast as trends are – and we know how quick the trend cycle has gotten.3 The brand portfolios of global chains are starkly expanding, to the point where both guests and investors alike are left asking, what is the difference? These brands can offer experiences that are correct, clean, and functional, but at the same time utterly forgettable.

Also, from an investor perspective, if a brand has been created based on a trend, you have the literal worst hedge against the very likely event that mass consensus of what’s ‘in’ changes, an event which continues to occur faster than ever. When you and your competitor have 30 brands each, none of them can have a distinct identity in any meaningful way, not least because identity requires some level of constraint and *gasp* risk.

Why global chains are not the fast fashion of hospitality

Told you, there would be reflection.

Hotel chains employ millions of people worldwide and provide stable careers and transferable skills in an industry where independent properties often cannot offer or guarantee that same security. Hilton has been named the best workplace in the world multiple times.4

They invest in technology and sponsor some of the most impactful R&D in the industry (I’ve seen hospitality startups get life changing deals with them), build sustainability infrastructure as levels of reporting are completely different at that scale, and train staff at a scale that is incomparable to an independent property.

And newsflash, also brands like the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons are owned by global chains. Four Seasons, despite being a global brand with nearly 130 properties has managed to maintain a level of service consistency that is quite remarkable, and is one of the best examples of “real” hospitality at scale that’s out there.

Furthermore, there is good design in global brand hotels, especially when we get closer to the luxury segment.

Yet, brand portfolio Crown Jewels like these are the exception, not the rule, and they do it by growing slowly with some level restraint and intention.

Global chains are not inherently bad, but I have real concerns about the sustainability of the current growth model of, say, 30 brands, 10,000 properties, pipeline announcements every quarter, loyalty programs, and the commodification of guest relationships.

I’m concerned that we may be following the same trajectory of fast fashion: growth for the sake of growth, and at the expense of meaning and substance.

The consumer has caught on

The signs are everywhere, my friend.

There is already a rising traveler preference for boutique and independent properties5, and Substack newsletters (such as this one) focused on hospitality criticism are carving way from traditional, run-of-the-mill listicles of hotels.6 And it is not only the midscale brands that are under scrutiny; Bloomberg has called luxury chains ‘cookie-cutter’.

In the realm of fashion, the backlash against fast fashion produced the movement of slow fashion that’s traceable, ethical, and above all else, intentional.

I think we’re on the cusp of something similar happening in hospitality. Slow hospitality, if you will (Forbes called it ‘deep luxury’ here). Whatever you call it, real hospitality cannot exist without intention, and properties that prioritize depth and personality over breadth and consistency are just that; living and breathing, and filled with awareness, the prerequisite to intention.

A little strategic imperfection is more than welcome, as highlighted in this piece by . Why?

“The human brain is very good at remembering things that are novel or unexpected. So when the pattern is broken - when some otherwise basic detail is ‘reinvented’ - we remember.” – in Suite Things

This is why people LOVE properties like Passalacqua or Airelles’ properties. The level of detail that these properties have gone to build their world is absolutely unparalleled ( wrote an excellent list of more hotels that fall in this category here).

Conclusion

Just kidding, there is no real conclusion, just thoughts.

I think the industry as a whole could use some awareness. And I would encourage global chains to take a risk, introduce something unprecedented, hire a young, forward-thinking talent into your strategy team.

Sure, you think your investors will protest and want to cater to ‘real’ demand metrics. But trying to tick all those boxes leads to something so generic people would rather risk inconsistency by staying elsewhere.

All of this because I wish Hilton did something a bit more interesting with their recovery and wellness concept. Beige is not the enemy, but picking beige just because everything else is beige is a cop out.

As always, I really want to hear your thoughts.

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Thank you for coming to my ted talk,

🔑 Emma

Greetings from Sweden!

The gist of the hospitality industry is arguably guest experience, that is, the journey the guest takes when they decide to book a stay at a given hotel.

This journey starts way before the guest sets foot on the property. It’s the sum of all the touch points they ever come in contact with, including the digital ones.

This week I stayed at a hotel that has won the title of best guest experience in Sweden, and I approached the stay like a researcher on the field (for what else am I?).

What I learnt was that a truly exceptional guest experience is deceivingly simple, and that perhaps its something akin to the x factor - you either got it or you don’t.

I hope you enjoy.

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: the building blocks of a world-class guest experience, and a return to the basics.

Welcome home

“More at home than at home” – a guest review

It’s afternoon when my friend and I arrive at Hotell S:t Clemens in the medieval town of Visby on the island of Gotland in Sweden. We are greeted at the front desk by Helene who is standing in front of a hanging array of room keys.

“Welcome!”, she exclaims, with such sincerity that it’s hard not to feel like our arrival was awaited. She asks about our journey there, if we’ve been to the island before, if we have plans for the day.

And allow me to get woo-woo for a second: the good energy of the property was palpable. It’s made up from a few conjoint buildings from different eras, and a courtyard that’s attached to both the 13th century ruins of the church of St Clemens and the town’s botanical garden.

Moreover, everyone seems at ease: guests, staff, passers-by, and yours truly.

All I can think of is how is this atmosphere created?

I decide to chat to Agneta, another staff member, about what it is that guests love so much about the hotel, and what makes them return again and again (a significant portion of the hotel’s guests are returning customers, which is the best stamp of approval you could get).

“Many guests feel like they’re coming home. We have 30 rooms, so we’re small enough to recognize our guests. We have a very personal relationship with them. So, if we know that you’re going to Fårö [an destination in Gotland) today, we can remember that you’ve been to Fårö and pick up on that later. A large hotel can’t maintain that level of personal connection, but we can.

We have a significant number of returning guests and…”

Our chat is interrupted (and rightly so) by a guest who comes up to Agneta and asks if it’s possible to get a beer. ”Absolutely,” she says, and makes the guest feel just as attended to as she made me feel just now.

”Emma,” she says endearingly while ringing up the guest’s drink. ”I’ll meet you in the garden in a bit, ok?”

Hospitality is a reciprocal act

There is no direct translation for the word hospitality in Swedish, which is also the case in the Finnish language (read my thoughts on Finnish hospitality in this edition of S.P.A), but that hasn’t stopped Hotell S:t Clemens from embodying its essence fully.

We are now sat in the garden. Agneta is visibly cold (late-summer evenings in Sweden are no joke), but at no points does she make me feel like we are in a hurry to end our chat.

She points out that the ruins used to have bees in them, and that a couple of centuries ago there was a lady who lived in the vicinity and sold cigars, which is why today the hotel has its own locally produced hand-rolled cigar (hotel merch done well).

She takes her time, making me feel like we’re old friends and that I belong here.

“I often think that I wish everyone could experience what I experience during a working day, because I get such a boost from the guests,” Agneta explains. “It’s the interaction with guests that makes the job, and when you’ve built a great connection with a guest and then they check out, you get so much appreciation in return. You just walk around feeling happy—it’s such a wonderful job.”

“My colleagues who work in housekeeping and other back-of-house functions, they don’t always get to hear all of this, so it’s up to us, the front-of-house staff, to pass on the joy and gratitude we receive from our guests.”

The mutual respect between colleagues is apparent from the way she speaks. “We are like a big family. We really enjoy working together, and I think that is, then, mirrored to the guests, as they can see that we truly enjoy being around each other”.

Two sides of the same coin, indeed. You can just hear the devotion for the task at hand.

Great guest experience is deceptively simple

Our stay had nothing to do with the extravaganza that is luxury hotel guest experience today, but it felt far more impactful. It is astonishing what the emotional presence of the hotel staff does for one’s nervous system.

At no point did I feel I was anything but a pleasure to the property. I saw the unhurriedness of other guests, sitting in the locally-crafted garden chairs sipping on locally-crafted beverages, enjoying the last slivers of summer sun, and felt an exhale of bliss escape my lungs.

This is it, I thought. This is what (ultra-)luxury is trying so hard to replicate.

Presence, time, attention, personalized interactions, but all coming from the soul rather than a checklist. Standard operating procedures can absolutely help, and I would even go as far as saying that they are necessary for consistency and good service, but nothing will ever beat the genuine care from another human being.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s quite different edition of tPH. I want to clarify that this post is absolutely not sponsored content, and has sprung out of my own awe from coming in contact with what I feel is true hospitality.

I can’t but recommend visiting Visby on the island of Gotland in Sweden, and when you do, you know where to stay.

I would be so glad to hear where in the world you have felt most welcome or felt something similar to what I tried to describe above.

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I’m working on a more analytical look at the hotels that are named to have the best guest experience in the world, so stay tuned for that.

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Goodbye and see you again,

🔑 Emma

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

- Søren Kierkegaard

Dear guest,

In order to see what’s ahead of us, we must understand where we come from.

Hospitality is one of the longest-standing industries in the entire world, and you can tell. The industry has its quirks and is often deemed slow to innovate, but at the same time, it stands on a rich and multifaceted history filled with incredible stories and juicy details.

Now, I’m not a historian; just a philosopher who happens to be neck-deep in hospitality, and who is still very much trying to figure out what it is and means (if you have been here for a while, you know that we keep tackling the question from any and every direction).

History is never a bad place to start; alas, join me on this journey over millennia.

★★★

The mysterious history of the hotel

★★★

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: 5,000 years of hospitality in one sitting. Buckle up!

Knock knock. Who’s there?

When we talk about hospitality, we are often referring to one of two things: 1) the moral notion of hospitality, or 2) the transactional notion of hospitality.

The first commercial inns appeared in Mesopotamia around 3000 BC, and they were best described as stripped-down-bare-essentials. This was a purely transactional configuration of a place to not die on the road.

To contrast this dynamic of you give me coin, you get roof over your head, there is the understanding of hospitality in its moral and sacred sense, that far predates the understanding of hospitality as a transaction

Some traditions that came to the same conclusion independent of each other:

• Ancient Greece: xenia, the sacred duty to welcome strangers under the protection of the big guy Zeus. If you violate it, you get struck by lightning or suffer an equivalent divine punishment.1

• India: the principle of atithi devo bhava declared that the guest is god.2

• Middle Eastern philosophy: diyafa as a law mandated three days of unconditional hospitality for friend and foe alike.3

• Norse culture: guest-right was so sacred that violating it was considered worse than murder (also discussed in my piece on medieval hospitality).4

With this in mind, let’s look at some of the most important events and eras in the history of hospitality.

The Roman Empire

Along their imperial roads, the Romans built a network of hospitae and mansiones, dedicated accommodation for travelers, that became the first wider network of hotel-like establishments.

By all accounts, this system also happened to be utterly dreadful. The reputation of Roman inns was in fact so bad that Cicero, who was one of the most well-travelled men in the entirety of the Roman Republic, completely refused to stay in them, preferring to do the historical version of couch surfing instead.

The poet Juvenal complains about the noise, the smells, the company, and stolen belongings in his records. He writes:

"The sick die here because they can't sleep... For when does sleep come in rented rooms?" - Juvenal

Yet these establishments were a completely necessary development, and for the average merchant or soldier on the road, it was the best option.

The world’s oldest hotel

In 705 AD, a hot spring inn called Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan opened in Hayakawa in Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture to serve traveling samurai and officials – and it’s still very much in operation today!

Not only is it the same location but the same family (passed along over 53 generations), which means over 1,300 years of continuous hospitality.

The hotel room with a lock (a revolution)

The modern hotel didn’t really exist until someone very brave and someone we are gravely indebted to dared to ask: what if the guest had their own room?

Before the late 18th century, sharing a bed with a stranger was pretty much standard, and you would just sleep where there was space and hope for the best. Privacy was not yet a real consideration.

The City Hotel in New York opened in 1794 was the first American building designed for the sole purpose of being a hotel, and it already carried loads of resemblance to hotels as we understand them today. There was a ballroom, a bar, a library, and public parlors.

And yet, NO LOCKS 🚫🚫🔒🔒

It was only in 1829 when the Tremont House (also called America’s first luxury hotel) opened in Boston that you could lock the door behind you.

The birth of the luxury hotel: enter Mr. Ritz

César Ritz was born in 1850 in Switzerland, the promised land of hospitality (I’m biased as this is where I got my hospitality education).

He was the youngest of thirteen children of a farming family, and wasn’t very successful in the myriad of endeavors he undertook (he was almost like Barbie in that there was no career he hadn’t tried).

In 1867, at seventeen, he left Switzerland for Paris on the eve of the Universal Exhibition, which was a move that ultimately landed him in the world of hospitality.

By 1877, at twenty-seven, he was managing the Grand Hôtel National in Lucerne, and by 1889, he was running the Savoy Hotel in London which was arguably the most important hotel in the universe at that time.

The Savoy was already revolutionary in that it was the first hotel entirely lit by electricity (the Tremont House was partly so), the first one with lifts running on electricity, and the first one with private bathrooms.

But there is a tier above revolutionary, which is legendary.

Ritz partnered with Auguste Escoffier, the father of modern French cuisine, and together they ended up rewriting the social rules of London. Before Ritz, public dining was a big no-no, a disgrace, embarrassing, especially for women.

Because of Ritz’s influence, it was no longer scandalous, as he introduced after-theatre dinners at the Savoy and made it normal for couples to eat together in public (one of the greatest joys of life, imagine not being able to do that).

He is the godfather of cosmopolitan London nightlife, thanks to the Savoy dining room.

A fun fact

In 1897, a young Italian named Guccio Gucci arrived in London worked as a bellhop at the Savoy. The unprecedented level of luxury he witnessed there inspired him to found his namesake brand.

Or rather, there’s this story of how he ran the elevator at the hotel and had loads of time to study guests’ luggage, and decided he could do better.

(In any case, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, fashion loves to take from hospitality.)

The first Ritz is opened

Right before the turn of the century in 1898, César opened his own hotel: the ever so legendary Hôtel Ritz in Paris on Place Vendôme.

He raised the bar of luxury hotels to an unseen level with en-suite bathrooms and telephones in every room, and it was without a doubt the most luxurious hotel in the world.

As with many success stories starred by men, there was a very clever woman behind it, who in this case was César’s wife Marie-Louise Ritz.

She designed the staircases to be wide so that women in gowns and heels could descend gracefully, implemented indirect lighting because direct light is harsh on faces (genius), she created a shopping gallery inside the hotel so that guests never had to leave (the mother of brand extensions), and just generally thought about all the seemingly minute details which ultimately make up exceptional experiences.

And she was obviously the one who chose the iconic peach-colored towels for the hotel, because peach flatters the complexion of the person drying their face (I bow down to this lady and aspire to her level of aura).

Marie Louise seemed to understand one of the golden rules of hospitality: all touch points at a hotel, whether they be staff interactions or objects, directly communicate whether you thought about the guest or flat out ignored them, and there is no in between.

When César suffered a nervous breakdown in 1902 and never fully recovered, Marie-Louise took over the management of the Ritz hotels in a world where she was sometimes excluded from her own business meetings for the fact that she was a woman. She continued to run the empire until and after César’s death in 1918.

The Ritz name entered the dictionary, and “ritzy” means ostentatiously luxurious.

The birth of the hotel chain

The 19th century came with a slew of big structural changes for the industry. Names such as Conrad Hilton, Kemmons Wilson, and J.W. Marriott emerged as the American hotel chain pioneers with the greatest promise for hotels yet: predictability.

Before the standardization that chains brought about, you would never know what you were getting into when checking in. A family inn (let alone a roadside motel) could either be clean and comfy, or an absolute hell hole. Naturally this risk still exists, but it’s mitigated by public reviews.

In 1952, Kemmons Wilson founded Holiday Inn after a family road trip where he was so appalled by the inconsistency of American motels that he decided to make every room identical, with the same bed, same towels, always affordable, and before all else, predictable.

Now travel accommodation was democratized, and people who couldn’t afford the Ritz would know what to expect from their stay, and be able to count on not having their shit stolen.

At the same time, a snowball of standardization started rolling downhill as brand guidelines and SOPs slowly became the baseline. This foreshadows what we know as the great beige-ification that’s happening in the hotel world today.

This is when the hospitality industry in the way we understand it today was born. And if not before, now is when it had finally drifted far, far away from the devoted and sacred.

The boutique hotel and return of love

The pendulum must always swing the other way.

In 1984, the men behind the legendary Studio 54, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, opened Morgans Hotel in New York – a very demure establishment sans signs on the building, with interiors by Andrée Putman. You could never confuse this place with a Hilton.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was the first ever boutique hotel, which was the counter-movement to the already-rampant sameness in the hotel world. Schrager saw that the hotels in Europe were still non-uniform (that also often had way longer histories behind them than American hotels), and wanted to rage against the machine. A hotel should feel intentional, and a hotel should surprise you, he proclaimed.

More births of icons ensued: Adrian Zecha founded Aman in 1988, which has become known as the epitome of luxury hospitality (and that is currently under some media scrutiny – there has been many takes on this already, let me know if you want me to discuss it too).

In any case, art and intention started re-entering the space, and with that, the essence of hospitality.

Places like Ett Hem or any of Belmond’s properties are not descendants from the Holiday Inn, but part of the same lineage of the monastery guest houses and ancient ethical pacts.

What has even changed?

And here we still are, lifetimes later, asking the same question: is the guest a transaction or a responsibility?

For the past hundred years, propelled by globalization, the industry has undergone very consequential structural changes, and in no way do I believe that the winds of change are done with.

With AI, even more functions in hotels can be automated, and consequentially, stays can become even more impersonal (and to be clear, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, not every hotel has to be a shrine of devotion).

At the same time, humans are craving experiences of care and belonging, and luxury hotels that succeed at building worlds that resonate are in more demand than ever.

The transformation economy, which we have talked about before, is asking us whether hospitality could be more than an experience, and if it can change people (I think you know my answer is absolutely). Wellness (the bad W-word that no longer means anything) questions if hotels can be vessels for healing. Moreover, could hotels be the solace in a world where third places are dwindling and people feel lonely?

There is also a conversation to be had about the almost mythical status of luxury hospitality, which is what now enables hotels to command over $2,000 nightly rates (entry level), which used to be unheard of. Now that even Aman’s facade of perfection is starting to crumble, can anyone live up to those expectations? Especially at scale?

To me, the hotel has always been more than a building with beds or a roof over your head. At its simplest, it’s safety and life support, and at its best, it’s a complete rewiring of identity and a refocus towards the beautiful.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s letter, which is an undeniably reductive account of a 5,000 year-old industry (and tradition!!!!). But I happen to believe that the details that stick out to us and storylines that pique our interest are always worth exploring.

If you love nerding out over hotel history, I recommend listening to the !

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and any fun stories or important turns I may have missed (I know there are many).

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Stay ritzy,

🔑 Emma

I am pleased to welcome you to this letter, which is the 400-subscriber special of the Philosophy of Hospitality.

This piece started when I was listening to this podcast episode, where talks about what attracts her to hospitality:

I felt this on a visceral level as I, too, find endless beauty in hospitality. But, then again, what is beauty?

Is there a difference between beauty, aesthetics, and harmony?

Join me on this attempt to articulate the philosophy of beauty as it relates to our world (and obviously, hospitality). I also have a special guest join us at the end.

⋆⭒˚.⋆ The philosophy of beauty ⋆⭒˚.⋆

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: why beauty is a necessity, what it is and is not, a conversation with a creative, and a warm, warm thank you.

Beauty is not frivolous, nor is it a luxury

What is beauty?

We have a tendency to treat beauty as something that is nice-to-have; an upgrade to the mundane, the cherry on top, the finishing touch that is handled only after serious things are sorted.

I happen to think that this, very functionalist and modernist approach that favors rationality and efficiency is not in alignment with what human flourishing entails.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, philosopher Elaine Scarry argues that beauty performs a specific and fundamentally irreplaceable function in human life: it decenters us and our individual human existences.

When we encounter something beautiful, whether that’s a view, a room, a gesture, a face, we are momentarily pulled out of our own singular point of view.

As this newsletter is called the philosophy of hospitality, allow me to pull an example from that realm.

Imagine you are arriving at a hotel after a long flight, your inbox is swamped, you’re exhausted… imagine the relief you could get from being able to decenter yourself and your regular life for a moment.

At its best, a beautiful lobby can interrupt the drama that is human life. We become attentive to something outside of ourselves and surrender our importance.

According to Plato, beauty is the most accessible form and the only transcendent quality of the universal and fundamental Good™, as we can perceive it with our senses. We cannot see or touch or taste virtues such as truth or justice, but we can directly experience beauty which, then, can lead us toward those higher things.

A beautiful hotel is far from frivolous, as it is making the invisible and often abstract qualities of care, attention, intentionality (that also happen to be the constituents of hospitality) visible and tangible.

Beauty ≠ perfection

Another frequent misconception about beauty is that it is equal to flawlessness or perfection.

The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in Saving Beauty that contemporary culture has reduced beauty to smoothness; everything is frictionless, filtered, optimized for the screen.

Han argues that this smoothness is actually the enemy (if not the antithesis) of beauty. True beauty requires what he calls “negativity”, which is the unknown factor of texture, mystery, resistance, even grit.

If a space is designed to be instagrammable, meaning every angle is considered for the camera, design choices tend to become as inoffensive and palatable as possible to as many people as possible.

This results in borderline ominous spaces that could be anywhere. Both and have talked about the great beigefication in the hotel world, where algorithms and mass-market design have flattened what used to be diverse spaces and brand into a uniform palette of beige, cream, and taupe.

Even if it’s not neutrals and, instead, neon signs and green plants as is the case with lifestyle hotels, the same issue is present – and so is notably also the absence of beauty. For a space geared for hospitality (hotel, bathhouse, spa, restaurant, members’ club), embracing life and grain communicates authenticity and realness to the guest, whereas overt smoothness evokes distrust (we all know this now through our lived experience with AI slop).

What is it then? Attention!

Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Beauty commands attentiveness (as opposed to the frantic, dopamine-driven vigilance we have towards a notification for instance). The attention beauty sparks in us is more spacious and vigilant.

Putting attention into the design of a space or an experience also means producing attention and presence in the guest.

Aristotle said that beauty is order, symmetry, and definiteness, and it always results from intentional arrangement. Often the places we find most beautiful are the result of a thousand small, intentional choices that were all made with the guest in mind.

(Side note: many beautiful things are that precisely that because they happen in an unprompted, completely kismet way. However even in these cases you could argue for an underlying organizing intelligence that is geared towards order and harmony).

In conversation with a creative

I wanted to hear from someone who thinks about beauty and harmony professionally but from outside the hospitality industry.

is a New York-based creative and art director who’s embedded into the fashion scene.

He approaches spaces and images with what I would call a philosophical intuition, and we spoke about beauty, harmony, the death of Instagram hotels, and what he would do if someone gave him a hotel.

What does beauty mean to you?

“Personalization. Beauty means your camera roll. What do you find beautiful? Personal beauty is the denial of what is considered objectively beautiful.

You kind of get to edit and control the construct of what the word sees beauty. So you’re not just reduced to the idea of what has been driven into the normalcy, but the expression of subjectivity in a beauty is in the eye of the beholder kind of way”

When you walk into a space and something feels off, what’s usually wrong?

“It’s always the absence of culture. You should always consider, how do you put the spirit of the city you’re in, the energy of the place, onto the experience you’re offering? When that connection is missing, you feel it immediately. You can’t fake cultural resonance.”

Everyone talks about taste (*joint eye-roll*) right now. Where does yours come from?

“Reading the room. And reading, period. Document Journal, Wallpaper magazine, YouTube. Not reels, not TikTok, not whoever says you need these things to be chic. Because those people go do research from someone else and repurpose it. You’re listening to a copy of a copy of a copy. My fluency comes from primary sources.”

What do you think about the Instagrammable hotel epidemic?

“Everyone is bored of Instagram. That’s the issue. And here’s the thing: if the vibe of a place is that no one is on their phones, and you’re the only one scrolling, you feel it. Put down the phone. The best places make you want to do that. It’s always the worst places are designed for you to pick it up.”

What’s missing in the wellness and hospitality space?

“Life. Everything is so fictionalized. You can’t over-polish everything. You need to humanize and connect people. At the end of the day, you’re servicing people, not curating a set.”

Three tips for someone designing a hotel?

“One: find the Gaia Repossi of your world (someone with real taste and cultural fluency) and invite them to live in your hotel for a month.

Two: read the city you’re in. Find the young emerging artist and connect them to the property.

Three: remember you’re designing for two audiences, people who travel and people who live in the city. The best hotels become a place of belonging for locals as well.”

If you could create one experience that no hotel currently offers, what would it be?

“A photographer who travels with the guests to document their day-to-day. The guests are off their phones because someone is capturing the memories for them. When they check out, they get the photographs. Because once you’re checked out, it’s all memories, which is what a hotel actually sells.”

To all NYC people: make sure to catch ’ exhibition starting from 8th of August.

Beauty is ethical

The aim of this letter was to communicate a) the necessity of beauty and b) what beauty is and is not.

It was Nadine’s words that made me realize I was also drawn to hospitality because I love beauty, and its allure is what makes me reminisce over a hotel years later.

Scarry writes that when we encounter beauty, we want to reproduce it and to bring it into the world again. When we leave something we found beautiful, we carry it with us and want to recreate that in our lives.

This is why beauty is also an ethical choice – by creating beautiful things and atmospheres, that attention compounds and goes on to create even more beauty in the world.

Happy 400, dear guests. Thank you for being here, this is truly my happy place and it’s because I get to hear from you each week and talk about my favorite things.

And as promised, a snippet of my DJ set coming soon!!!

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🔑 Emma

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: the private members’ club market is still growing, a brief history of the sector, the Soho House story, and how to open the best private members’ club ever!

Earlier this year I was in Verbier and walked past 67 Pall Mall’s alpine outpost, which is a wine-focused members’ club with a collection of 3,000 bottles and a gym that caters to professional (après) skiers.

CHF 2,500 a year to join, CHF 600 if you’re under 25, but as with many clubs, you can’t just buy your way in. Oh no nooo. Member candidates require a ‘proposer’ and ‘seconder’ from within the club’s existing membership.

Each day that I made my way to the slopes I saw fur-clad, rather glamorous alpine ladies enter the doors and be greeted by a uniformed concierge offering them coffee at the door.

Seeing this got me thinking about the explosion of private members’ clubs and what it means for hospitality at large.

Let’s talk about it 🔑

What are private members’ clubs actually selling?

At their most basic, private members’ clubs are social and increasingly work spaces and facilities (e.g., wellness) that you pay to access.

But such a reductive description misses the main selling point, which is curation of the space, of the cultural programming, and perhaps most crucially, of the people sharing the space with you.

As Vogue Arabia demurely put it, a certain standard of company and caliber of conversation are expected at a private members’ club. Without the promise of a certain lifestyle or community, the offering would be essentially glorified coworking (and we know that doesn’t pay off).

The promise of being a member is that the person sitting next to you is interesting, accomplished, or at the very least, vetted.

Now there is an issue with this promise, which we will tackle later. But first, some numbers!

The private members’ club market size and growth

More private members’ clubs have opened in the past four years than in the three decades following the 1985 opening of London’s Groucho Club1. The pipeline of prospective openings is the largest it has ever been.

The global market is projected to nearly double to $59.1 billion by 2033, growing at an annual rate of 7.2%. The sector grew at 11% annually through to 2027, at which point it was valued at $25.8 billion.2

And the effects extend beyond the clubs themselves. Properties within a 15-minute drive of Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds saw buyer interest more than double in August 2024, with 2.3 buyers registering for every one buyer in adjacent areas.3

Houses within a mile of prestigious clubs sell 2.5 weeks faster than comparable properties five miles away.

The buyer profile is different too, more international and affluent.

Three waves (a brief history)

Back in their naissance, traditional gentlemen’s clubs were for people of position, power, and wealth. Think University secret societies and men with big moustaches smoking cigars.

In 1985 The Groucho in London was the first to open its doors to members based on other factors than money or title. Interesting and credible people, especially from the arts world, were welcomed.

Then Soho House in 1995 took this idea and ran, scaling it globally, adding creative professionals to its pool, and in doing so turning a somewhat niche corner of hospitality into a billion-dollar industry.

Now we are arguably experiencing the third wave of private members’ clubs, and the types of clubs have proliferated wildly.

There are super luxurious ones like Aman in New York, hyper-local ones that are embedded in the surrounding neighborhood like The Dally in London’s Islington, clubs tailored for tech entrepreneurs, clubs for longevity-junkies (quite the oxymoron).

Wellness clubs, also called the Gen Z equivalent of the country club, such as Equinox and Remedy Place are an especially interesting category that with the longevity boom will see a stark rise in demand in my humble opinion4.

Do to peaking demand, mixed-use developments now routinely integrate members’ clubs alongside hotels and residences. The subscription economy has officially infiltrated every corner of our lives, and hospitality is no exception.

The Soho House question (yes, we are opening this can of worms)

Can Soho House redeem itself?

While the company has almost become synonymous with the private members’ club, it has faced a lot of controversy.

Soho House went public on New York Stock Exchange in July 2021, valued at nearly $3 billion. The entry pitch was exclusivity, lifestyle appeal, and a strong pipeline with the aim of opening 7 clubs a year.

Putting quarterly performance and growth pressure on a business model based on exclusivity and curation is not the most harmonious equation.

In 2023 the member pool of Soho House had grown to over 250,0005 and 40 clubs (vs. just 150,000 members and 33 clubs in 2021), leading to dissatisfied members circulating letters accusing the company of a “spreadsheet culture” and a “creep toward corporatism.”

Following the outrage, the company had to temporarily stop accepting new members in its more popular locations such as New York and London.

(On a further note, the company has been in operations for the past three decades and has never managed to turn a profit).

Now most of you know that Soho House has been taken private, away from the rising pressures of the public market at a share price far below its IPO level (we took a look at this in this edition of the Lobby).

The question remains if the sector is fundamentally unfit for scaling. Soho House showed that the pursuit of commercial success makes the club worse, because optimizing for growth (i.e., opening the doors for more members with less scrutiny) dilutes the exclusivity that people paid for.

As Jamie Caring puts it in this report:

“If you go into the club world to make money, you are concepting it back to front. Clubs are about culture and community, not commerce.”

Does this sound familiar to you guys? Isn’t this the exact same dynamic we see in luxury goods, namely the juxtaposition of scale versus actual substance (previously discussed here).

And just like in luxury, the clubs that chase growth at the expense of their soul will find their members making an Irish exit and opening their laptops somewhere else where the atmosphere is cooler and the people are more interesting and the food is better (, who’s a member of Casa Cipriani, mentioned in this interview that F&B programming is one of the most important things a members’ club needs to get right).

Is the growth of the private members’ club sector sustainable?

As established, the market is projected to nearly double in the next decade but we have already seen massive growth pains à la Soho House. Do we really expect the situation to get any better when the market is getting flooded with options?

If everyone and their mom is selling access to a curated community, the word curated becomes a non-word (just like luxury, which means nothing anymore).

Selling access seems to me an inherently fragile business model when exclusivity is the final product; because the more you sell, the less exclusive it becomes by definition. The more clubs there are, the easier it is for members to hop from one to the next chasing the moment i.e., the newer, cooler opening.

I predict that retention will be the real challenge of the industry, because for members to become rooted in their chosen club requires a bit more than a picturesque bar and bespoke speaker lineup (this reminds me that I’m going to Nordic Business Forum this year!! Anyone else?).

I wish I could refrain from sounding like a broken record, but if a private members’ club were to become lucrative and sustainable in the business-sense, then it has to embody the genuine care, attention, and sense of belonging of hospitality.

Speaking of belonging…

Join , , and I for a very special webinar where we explore the intersection of hospitality, safety, community, and culture.

We’ll share practical insights for creating spaces that people want to return to.

If you can’t join us live, register anyway and we’ll send the recording your way 🐬

11th of August 2 pm ET on Zoom

Register here

The key 🔑 takeaways

Do we realize that private members’ clubs are commercializing belonging in an increasingly lonely and disconnected world (how many times have you read a sentence like this in the past year? My sincere apologies for throwing another one at you). But on a larger scale, I’m afraid it’s not something we can commodify.

What I think WILL and DOES work:

1. Small-scale clubs that have minimal to zero marketing outreach aside from word-of-mouth and organic reputation. Chez Margaux in NYC comes to mind.

2. Clubs that have a specialized offering and do not solely rely on member curation. Wellness and longevity-focused clubs are a prime example, because people will still get the value out of their membership getting specialized treatments or having a sauna session even without a tech CEO seated next to them. Others are food-focused private supper clubs.

3. Exceptional hospitality and service excellence will remain a differentiator and unique selling point. As rumor has it, the service quality at more established locations has gone down. Prioritizing a high standard of service and hospitality without compromises will resonate with members paying a high ticket.

That’s all for today dear readers. What do you think? Are you investing in private members’ clubs? Are you part of one? You can comment or reply to this email directly with your thoughts.

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Already looking forward to next week,

🔑 Emma

“Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. Question your teaspoons.”

– Georges Perec

Dear guest,

You may or may not know that I’m not a huge fan of listing (the format of writing also rampant on this platform), whether that’s hotels or restaurants to visit or new openings, in hospitality writing.

Perhaps I feel this way because it’s almost what most of hospitality media is comprised of. The Philosophy of Hospitality was, in a way, born out of my attempt at being contrarian – be fun, GenZ 🤪, thoughtful, and make more unexpected connections and observations about the industry and its role in culture.

However now I find myself thinking that I’ve had beef with the listicle format for no reason, and that even this format could be fun and intentional.

So without further ado, please enjoy the continuation of the conversation on hotel merch that begun last week.

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: some really good pieces of hotel merch from chic to whimsical to outrageous plus tPH readers share some of their favorites!

But first, what makes hotel merch good?

The criteria to end up on this list are not groundbreaking. However, now that everyone is doing merch, the simple things can make the greatest of difference.

• Originality (put some intention into the objects please)

• Functionality (usability of the object always grants bonus points)

• Locality (if it’s somehow nodding to the surroundings, the uniqueness of the property… we love it)

• Wacky (surprise me!)

To note: all of these examples, save one (point 16), are things you can purchase, so I have left out the items that hotels gift to guests. However, I want to hear about those too; drop your favorite in the comment

20 pieces of hotel merch that make me go ahhh

The following list is non-exhaustive and not in an order of superiority. If I missed something, call me out in the comments.

1. The Bowery Hotel’s sold out Privacy door sign: it’s sold out, and no wonder. It’s so quintessentially hôtel.

2. Bowery duvets: inspired by the hotel’s iconic red-accented bedding for when you want to bring Lower Manhattan dreams home.

3. The Chateau Marmont keychain tassel: the Chateau still uses physical keys and guests infamously pocket them as talismans of Hollywood glamour, and this is the tassel (made in Italy) hanging off of them.

4. Grand Hotel Tremezzo’s fibra di legno bed linen: just shared in her newsletter’s chat that her astrologist advised her to sleep in percale sheets; but have you heard of wood fibre satin? Grand Hotel Tremezzo is run by the De Santis family (who also own and operate Passalacqua) have made merch a core business pillar, which makes sense considering that their hotels are world-renowned for the collections of objects they host. And, they do bedding very well.

5. The Airelles mattress: French luxury hotel group Airelles does opulence like no other, and this mattress collaboration with Tréca is a testament to the extravaganza. Best sleep of your life?

6. Grand Hotel Tremezzo's coral-striped pool parasol: what’s the best part about being poolside on Lake Como? The parasol hanging over you.

7. The Beverly Hills Hotel wallpaper: nothing more iconic than the banana leaf (by CW Stockwell specifically) that designer Don Loper plastered on the walls of the hotel for its redesign.

8. Passalacqua and Grand Hotel Tremezzo signature scents: named 1910 and 1787 after the respective birth dates of the two properties.

9. The Rosewood candles: with a base of dried patchouli, created by the founder of L’Objet, Elad Yifrach. These can be bought but are also frequently gifted to guests.

10. Claridge’s Christmas bauble: few items are more sentimental than those attached to Holidays, which is why I weep at the thought of collecting Claridge’s annual Christmas baubles, that are naturally featured on their lobby Christmas tree.

11. Clothing-wise, anything that Le Sirenuse does: like these mulberry silk boxers and shirt that are the incarnation of la dolce vita.

12. The most beautiful jacket by Airelles: another signifier of good merch is the if you know you know -feeling, which is at its peak with objects sans logo. For instance, I would gladly introduce this piece into my closet even if it had nothing to do with Airelles.

13. The Setai Miami Beach slippers: if you know me personally, you know I have huge beef with hotel slippers. Most of the time, they suck, and if we think some are good, they’re still usually objectively bad, because the bar is in hell. So when a brand decides to do slippers well (here in collaboration with the American slipper brand Brunch), I bow down.

14. Le Bristol Paris Cluedo: the classic, but instead of someone being murdered in the kitchen of the manor, the hotel’s cat goes missing! Michelin-starred restaurant Epicure is featured, obviously.

15. Hôtel Costes CD collection: to still see a CD the lord’s year of 2026 just does it for me. Mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac, it’s like being translated to an early 2000s Parisian hotel atmosphere. Having a CD player is a flex (and I’m biased, I probably grew up around the largest CD collection in Northern Europe thanks to my dad).

16. Mont Cervin Palace bookmark: earlier this year, during ski season, I was staying at the Mont Cervin Palace in Zermatt, where they placed a magnetic leather bookmark (technically Michel Reybier -branded, which is the company that owns the hotel) between my book during turndown service. The gesture was small but I remember being so delighted, and I still am, to the point where I’m sharing it with you.

    

17. This entire physical shop by Trunk Hotel Tokyo: their Harajuku concept store is inspired by a konbini (convenience store) and it’s filled entirely with locally made things in food, fashion, bath, beauty… and I think this still counts, even if the items are not Trunk branded. The in-store experience becomes the brand extension, and the products you buy become part of the Trunk universe by association.

18. Aman monogram swimsuits: see, functional and beautiful, nods at Aman without being like in your face AMAAANNNN if you know what I mean.

19. Fogo Island Inn furniture: this regenerative hospitality property in Canada is so drool-worthy in general, and like everything else, they take their brand extension seriously. The furniture that adorns the hotel is also available for purchase, all pieces sustainably made by artisans of the island (there are also these insane quilts).

20. Hotel Byblos Porsche: I’m sending you off with a banger. This Saint-Tropez hospitality gem takes the cake with a restored Porsche 911 Targa in full-grain beige leather and a sound system inspired by Les Caves du Roy which is the nightclub in the hotel’s basement.

And there we have it

My current picks from the hotel world that I would adorn myself, my home, and my life with.

I want to hear what you think I missed. I already got some great notes from you last week:

Please share your favorites in the comments!

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I hope you enjoyed this week’s letter, I had so much fun writing it.

Until next week,

🔑 Emma

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: the state of play of hotel merch, we will soon be creating our own objects to take home, and an expert’s view on the most underrated merch products

Dear guest,

I have announced in an earlier edition of this newsletter that I very much appreciate good hotel merch.

By good, I mean visibly high-quality and thoughtfully designed.

Our hospitality experiences are often tied with memories and experiences, whether we’re with loved ones or on an introspective solo-dinner or stay. That’s why I love the idea of being able to immortalize the moment and leave with a piece of memorabilia.

While iconic institutions such as the Ritz have been doing merch seriously for some time now, it now seems that every single establishment, no matter how tiny, has some version of a brand extension offering.

Before we begin, some personal notes on the state of merch

On a recent trip to Paris, it was almost as if every boulangerie, matcha shop, restaurant, hotel, had their own version, which kind of exhausted the concept in my eyes.

I think we are possibly experiencing a collective exhaustion with luxury brand logos and the such, but is the solution to replace them with the signatures of our favorite restaurants and hotels?

I saw someone on here write that hotel merch has become a way of signaling being in-the-know, having been to the ‘right’ places and pledging allegiance to them in the form of a baseball hat or a tote bag.

I own a few hospitality merch items myself. I have a sports set from the Rosewood Asaya Spa (a collaboration with Sporty & Rich), and a t-shirt from a mini tapas bar on a Spanish island. I have attached memories to both, and wear them gladly.

But now with the proliferation, I don’t know what to think. Do I really want a tote bag from a bagel place? Or drink my coffee out of Ralph Lauren mugs?

Maybe it’s just an overall exhaustion with logos. I feel myself gravitating towards timeless design that has no logo on it whatsoever. I want to wear pieces that don’t have names on them.

A trend I’m noticing (and probably everyone else has as well) is brand lighters and matchboxes, the latter of which used to be pretty standard but disappeared for a little bit. Now both are in full swing (correlated with the fact that smoking is back in?).

Logos are a way for us to communicate taste, or a lack thereof. Understated signals, like a cap in the colors of a certain brand are way more attractive to me than, say, one that has a big Aman logo on it, if you know what I mean?

But I guess this also applies to me not wanting to wear a full Gucci monogrammed outfit, or anything else OTT so to say.

Anyway, now we’re done with my musings – let’s enter our very special house guest of the day.

“Everyone wants merch now” – the thoughts of a hotel merch designer

This week, I sat down with Katelyn Powers, a designer, creative, and all-around cool person based in Canada who has an impressive portfolio of brand names under her belt.

In hospitality and wellness, you can see her work under brands such as Ritz-Carlton, Othership, W Hotels, Ennismore, 1 Hotels, Airbnb, and many more.

Many of the items she has designed have become cult favorites, to the point where guests pocket the do not disturb -signs she has created (the small boutique property reacted by ordering plenty of more so that guests are able to continue this habit).

She is the person to speak about this topic.

Everyone wants merch now, but it’s not that easy to get right

More and more hotels and hospitality brands are feeling the pressure to have a merch offering.

According to Katelyn, the instinct is right. Merch is a way of creating a club, of expanding the brand world beyond the physical property and into a guest’s daily life.

“When someone wears your hat on the street or carries your tote to the grocery store, they show that they are part of the club that has visited that place”. But exclusivity is not the only reason people buy into merch. “Sometimes people just want to support and represent their favorite local spot, and buying merch is a good way to do that”.

In any case the pressure to have merch (and end up doing it quickly) and the ability to do merch well are two very, very different things, and most brands fall into the former category.

What hotels get wrong about merch

I asked Katelyn what pattern she sees across properties that get it wrong, and her answer was immediate: not thinking beyond the obvious.

“There’s too little intentionality. Hotels default to the obvious – a cream tote because it’s the default color – without pushing even slightly further.””

“Something as simple as a more considered color choice or an unexpected material can completely transform an object,” she says. “I mean it’s fabric, you have the option to pick any color. I feel like brands are often not thinking big enough”.

When everyone has merch, guests will automatically benchmark one brand’s offering to that of another.

With the proliferation of merch, there will be (and already is) a point of bifurcation where there is the generic stuff that almost falls in the same category as the free stuff you get at conventions, and the good stuff that has thought behind it.

Sometimes the difference between the two is using the company’s existing brand playbook to its full extent. “Brands now often have these incredible playbooks that they have paid a lot of money for, often including these cool small details that the designer rarely sees come to life". All of this, Katelyn says, is gold for creating elevated objects.

Even a tote can be great, but a lack of thought behind any merch item is a problem.

Katelyn also points out that sometimes the hurdle for creating something memorable and worth the resources is that the brand has no dedicated person to handle the project. “You’re often met with a person from the marketing team who does not have the capacity or knowledge to handle a merch project,” she explains.

If the resources are spent and creating merchandise is deemed an important strategic objective, then enough time and budget should be dedicated for it to be executed well.

In my eyes, the equation is pretty simple:

Bad merch → brand image erosion.

Good merch → more revenue and happy guests representing your brand left and right.

Retail could be the missing piece for your property

Katelyn’s ongoing work with Othership, which is the super hip Toronto and NY -based bathhouse and wellness brand, gave her a front-row seat to the power of merch.

Othership has its own small and very aesthetically pleasing retail space that has become a cult favorite. “People love to get something to remember their transformative experience”.

Bathhouse culture and communal wellness experiences are still relatively new in North America, and when people go through something that genuinely shifts how they feel, they want to hold onto it.

“They bring them home and take pictures.”

And Othership’s array of merch doesn’t stop at the more obvious items of a hat and hoodie (which are both SO cute by the way). You can find sauna hats, custom essential oils, wooden body tools, herbal teas, and my favorite, signature incense to transport you right back to the bathing experience.

While I don’t know any specific numbers, it seems that merch has become an important additional revenue stream for Othership. Many hotels now have dedicated retail areas and mini shops that offer physical ways to opt into the property’s fantasy world.

Again, we circle back to the importance of doing merch well. If the products are good and thoughtful, guests will gladly opt in for post-stay immersion and tangible memories.

Scent and uniforms deserve more attention

Not all brand extensions are merch to buy. OS&E (Operating Supplies and Equipment) such as bed linens, towels, bathrobes, and staff uniforms all are touch points that impact the guest experience.

“Staff uniforms are the most visible expression of the brand that guests interact with all day, and are so important”. (Longtime tPH readers will remember that we covered the acute importance of hotel uniforms in an earlier letter).

Below, the most beautiful uniforms Katelyn designed for Othership.

Sometimes, OS&E and merch you can take home overlap. A hotel’s signature scent could also be something a guest can buy and take home in some form, whether it’s a candle or incense.

During our conversation, we even tossed around an idea of a scented bar that can be hung in the wardrobe, that can then be taken home.

Our house guest specifically mentions the power of scent in merch. “It’s psychological, it transports you in a way that no other sense does”.

(Btw, Katelyn told me that an unexpected merch object no one has taken her up on yet is a car air freshener – do it with her before someone else will)

What happens when every place has merch?

This question has been the object of my obsession for days, months, going on years. When everyone has baseball cap and a t-shirt, what’s next?

“We will be co-creating the merch,” Katelyn says.

We know that people yearn for experiences, they want to be offline, they want to literally and figuratively touch grass.

Guests will be expecting deeper personalization, and this could mean programming where they leave with something they helped create. To name a few that Katelyn mentioned: scent blending workshops, incense making, basket weaving, print-making.

This is where everything started making sense to me. I mean, isn’t this just the most hospitality thing merch could do; involve you in the creation? If hospitality is a reciprocal act, why shouldn’t hospitality merch be that too?

Is your mind blown? Mine is

Was this obvious to you all? Or are you just as dizzied by this predicament as I am?

The future of hotel merch is personalization, mirroring the hospitality industry in its entirety. Somehow just imagining notebook making or glass blowing workshops where you create something with branded colors and then take home makes my heart flutter and eyes tear up and feel like I can see into the future.

When anything proliferates, it creates a spectrum of slop – meaning, and we can obviously place the conference landfill adjacent totes on the other end, and a lovingly handmade (by you!) item on the other.

Whew, I hope you enjoyed this emotional journey, I was most certainly on one. If you have a hotel property and want to work with Katelyn (you should), you can find her here for all your design needs.

Extra! 3 hotel merch trends to keep an eye on according to Katelyn

• Artists collaborating with hotels as people want to see the human touch (Katelyn worked on the W Hotels’ collaboration with Paris-based artist Thomas Lélu)

• Consumable or perishable merch, such as branded skincare or beauty products

• Seasonal capsule collections that are limited edition (start building your in-house design team now!)

Now I need to hear from you: what is the absolute best instance of hotel merch you have ever come across?

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Thank you for being here, hope you’re enjoying your stay!

🔑 Emma

Greetings from the motherland of modern hospitality – Switzerland.

I always feel extra inspired when I’m here, not least because this is where I got my hospitality education.

This week's Lobby is about legacy, and what happens when hospitality is inherited, borrowed, or reborn. A restaurateur's son, an AI company, and a 93-year-old Finnish sanatorium walk into a bar…

Welcome to The Lobby_, a roundup of what’s happening in hospitality, served with a point of view.

In this letter: a hospitality legend’s son is opening a restaurant, AI goes corporate wellness, and a new era of hospitality diplomacy.

• Keith McNally's 22-year-old son is opening his first restaurant. George McNally is the son of the man behind NYC restaurant institutions such as Balthazar, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern. He is now opening Faux in Tribeca this summer, which is a French-inspired restaurant slash nightclub. I read his father’s biography I Regret Almost Everything, which I found excellent (although gruesome in some ways), where he details the wins and woes of creating legendary NYC F&B destinations and living the life of an all-around hospitality legend.

  I’m truly excited to experience George’s vision in person and see how the next generation of hospitality fares. Read more.

• Midjourney is opening a spa and I ironically think there’s nothing that could attest more to the power of hospitality. In case you missed it, Midjourney is an AI company best known for image generation, and they are now pivoting into wellness, or more precisely, bathing.

  Midjourney Medical (which is what this branch will be called) will build a spa in San Francisco's Union Square that will include hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and… full-body ultrasonic scanners hidden inside the pools! (yes that’s the catch). The process is the following: you step onto a golden platform, descend into warm water, whereafter 500,000 tiny transducers map your entire body in 60 seconds.

  The scan is in one way a side effect of the guest’s spa visit, but at the same time, the company’s incentive into going into wellness business in the first place. Their ambition is to have 50,000 scanners worldwide and a billion scans per month by 2031 (very apocalyptic if you ask me). Bryan Johnson, lover of AI and the self-proclaimed king of living forever was at the launch event.

  

  To me, Midjourney is using hospitality as their Trojan horse for data collection, which in many ways reflects the Meta glasses conversation going on right now.

  At the same time, all of this goes to show how much potential there is in hospitality and wellness that other industries are very eager to harness. had some excellent things to say about it here.

• Hospitality diplomacy is so back!!! And my evidence is that the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium is becoming Finland’s answer to Camp David (the US President's retreat for international diplomacy). The Norwegian design firm Snøhetta has unveiled a masterplan to transform the Paimio Sanatorium, which is Alvar and Aino Aalto's 1933 functionalist masterpiece (originally a tuberculosis treatment centre).

  It shall become a luxury wellness resort and diplomatic retreat, where the prior patient rooms are hotel suites that feature Aalto-designed ceramic basins and all. And if you know Aalto, you know that everything has a function.

  Case in point is the Paimio chair that has a place for your arms to ameliorate correct breathing (see below).

  It almost goes without saying that there are saunas (with direct forest access), and it’s conceptualized to become the background for healing diplomacy.

  The property is awaiting its UNESCO World Heritage designation decision, and they are also on a lookout for premium hotel operators (calling the tPH network!).

  Why I love this project, and why I think it’s the perfect lovechild of wellness and hospitality, is that the building was designed to heal people through architecture and natural light, fresh air, and closeness to nature.

  I’m near-certain that coolcations in the Nordics will be the hit of next summer following the extreme heatwaves in Europe this time around, so seeing these heritage-oozing projects come to life feels like perfect timing. See you all in Finland next summer! Read more about the project here.

  

What I’m reading, watching, or listening to; hospitality-related or not. Consider it a peek into what’s influencing my thinking.

I’m deep in summer mode, and I hope you, dear guest, are too.

I’ve been doing crossword puzzles and letting my mind float elsewhere than hospitality. Which is obviously happening in a hospitality setting. The irony!

Still, I think you must read this conversation between and I about wellness and hospitality, regarding the well-being in hospitality report that I edited. I think you’ll love it if you are interested/believe in/understand the connection between employee wellbeing and guest experience in hospitality.

Sierra Blake, MPS, LADC

The Psychology of Wellbeing

Get in, we’re doing a deep dive! The bathhouse market is maturing and it has emerged as a distinct category. It is not a spa, not an amenity, but has nestled itself into the world of hospitality. The experience itself is the offering…

Read more

2 months ago · 6 likes · 10 comments · Sierra Blake, MPS, LADC and Emma Näpänkangas

A hotel that has been on my radar.

In a couple of months I’m heading to Southern California, which is the promised land of healing vortexes and wellness hospitality (which also means that great and never-seen-before tPH reportage is coming up).

One of the properties on my radar is Estancia La Jolla, which is a ranch-esque stay (it’s a former equestrian estate) in the already anti-inflammatory setting of the seaside community.

I’m ready to soak up the healing waters of La Jolla. But first, Lago di Como and the rest of the summer in Finland.

That’s all for this edition of The Lobby. I’m so happy you’re here and hope you’re enjoying your summer as much as I am!

As always, my messages are open, so if you’d ever feel like chatting hospitality, wellness, philosophy, or the world, you know where to find me.

🔑 Emma

I am currently on my way to Switzerland, the birthplace and gold standard of modern hospitality, after which I’m heading to Lake Como. Some reportage will naturally ensue.

Today’s topic is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as fashion brands are increasingly borrowing antics from hospitality.

I find myself yearning for a time when retail was somewhat interesting, and I myself now do most of my shopping vintage and second hand, just because I enjoy the process of scouring for and finding gems way more than the current state of commerce.

Here are some thoughts on why shopping bores me :)

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: retail is going experiential, and what it can learn from hospitality to survive.

I think we have all noticed that retail is in trouble, at least in its current incarnation. Saks Global (the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, ‌Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman) announced its bankruptcy in 2025, and has now risen from the trenches after a complete overhaul and restructuring.

Department stores have lost their luster to consumers, and according to this Forbes article, more stores have closed than opened in the past years.

However, there is a category that warrants individual examination, namely, experiential retail (where hospitality and purchases meet 😊🤝🛍️)

Shopping has been so disappointing lately

On a purely personal level, shopping has become underwhelming, and I would attribute much of this to everything being so available.

Just in recent history, at the start of the 2010s, there were many curiosities (such as Abercrombie sweatpants if you happened to be a Scandinavian teenager) you had to travel overseas to acquire.

Having immediate access to the trend of the moment was still unheard of for most of the world.

While e-commerce has soared and most likely will continue to do so, an undercurrent of more curated retail experiences has emerged.

To me, this change physical retail is undergoing is twofold: firstly, brands are increasingly investing in experiential pop-ups and flagships, and secondly, we are seeing a renaissance of the (fully analog) specialized brick-and-mortar.

✮⋆˙Experiential retail ✮⋆˙

The goal of experiential retail concepts is to create emotional resonance with shoppers, and really viscerally drill down the brand messaging into the storegoer.

For most brands, it has proven to be a gateway to increased omnichannel sales, with uplifts from 15-25 percent up to doubled(!!!) revenue.

This makes sense because if your concept is eye-catching and resonates with shoppers, it will inevitably garner a lot of organic attention through social media and shared experiences.

There’s not one way to do experiential. For instance, Gentle Monster has successfully taken the more tech-ish and visually captivating route with giant robotic statues in-store and spatial design that invites lingering.

Naturally, I am more interested in cases where brands lean into hospitality, and I think you may be too, since you’re here :)

✮⋆˙ Hospitality in retail ✮⋆˙

Mini case study: RH

RH, the renowned and quintessentially American luxury furniture house, opened its first restaurant a decade ago and now runs a portfolio of over 20 locations mostly in North America, but also Paris and the UK.

Guests have reported visiting precisely because of the immersion into the brand’s aesthetic, the culinary experience being entirely secondary. (Although I must say their new Milan menu looks great, thank you to for the tip!)

What an ingenious way to make people lust over the idea of replicating the atmosphere in their own dining room.

✮⋆˙ The pilgrimage purchase ✮⋆˙

Mini case study: Rubirosa’s

Now to the subject matter that pulls my heartstrings, and whispers a promise that I may get to relive the high of gaining the possession of Abercrombie sweatpants at 13 years old: the renaissance of the analog brick-and-mortar.

And when I say analog, I’m referring to retailers rejecting e-commerce and making you plan a trip to become a client. One of these is shirt atelier Rubirosa’s, which welcomes shoppers solely at its shop on Paris’s Left Bank (no webshop to be found).

The founder is Lauren Rubinski, a third-generation shirtmaker and successful jeweler, and I was introduced to her through this Monocle article (another brand that knows experiential retail à la their cafés).

Rubinski’s motivation for not going the DTC/e-commerce route was to get to focus on the human experience, which is something the store aims to achieve through hospitality.

”On arrival [at Rubirosa’s], a staff member in a rollneck and apron offers a warm welcome – a small detail that sets the tone,” writes Monocle.

To me, Rubirosa’s is a promise of a world where only by journeying and delaying gratification can you own a specific piece of artisanship. Is this what luxury is, considering that everything is now exhaustingly accessible?

In what form will retail survive?

Experiential retail is, in many ways, nothing new. Nor are brick-and-mortars, obviously. But just reading about Rubirosa’s and the idea of committing to intentionally creating a certain atmosphere for the shopper in simple ways (I would love to buy a shirt from someone in a rollneck and an apron) makes me feel like something interesting is underway.

Consumers want more than the product itself. They want to feel emotionally attached to the things they purchase and feel like this endless cycle of consumption is meaningful.

To send you off, some honorable mentions of great retail concepts:

• Officine Universelle Buly

• 10 Corso Como

• Liberty London

• The Anya Hindmarch Village

• Monocle

Any retail experiences that have blown your mind lately? What do you foresee for department stores? Are malls dead?

So many questions, I need your thoughts 👇

Leave a comment

Until next time,

🔑 Emma

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: A frantic rant about the lack of disciplined critique within the hospitality industry, hotel merch on merch on merch, Sporty & Rich’s genius hotel collab strategy, and why hospitality is the real art and asset.

The fashion industry, undeniably, holds a seat at the cultural table. For many, fashion is equal to culture.

Fashion is surrounded by an infrastructure of attention, spanning from news coverage, worldwide publications, podcasts with millions of listeners, and entire museums that all treat clothing as being worthy of serious intellectual inquiry.

The cultural impact of fashion is nothing I disagree with, because it is true that the way we dress speaks to identity, power, class, desire, belonging.

What is curious to me, however, is that hospitality delivers on all of these facets (and more), but the cultural discussion around it seems to be nonexistent.

In my opinion the hospitality industry has a tendency to reduce itself to operations, demand forecasts, occupancy rates, RevPAR, profit margins, etcetera (as a side note: I cover many of these operational topics for EHL Insights), and not much more.

There is trade press (I do enjoy myself some CoStar and Skift <3) and “top 10 hotels in x” listicles often void of substance.

Mind you, this is an industry that both literally and figuratively constructs spaces where human life happens, as people sleep, eat, gather, grieve, celebrate, and rest; and we only want to talk about the logistics of it all?

Where is the Vogue of hospitality (although some have argued that Vogue also has succumbed to reporting rather than actual cultural fashion criticism)?

Where is the joint hype for a new hotel opening as for a runway show?

There is a vast gulf between what hospitality is (and its significance) and how we talk about it.

Hospitality culture lacks structure (my rant continues)

Obviously, the hospitality industry has not failed commercially, as it has grown into a trillion-dollar global sector1 despite the trying times it faced in the 2020s.

Culturally and philosophically, however, I’m afraid it’s still in its infancy.

The industry has failed to claim its own significance and to produce the language, the criticism, the public discourse that would let people understand what makes a great hotel or restaurant so great.

The fashion industry went from being the ‘rag trade’ to generating endless cultural commentary and becoming a zeitgeist fixture. There are critics, writers, theorists (omg where are the hospitality industry theorists???), curators, and public intellectuals who exist to continuously articulate the context behind garments and collections or designer choices.

While hospitality has fantastic institutions such as EHL (my alma mater) and Cornell producing excellent managers and executives, and industry consultants who can optimize the hell out of a P&L.

But where are the hospitality critics? Not reviewers!!! Critics!!!

Where are the people asking what it means, philosophically, that we’ve built an entire economy around the idea of paying strangers to care for us? What does it say about loneliness, about community, about the failure of domestic life, that the fastest-growing segment of luxury is wellness hospitality?

Is hospitality even critiqueable?

Maybe the issue is that hospitality as a cultural object is harder to criticize.

A garment holds still, is photographable, hung at the met, and it can be argued about for forty years and the thing itself doesn’t change or disappear (even though the world around it naturally does).

But the object of hospitality criticism would be something much more elusive, namely the felt experience (we love phenomenology2 here at tPH) of being hosted, which is private, lived once, and, then, gone; because the product of hospitality is by nature perishable.

Hospitality moments cannot be hung on the wall for everyone to admire, which brings us to the ultimate dilemma of building a public discourse around an art that leaves no artifact. You can’t march concierge down a runway (or… could you?).

(I don’t think this is unsolvable, by the way. I think it’s unsolved, which is a completely different thing).

Walk with me:

What if universities offered hospitality as a humanities subject, not just a management degree? Or imagine a TED talk about the philosophy of room service!!! And even better, what if hospitality brands would convey their values through commissioning artists, funding research, and publishing essays? Hospitality could have the chance to pioneer something amazing and thoroughly anti-anti-intellectualistic.

And the conditions are right, my friend. The wellness boom, the experience economy, the quiet luxury conversation a couple of years back, in my opinion all point to people being hungry for the thinking and values that hospitality could offer.

People are just simply missing the proper language to describe why the best hospitality experience left the impression it did, or why experiences seem to fill some void that luxury goods haven’t been able to.

BUT HERE’S THE TEA!!!!

Earlier this year, Mandarin Oriental announced its collaboration with Sporty & Rich (which has a history of hotel collaborations, including collections with the Carlyle, the Sunset Tower Hotel, and Le Bristol, to name a few), and Frame is on its 5th collection with Ritz Paris.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a sign that hospitality is finally entering the zeitgeist, but that fashion is colonizing the cultural capital of hospitality. There! I said it.

Frame is selling the feeling of Ritz Paris, its heritage and sense of being cared for that people associate with the hotel, either targeting brand loyalists or aspirational shoppers who can afford a cashmere sweatshirt but not a stay at the premises.

But the gag is that Sporty & Rich actually needs the hotels more than they need S&R, because without the hotel the old-money-wellness-fantasy is just a font on any other sweatshirt.

The cultural capital is flowing from hospitality to fashion, because the fashion industry has recognized the enormous emotional and cultural power that hospitality holds. The feeling I get is that the hospitality industry is just flattered to be noticed rather than making a claim for that cultural power on its own terms.

Visibility is a gift and a threat

There is a caveat that the fashion industry learnt the hard way: namely, that cultural visibility cuts both ways. The same critics and journalists that elevated fashion to art have also held it accountable for sweatshops, waste, and burning unsold products.

Now that spending and attention alongside it are migrating towards transformative luxury and hospitality, the scrutiny will hit the industry. The brands that underpay and mistreat staff or blatantly greenwash their sustainability claims will hear about it.

The huge opportunity is for the brands that are invested in bettering the industry and being part of the cultural conversation. Where there is integrity, there will be a lot of gain when hospitality finally gets its cultural moment.

Back to hospitality x fashion -gate

Fashion has latched itself onto hospitality because it can smell the cultural charge that it cannot offer by itself.

Let’s take Sporty & Rich that owns a sweatshirt which is lovely and on-trend (I own many pieces, including from their collab with Rosewood’s Asaya spa), and also in theory infinitely manufacturable. Mandarin Oriental, on the other hand, owns the live, rare, never-the-same, iconic, inimitable thing of hosting a person and creating everlasting memories. It cannot be bottled, which makes it the more valuable asset of the two.

Fashion can borrow hospitality’s iconography with the crests and the serif, but it cannot borrow the act3. So the hotel has something inimitable and viscerally human – and what does it do? LICENSES ITS INFINITE AURA TO A FASHION BRAND that has so much more to gain than the hotel.

And if you want the receipts, Sporty & Rich in about eighteen months went from one hotel capsule to a standing arrangement with two of the most prestigious hotel groups on the planet (Oetker and Rosewood), doing repeat collections with the same properties, and the company grew immensely as a result.

The party that gained the most brought the least. Yes the hotels got some margin and maybe a younger customer and walking billboards roaming around the world, but they still took the cheaper half of the trade.

Similarly, the Ritz Paris doesn’t need Frame because it can and in some ways already does build the whole thing by itself on its own terms (the Ritz bear and yellow robes are phenomena in their own right), and fashion can only ever gesture from the outside.

✶ ✶ ✶

And that is, dear guest, the cost of staying quiet. If you won’t theorize yourself, someone else will happily theorize you.

There is much, much more to say about this topic (e.g., hospitality activations of fashion brands, hotels that do amazing in-house merch such as the Bowery) but I have a feeling there’s many interesting conversations around this to have with you all before we do so.

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Stay sporty and rich,

🔑 Emma

𖤓 ｡𖦹°‧ ⋆☀︎. Happy midsummer! 𖤓 ｡𖦹°‧ ⋆☀︎.

I’m reporting to you from the North of Finland, and the midsummer here looks like sauna, 24 hours of sunlight, and family time. It’s the best.

It’s been a while since I shared my thoughts on industry news and trends here on tPH (I’ve been deep in a whimsical medieval rabbit hole), but fear not, I have not forgotten about my industry peeps. The theme of today’s mini edition is H₂O – let’s dive in! 🫧🫧

Also, if you missed it, I shared my thoughts on Finnish hospitality in (if you are a hospitality person who has not yet ventured into the spa(aaaaah) world, you’re missing out).

Welcome to The Lobby_, a roundup of what’s happening in hospitality, served with a point of view.

In this letter: hospitality yacht business is hit with hard winds, the rejuvenation of a legacy wellness hospitality brand, and how can hotels capitalize on the growing sauna phenomenon.

• The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection is not hitting its sales targets, and this could mean trouble for the hospitality on water market. As we know and have previously discussed, one hotel brand after another have jumped on the yachting bandwagon, with Four Seasons and Orient Express having launched theirs this spring (we have Aman and Waldorf Astoria following suit very soon).

  The Ritz-Carlton, who essentially started the trend of giving a facelift to the traditional cruise in 2022 when its first yacht set sail, is now reportedly struggling financially, having accumulated nearly $700 million in losses since the company’s inception in 2017. Occupancy targets have not been reached (50% vs. projected 90%), and the marketing budget is absolutely leaking with the spend at $100 million per year.

  While Marriott owns Ritz-Carlton the brand, the yacht business is purely a licensing deal, which means few repercussions to Marriott, aside from damage to the brand’s reputation. I’m very curious to see if other brands are able to pull off yachting, as it is by nature extremely capital-intensive. also wrote about the topic here.

• Soneva just rebranded from barefoot luxury to bare luxury one year into private equity (KSL Capital) ownership. The Maldives-based ultra-luxury resort group pioneered the concept of barefoot luxury in 1995 (which back then meant something like shoes off, toes in sand) has announced an evolution of its founding philosophy under new CEO Neil Gallagher who was brought in after KSL acquired majority ownership. The new approach is based on the removal excess and focus on serving ‘Just What Matters’, which is Soneva’s language for wilderness and presence. It’s easy for companies to say that they care about connection and stripped down luxury as a marketing claim, but when chatting with Rhea Saran, the company’s global director of communications, she assured that this philosophy is embedded into each building block of the brand.

  Presence and connection, for instance, manifest in that staff are not given strict scripts to abide by, but encouraged to lead with their personality and curiosity towards the guest. Soneva was one of the OG wellness hospitality brands, and I’m super excited to see how this new chapter unfolds and how the new philosophy translates to guests and brand devotees.

• Sauna is becoming mainstream, but can hotels do it the right way? I just attended the World Sauna Forum in Jyväskylä, Finland (basically my home turf), and the international appetite for authentic(!!!) sauna was palpable. Some numbers: the global sauna and spa market hit $4.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $5.4 billion by 2030. While third spaces are generally diminishing, urban sauna clubs and next-gen bathing houses are popping up from New York to Toronto. Aufguss ceremonies are also a big deal, where trained sauna masters use towel work and scents and choreography to turn the sauna experience into a performance. [My friend from has written an excellent piece on the role aufguss is playing in building sauna culture in the US – and she’s a trained aufguss master herself!!!

  

  

  The emergence of communal sauna culture outside the Nordics where it has been commonplace for forever is not surprising. Third places in general are diminishing, and people are yearning for places to socialize outside of bars and restaurants, and the longevity/biohacking/health-maxxing boom is also driving people to sauna. In other words, the stars are aligned, and the demand is huge, but I don’t think most hotels are taking the opportunity seriously (if I encounter one more ‘Finnish sauna’ where you’re not allowed to throw water on the stove I’m OUT).

  Any property that invests in proper sauna experiences (infrared doesn’t count) has my pledge 🫴🏻

  I would obviously like to hear from you: what’s your relationship to sauna in the context of hotels? Do you wish for one during your stays? If not, is it because you most likely would get disappointed when met with one?

  Leave a comment

Sharing what I’m reading, watching, or listening to; hospitality-related or not.

── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──The tPH Summer Reads Guide ── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──

Summer is fiction season for me. I exclusively want to read fantastical stories and get swept away to other planets (Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir) or times (Son of Nobody by Yann Martel).

Right now I’m gathering inspiration for my hospitality-related projects from anywhere else than hospitality. I often feel that what’s about hospitality specifically is kind of an echo chamber, which is why venturing outward has been much more fruitful to me lately. If you need summer book recs, here are a few of my favorites (all fiction!):

• Kafka On the Shore by Haruki Murakami

• Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto

• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

• The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

• Summer Book by Tove Jansson

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt

• Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Reading fiction was also my go-to strategy to break a rut when I was studying philosophy at university and spent my days neck-deep in ancient texts. Somehow the inspiration that may have seemed irrelevant at surface level always made it back around into my work.

A hotel that has been on my radar.

If you thought my medieval-phase was over already, you thought wrong!!!

My current dream stay Castel Badia in the Dolomites still has one of its feet in the dark ages.

The building itself is from the 11th century, but the level of comfort and luxury is not.

I’m afraid to visit because I don’t know how they would be able to remove me from the premises. It’s just tooooo good.

With magical midsummer greetings,

🔑 Emma

I have fallen deeply and unexpectedly into a medieval rabbit hole.

I don’t exactly know what prompted this (perhaps my recent visit to the outskirts of the Scottish Highlands), but it I can now see that it has been brewing all along (my favorite movie ever is the notoriously medieval Shrek 2).

This newfound love for the Middle Ages culminated with a visit to a medieval fair in Hämeenlinna, Finland, where I met fellow enthusiasts.

So, I thought what better thing to do with this obsession than to find away to extend it to you! And as a matter of fact I have gotten some requests to dig a bit deeper into the history of hospitality, so I feel like this is a win-win-win situation.

Alas, join me on this quest to find out about hospitality of ole yesterday.

(Some music to set the tone)

🌞The tavern is open🌞

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: Monasteries, caravanserai, early taverns, the grueling story of the patron saint of hospitality, and Derrida.

⚔️ Medieval hospitality ⚔️

Monasteries, the most hospitable of them all

Around 530 AD, Benedict of Nursia wrote a rulebook for his monks. Chapter 53 opens with the following:

Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ.

Any stranger at the gate may be God in disguise, therefore, you treat every stranger as if they are.

Monasteries had a dedicated role in receiving travelers, washing their feet (the abbot was supposed to do this but apparently often ended up delegating the task to the monks) and feeding them.

The monks would break their own fasts when guests arrived hungry because the guest’s needs were seen as far more important than the monks’ discipline and monastic routines.

There were entire systems of guest houses, kitchens, and stables… all this trouble because caring for a guest was seen as a sacred duty, no matter who they were.

The Middle East, on the other hand, had the caravanserai (from the Persian karwan, caravan, and saray, palace) that were rest stops built along the Silk Road and major trade routes from North Africa to China. They were paced roughly between a day’s journey by camel, and sheltered anyone on the road, mostly merchants and pilgrims.

These places too were completely free, funded by sultans and philanthropists as acts of piety.

Hospital, hospice, hotel

Chaucer opens The Canterbury Tales (a 14th century text) at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where a knight, a prioress, a merchant, and a miller all share the same roof and the same ale. The medieval inn was rough and crowded to the extent where you would likely share a bed with a stranger, but it was also the most democratic space in medieval society.

Hospital, hospice, hostel, and hotel are all derived from the same etymological root of hospes. A medieval hospitale took in travelers, the sick, the poor, pilgrims, under the same roof, as they were all strangers in need of shelters.

The Great St Bernard Pass in the Alps still has a hospice that’s been receiving travelers for almost a thousand years, and pilgrimage (such as journeying through the Camino de Santiago) was the first mass travel market, where the houses along the road made the journey possible to begin with.

While this early form of hospitality was based on moral obligation, medieval hospitality was also very hierarchical and self-interested. A noble guest would be seated at the abbot’s table (hosting the powerful was very political), and the poor would be given the almonry.

Furthermore, monasteries complained constantly about freeloaders, which led to most of them developing an informal cap of days after which you were expected to either move on or pick up a rake. The ideal and the practice argued with each other, the way ideals and practices do.

But nonetheless, the ideal was there, and guest-right was close to sacred across medieval Europe, beyond the Church. Violating it for instance by harming someone you had fed under your own roof was one of the few things that disgusted everyone despite social class or region.

There’s a reason the red wedding is the most upsetting thing in Game of Thrones (I haven’t been able to revisit that episode since) or maybe in TV history ever, and it’s because we still feel the taboo of the violation in our bones.

The patron saint of hotels has a terrible backstory

Earliest renditions of this legend date back to the 12th century.

St. Julian the Hospitaller was a nobleman cursed by a prophecy that he would kill his own parents, and he fled across the world to escape his destiny.

Years later his parents tracked him down, and his wife, welcoming the elderly strangers warmly, gave them the master bed to sleep in. Julian came home, saw two figures in his bed, assumed the worst, and fulfilled the prophecy with his sword.

He built a hospice at a dangerous river crossing and spent the rest of his life ferrying travelers across it and sheltering them, and in his martyrdom asking for nothing in exchange. One night he carried a leper over the freezing water and gave him his own bed, and the stranger revealed himself as a messenger of Christ. Julian was forgiven and later granted sainthood.

Exit the monk, enter the innkeeper

Gradually, and for understandable reasons, the guest became a customer and the act of hospitality a transaction, and the holy status of the guest was long forgotten.

As trade grew in the 12th-13th century, roads started to fill with merchants which led to commercial inns appearing to serve people who could pay for the roof over their heads. By the late Middle Ages, many towns had proper hostelries with signage (okkkk branding) and even some kinds of reputations and reviews. The Reformation dissolved the monasteries in many parts of Europe, which furthered the disappearance of the charitable layer of hospitality.

Hospitality becoming more transactional was also a liberation in a way, because paying for your stay meant no gratitude was necessarily involved, nor did you have to depend on anyone’s virtue. The customer has a right to a certain product they are paying for, whereas the guest could only rely on the host’s goodness.

What we gave away in exchange was the idea of receiving a stranger as a moral act, and I think we are still phenomenologically and viscerally able to tell the difference between being treated as a transaction and being the subject of true hospitality.

Medieval virtues, modern reality

Derrida spent a lot of his late career arguing that true hospitality is unconditional (i.e., welcoming a stranger no matter their name or business or whether they can pay), but that hospitality in its truest form is also virtually impossible, because every act of hospitality comes with conditions.

This Derridean understanding of hospitality as a willingness to let a stranger disrupt your world was practiced in monasteries and caravanserais, and going against this, i.e., violating guest-right was a crime worse than murder in Norse and Germanic traditions. Are there even whispers of this left in today’s dynamic pricing algorithms? (Rhetorical question, we know the answer).

I’m not saying we should go back to washing each other’s feet and sleeping on straw (although if a hotel offered this as a wellness experience I’m certain it would be a hit), but I just love thinking about how the hospitality industry sprung from what used to be a radical ethical commitment.

The medieval world was dark and violent, but that doesn’t stop me from yearning for it.

Fare thee well,

🗝️ Lady Emma of tPH

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P.S.

I spent a lovely, steamy few days at the World Sauna Forum in great company such as (and Mr. Spa) and (I want this sauna hangout thing of ours to be a weekly occurrence) – more on this coming up next week because we are long overdue for a new edition of THE LOBBY.

Kippis ja kiitos <3

Greetings from Scotland!

I’m here on a very special trip featuring a bunch of bagpipes and kilts and steak pies.

Today’s letter is something I wrote a while back, and maybe something a bit more frivolous than what you’ve gotten used to here at tPH.

Without further ado…

Welcome to Turndown Service, where we immerse ourselves in an experiential detail or sentiment.

In this letter: why hotel uniforms are sexy and important, the tPH formula for building a signature uniform, and brands that do it right.

A couple of months ago I was approached by a designer whom I admire regarding my thoughts and feelings on hotel uniforms.

Prior to him reaching out, I did not even realize that this was a subject I have an opinion on (but turns out, I sure do).

I whipped out my archives and pulled out some of my favorite examples of well-executed signature styles that go beyond basic scrubs or what you immediately think of when thinking of hospitality workwear.

Because you are here and I really like you, here’s my curation and some véry important tips, as well as the tPH signature uniform formula™.

Why should I care about hotel uniforms?

I’m glad you asked!

Seriously, staff uniforms are an extremely pressing matter that is too often overlooked. I promise I’m not exaggerating. The comfort and aesthetics of hotel uniforms impact not only how easily guests are able to buy into the particular fantasy that a hotel (or restaurant or any service-inclined establishment) is selling, but also the confidence and pride employees take in their role.

Don’t worry, I have sources. Nelson & Bowen (2000)1 found that employees are more self-confident when their uniforms look the part, and furthermore, exude more credibility.

Also, I went to EHL (the number one hospitality school on the planet), and if there’s one thing that is instilled into us from day one, it is that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Research confirms this, as customers form lasting impressions within 7 seconds of interaction, and visual cues account for 55% of that initial judgement.

TLDR; there is a real business case for investing in hotel uniforms and guests will find you sloppy if you don’t.

Now that we have the concrete stuff out of the way, let’s dive into the vibes.

The signature hotel uniform formula

(Ah now we’re in the vibes section. I love it here.)

I love fashion and visually interesting things, and I always find it a let-down when hospitality does not lean into this. Global chain brands naturally have their brand standards with more run-of-the-mill outfits, but in my humble opinion, boutique and independent hotels (or any property in the luxury segment) have no excuse to slack in this department.

And there is no need to! The process of creating a signature hotel uniform is at the end of the day rather simple, and consists of combining three features:

The signature uniform™ combines the following:

1. Local elements: a nod to the where the hotel is located creates a sense of place and bumps up the authenticity score

2. High-quality materials: fabric must be breathable and made from natural fibers. Polyester is unforgivable.

3. Functionality: uniforms should work with the employees and make their job easier

There are many great examples that hit all of these areas in a fantastic way, and I have handpicked a few of them for you below.

Polo shirt, jeans, and Gucci sneakers

Casa Maria Luigia, Modena

A while back I wrote about the incredible experience I had staying at Casa Maria Luigia. This hotel does world-building like no other, and every detail is thought out, down to the staff shoes which are just quintessential Italian luxury.

The simple but fresh combo of a white polo with quality denim creates a casual but still chic atmosphere.

Monochrome

Kempinski

A signature uniform can create an aura or even a character. Kempinski’s Lady in Red is a good example of when a uniform becomes something more. The brand’s hostesses are dressed in red, signifying ambassadorship.

While the red is always red, the silhouette of the dress varies based on where the property is located (✔local elements).

High-end fabrics in locally-rooted silhouettes

Mandarin Oriental, London Mayfair

Speaking of local elements and brand authenticity, few examples hit the spot more than Mandarin Oriental’s London uniforms.

The materials and cuts are just luxurious to look at, and the uniforms incorporate both British influences (a gesture to the London location) and Asian ones (a gesture to the brand’s Hong Kong roots).

If your employees feel sexy your hotel will be sexy

Hospitality is an act of play and the creation of a fantasy, and staff need to play their part for that bubble not to burst.

A uniform that fits well, breathes well, and looks considered tells an employee that they were considered, that their experience is important too, not just the guest’s.

An employee who feels dignified in what they’re wearing will extend that dignity to the guest. An employee stuffed into a polyester polo two sizes too big will give you microplastic-discomfort-energy. I know which one I prefer.

I firmly believe that how you dress your team is part of the hospitality you extend to the world, and no one can convince me that it isn’t a serious matter.

Send outfit pics,

🔑 Emma

In this letter: why people are addicted to Aman, hospitality memes, the ethics of hospitality, and piping hot industry tea.

I recently spoke to a friend who has worked with a certain, ever-so relevant hospitality brand that has built its reputation and cult-ish fandom on, yes, it’s wonderfully designed properties, but also on its incredible service.

That brand is, of course, none other than Aman.

The fast-expanding hospitality group has built an allure of exclusivity and taste (the most overused word of 2026) around its hotel portfolio, that Aman junkies approach with a gotta-catch-‘em-all attitude.

What these brand devotees (foreshadowing) say on Reddit threads and Google reviews about what keeps bringing them back again and again is the service that contributes to an almost magical atmosphere.

You are transported from the ordinary to a carefully orchestrated alternative world order, not of the Eyes Wide Shut kind, but of harmony and stillness.

The soul of Aman

But what makes the service at Aman stand out from any other luxury property out there?

According to my insider friend, the brand has managed to become such a phenomenon because everyone from housekeepers to corporate managers are devoted to the soul or spirit of Aman, something that seems exist beyond the property. A higher power, if you will.

When I hear this, I envision concierge serving guests from a dignified position of being in service of something larger. They become embodiments of the harmony that arises from attention and care, hospes1 in action.

If you think this is woo woo, I grant you your opinion. It does feel almost impossible to articulate this sentiment without relying on the world of abstractions and ideas.

Still, this strikes a very specific chord inside me; one of truth, something close to what the philosophy of hospitality truly means.

The ethics of service

I do happen to believe all great creativity comes from being moved by something larger and creating experiences that go beyond a transactional service touch point.

Service is hugely, immensely undervalued in our society, not least made concrete by the fact that most of care-related labor is produced by women in the private sphere, completely unpaid.

Jobs in hospitality, especially in operations are not generally seen as dignified career paths in and of themselves, and are treated more as transitory work (exhibit a: employee turnover is extremely high in the hospitality industry).

This is a structural issue, comprising of many factors, including that we tend to see those serving us as means-to-an-end to fulfill our needs, rather than human beings who are using their precious time to be of service to us (something Kant would note to be a big no-no).

And it’s not only guests who succumb to this line of thinking, but the hospitality industry itself is a culprit, not paying employees enough, alongside endless cases of general mistreatment and poor management.

I think the mindset of devotion that can make a hotel brand stand out above all others, and that Aman has seemed to master, can only exist when the employees are treated well enough to give a shit. When they are made to feel like their work is one of great dignity and service to a bigger, ethical obligation of being of service to others.

A cautionary tale (and piping hot industry tea!!!🍵)

Many hotel groups are so obsessed with their bottom line and consequently are not happy with how human capital intensive the business is (especially in the luxury segment), flat out complaining about the incurred costs of the salaries of the people that make their product (hospitality) possible.

Spring last year I had the opportunity to meet the area finance director of one of the most iconic hotel brands in the world that, at the time, was a publicly traded company (I will not name names since the company has since gone private and hopefully is changing its strategy going forward).

She presented the financials and growth plans of the group, with an overwhelming amount of properties in the pipeline. Then, she went on to say that the company’s biggest challenge is salaries.

This really did not sit right with me, especially because right after she concluded the presentation, the brand’s bubbly, smiley HR representative gloated about their growing, practically unpaid internship program.

Do not get me wrong, the pressure is understandable, especially for public companies that have to deliver growth and improve results on the quarterly under stakeholder scrutiny.

The options are essentially to either grow revenue or cut costs.

The former happens the quickest through acquisition and expansion, which I think can be a detrimental strategy for an ultra luxury brand. A larger portfolio will almost inevitably bring inconsistency across the portfolio.

The cutting costs route is what leads to the finger pointing to staff expenses.

Neither is a great look for a luxury hotel that’s supposed to be rooted in quality and intentionality, in my opinion.

How to build your own cult and make your staff devoted

Hotels can gain insane and completely deserved advantage by becoming a vessel for something greater; having an ethos that each member of the team can subscribe to and gladly embodies.

However, this is impossible if this philosophy is not made a structural pillar and the employees, who are the ones bringing the vision to life in the day-to-day actually in contact with the guests, do not feel like their work has dignity or grace.

This is absolutely not something you can plaster on, as devotion does not spring from pretty words or motivational quotes in the staff canteen.

Investing in human capital, and caring for the people who care for your guests, is the single most valuable thing you can do in an industry that commodifies human care and attention.

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Send memes,

🔑 Emma

tPH is almost 3 months old, and I feel so at home with how you’re responding and engaging.

It feels like so many of you have felt the way I did, that hospitality media is missing a place where we go a bit deeper than operations and aesthetics, and commune around the deeper themes of human-centricity and connection that predate them.

In addition to this letter, I have the pleasure in working on many other interesting hospitality writing projects, most recently as the editor of EHL’s Psychological Well-Being in Hospitality Report 2026.

It is based on the interviews of nearly 50 hospitality and well-being leaders, including the CEO of Equinox Hotels, the longevity director at Clinique La Prairie, the President of global hotel operations at Four Seasons, and many more.

Read the full report here

While the report includes a plethora of interesting findings, my absolute favorite of the explored themes is the move towards transformational hospitality and its philosophical roots.

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: we are moving on from the experience economy, hospitality as transformation, Aristotle, and Hannah Arendt.

From the experience economy to the transformation economy

In 1998, Joseph Pine introduced the concept of the experience economy, which is the idea that the mechanics of business had moved from a focus on goods to a focus on experiences.

This has been largely great news for hospitality, which is by default experiential.

However, this is no reason for the industry to rest on its laurels. The successor concept to the experience economy is already here, introduced by Joe Pine himself: the transformation economy.

The transformation economy argues that consumers are no longer satisfied with staged experiences around the products and experiences they are purchasing. Instead, consumers are now seeking for the things they consume to change them in some way, whether that’s their thoughts, feelings, or entire lives.

So in wellness terms, a hotel may have a bespoke spa or a pillow menu (have any of you seen one of these in real life??), but it does not on its own hold the promise of transformation for the guest.

Is the hospitality industry prepared?

The hospitality industry is still largely stuck in the mindset of the experience economy, thinking that this almost 30-year-old framework still holds. According to one of our interviewees, “If you ask most hoteliers, they still talk about well-being as ‘hey, we have a gym and granola’”.

The sad thing is that the industry has all the potential to become a place of transformation. Currently, the focus is largely on serving the guest’s hedonic needs for rest or pleasure. While these are important, for transformation to occur the guest’s sense of meaning or relation to life must be addressed.

There are properties that pioneer hospitality as transformation. The South African off-grid wilderness retreat Bliss & Stars removes wifi, caffeine, and alcohol from the guest’s vicinity, and programming includes stargazing and somatic practice.

Guests get removed from the endless chase of productivity, and as a result, leave feeling transformed and fully restored. When I had a conversation with the retreat’s co-founder Daria Rasmussen, she mentioned how she continues to be amazed by how the simplest things can have such a profound effect on the human being.

Who knew time off screens, proper meals, community, and nature could be so good for us?

Jokes aside, being put into this situation of silence, stripped from all the everyday crutches can be extremely uncomfortable (before it becomes rewarding), which is not what hospitality usually goes for.

But this discomfort and going back to basics is also exactly how a property like Bliss & Stars can evoke such a deep transformation in its guests.

Hospitality is a reciprocal act

And that’s what hospitality ultimately is, the return to the fundamentals. We all need attention and care to survive.

Even a limited-service automated hotel with minimal staff should ensure that the guest feels seen and cared for through design and amenity choices.

In fact, when it comes to the questions of AI and automation, I think the greatest value and promise of them for hospitality lies in making sure team members can spend less time doing redundant, low-value manual tasks and focus more on connecting with guests.

Because the truth of the matter is, that almost everyone who ends up in the hospitality industry does so because they get a kick out of making others feel good.

This makes sense given that the word hospitality is derived from the Latin hospes, which signifies the reciprocal relationship between host and hosted.

A holistic well-being philosophy

What makes hospitality uniquely positioned to support human well-being is how holistically it can do so.

Aristotle identified eudaimonia as the highest form of human flourishing, which is a continuous condition that arises from an alignment of different human capacities, such as reason, virtue, relationships, purpose, health, and physical fitness.

In philosopher Hannah Arendt’s words

“The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it”

In this sense, the hedonic, pleasure-driven sense of well-being is a prerequisite for reaching eudaimonia. Well-being is inherently plural and interconnected, like Indra’s net, a concept from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, where reflective droplets mirror each other.

While hospitality can make us feel good, it can also help us be better, which is what the guest now wants.

I think of Aman collaborating with tennis player Novak Djokovic to create performance and detox programming that definitely sells the fantasy of athletic transformation, and longevity clinics such as Clinique la Prairie that orchestrate your health in an optimized environment, equipping guests with the tools they need to implement the transformation in their everyday lives.

In the video, wellness is spoken of as a lifestyle and a personal obligation, implicitly promising Aman junkies that through this “guided reset for body, mind and spirit”, you, too, can transform and master your life.

When sleep, nourishment, environment, connection, and purpose converge, transformation becomes inevitable.

The Psychological Well-being in Hospitality Report is one of the most comprehensive projects I have worked on, and this letter only scratches the surface of all the topics covered.

I would like to hear your thoughts: have you ever experienced feeling transformed by hospitality? This need not be a silent retreat, maybe it was simply someone’s direct attention that changed you 👁️

If you liked this piece, further recommended reading is this letter by and I that touches on similar concepts.

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With my warmest greetings,

🔑 Emma

In this letter: the death of the term boutique, neon sign that says good vibes only, instagrammable interiors are a hate crime, and are independent hotels the future of the industry?

In recent letters I have expressed my love for home-like hotels that invite us to dwell, hotels with unlimited attention to detail, and in general hotels that embody third places.

Coincidentally, many of the hotels that check one or more of these boxes are considered boutique hotels.

Pleasing the modern traveller

Boutique hotels often have max 100-200 rooms, creating a more intimate and exclusive vibe. They need not belong to the luxury segment, and, in fact, many of the best I have encountered would count as limited service.

But even though I could, I’m not here today to go on about why I think boutique hotels embody what I love so much about hospitality. Instead, we are going to look at what is threatening its very core: lifestyle hotels.

Boutique hotels are a fast growing and hugely popular hotel type. In my opinion this is the case because they happen to match many of the very things that guests are currently seeking in their stays. Authenticity is a big one, as well as personalization. The reasons and ways people travel have also changed, and the average guest increasingly resembles a hybrid who is traveling to satisfy both work and play.

Many interesting hotel concepts (not boutique per se) specifically catering to this new type of traveller have emerged in recent history as a result of this shift, such as Bob W and Zoku.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Global hotel chains like Marriott and Accor want in on the fun. A JW Marriott, while it has its own angle and offers standardized predictability, is pretty much the furthest thing imaginable from a bespoke locally-rooted and intimately-sized property; an unfortunate predicament as the demand has shifted so much towards the latter.

The solution for these global players has been to add new concepts to their portfolios (either through acquisitions or creating) that try to emulate what guests love about boutique properties. Enter lifestyle hotels.

There are SO many lifestyle brands now, almost to the point of exhaustion, and everyone is hopping on the bandwagon.

They have been called the next generation of boutique hotels, combining their distinct design charm with global chain prices. The sentiment is… sweet, but what about the execution?

In reality, many of these brands are indistinguishable from one another. This could be attributed to it being a structural feature of global brands to be scalable and replicable.

Also, I would like to note that lifestyle hotels were never really about the place they are located in. A recent study found that consumers expect lifestyle hotels to help them “express personal image” and “enhance social status”… while boutique hotels are more associated with an intimate atmosphere and design that is distinctive to the locale.

Lifestyle hotels are trying to reproduce this authentic feeling of being boutique to the point that the line between the terms has become rather elusive, stretched so thin that it ends up meaning nothing.

More than 50% of travelers in the study couldn’t even define the difference between boutique and lifestyle hotels. This is, of course, useful if you’re a global chain trying to sell something inherently copy-pasteable as something that has real substance and personality.

The lifestyle hotel aesthetic

Exposed brick, millennial pink, those lightbulb industrial lamps, a Love Island villa -adjacent neon sign, and many other quirky design elements.

This design approach is SO consistent across lifestyle brands be it Moxy, Mama Shelter, or Canopy (owned by Marriott, Ennismore/Accor, and Hilton respectively), and it’s definitely not an accident.

These hotels are designed to feel special, unique, hip, authentic… while being operationally as replicable as possible.

I have the ick

The ick, for me, is that authenticity means very little when we are discussing a scalable product designed to capture a specific demographic that needs everything to be instagrammable (does this demographic even exist anymore? I heard people are no longer posting).

Still interestingly, the research I mentioned earlier confirms that the people that do stay at lifestyle hotels are more motivated by self-image (i.e., how the hotel reflects who they want to be seen as) compared to those who stay boutique.

So there still seems to be a demographic for lifestyle hotel concepts that are driven by aesthetics (not to be confused with taste), and to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. HOWEVER, these brands should not be confused with concepts that have been born out of passion for hospitality and a drive to refresh a stagnant industry.

Oftentimes in the cases where global brands acquire a concept that created organic loyalty and interest around it, the soul of those independent brands gets flattened as the funnel requires them to become easily replicable.

In other words, the very things that travelers want get diluted when chains try to manufacture it at scale.

A Marriott executive once allegedly admitted (behind close doors) that Moxy was their copycat version of citizenM (this was naturally before they acquired the company). At least they’re honest about it!

Not all lifestyle hotels are evil

Not all hotels that could be considered lifestyle give me the ick.

Take Bob W., for instance. You can probably tell by now from the few mentions of the brand on tPH that there is admiration from my side. I feel like they do everything these branded lifestyle hotels set out to do but for real!!!

The locations are actually, by design, locally rooted, in converted office or apartment buildings, with breakfast served at a local café.

Why this is different from a run-of-the-mill lifestyle brand is that there is real point of view and vision that predates the trend.

Again, a disclaimer: global chains are capable of genuine excellence (specifically in the luxury segment with names such as St. Regis or the Ritz) and I’ve had the pleasure to meet many incredible dedicated people behind their portfolio brands that know what they are and do it beautifully.

The scale is not the icky part but rather the flattening and soullessness of it all.

Will there be a reckoning?

If you are operating or developing a hotel, I assure you, “lifestyle” is not something you should chase, coming from a gen-z girly who is probably somewhere on that target segment moodboard.

Instead, your time and money are much better spent by asking what you actually believe about the industry and the modern guest, and make that the guiding principle.

Concepts born this way have much more longevity than jumping on the lifestyle bandwagon for a short-term return horizon.

Now I need to hear your thoughts! Have you come across good lifestyle hotels? What are your icks? Can a lifestyle hotel ever compare to a boutique hotel?

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Ciao ragazzi see you next week,

🔑 Emma

I am in awe of the way in which you have made tPH your own. Like in a hotel, you are here for a myriad of reasons, some to relax, some to get down to some serious work. Everything is welcome and appreciated.

Since the last edition of the Lobby, we have had some incredible collaborations, on service recovery, enlightened CEOs, and details that elevate a hotel.

In the meanwhile, lots of interesting things have happened in the hospitality scene, not least of them being the more extravagant than ever edition of Watches & Wonders in Geneva. As a special treat, this letter includes the inside scoop of the event.

Enjoy!

(Note for email readers: This post is longer than what displays well in email. For the full reading experience, please view it on the website version.)

Welcome to The Lobby_, a roundup of what’s happening in hospitality, served with a point of view.

In this letter (by far the longest and juiciest edition so far): Met Gala hotel politics, the inside scoop on Watches and Wonders 2026, a very hospitality Milan design week, and all things Coachella.

• The Met Gala happened, and the getting ready in the hotel room spiel is getting more relevant by the year. 60 celebrities this year got ready at The Mark this week, with the rest staying at properties the likes of the Carlyle and the Lowell, as well as the Surrey, which is now the cool place to stay (thank you to my sources @Mila Stolk and @Seriesandthings for pointing this out). The managing director of the property, which is a Corinthia hotel, told People that the hotel has understood how important the hours leading up to the gala are, and now intentionally focuses on “supporting preparation, creativity, and storytelling”.

  Why precisely these hotels are the go-tos for the Gala attendees is largely logistical, as the proximity to the stairs of the Met is convenient. But I would love to see fashion houses choosing the property based on their alignment in storytelling and aesthetics, intentionally using the hotel as an extension of the brand’s world.

  Whether the fashion houses are paying rack rate or the hotels are cutting deals for the exposure they’re getting, no one knows (if you do know please share with the class!). But the economics are nonetheless fascinating, and these hotels are reaping the benefits of the cultural capital that comes from being associated with fashion’s big night.

• Coachella generated $870 million in media impact value in one weekend, all propelled by the art of hospitality. The festival has essentially turned into a content-churning machine, and the numbers of the 2026 edition are staggering. As 250,000 people headed for the desert, hotel rates in Palm Springs went up by 62%. Music aside, what caught my attention (and many others’, sparking conversation about the ’rich’ and ’poor’ sides of Coachella) was the world-building and brand activations that were again very hospitality-based.

  Rhode had touch-up rooms and claw machines, YSL Beauty had a multi-sensory drive-through with burgers, Camp Poosh had massages and a lakeside beach club, and Marc Jacobs orchestrated its eyewear launch with Tao Group Hospitality, a partnership that is going to continue beyond Coachella. The latter makes me especially happy, because while hospitality is an extremely important part of these activations and the cultural capital they generate (and increasingly so), rarely does a hospitality brand get accredited in this way.

  🚨Prediction alert (you heard it here first)🚨: Hospitality brands will become more and more visible in festivals like Coachella. Currently it’s very F&B-focused, but I think strategically savvy hotel brands will get in the game. Imagine if we saw a Janu (Aman’s more social sister brand) activation? (And yes, I know that Soho House hosted its own pop-up on the premises, but the members’ club is arguably not currently in the books of cool.)

• Fashion brands opened restaurants left and right at Milan Design Week. Marimekko revealed Osteria Fiori di Marimekko with aperitivo bites by Helsinki chef Maud Saddok, jasmine-infused drinks from the garden, bocce tournaments, limited-edition espresso cups… I loved it. Staff obviously wore the brand’s newest floral prints. Meanwhile, Marni took over Pasticceria Cucchi which is a legendary 1930s Milanese café for a three-month residency, where they redesigned everything from the sugar packets to the milk jugs to the staff uniforms. Wallpaper* called it “brand immersion at its finest.”

  This is further confirmation on the rising trend of world-building for fashion brands, and hospitality being part of it is becoming standard.

• Watches and Wonders just wrapped its biggest edition yet, and hospitality was évidemment the real star. Nearly 60,000 visitors, 50,000 hotel nights in Geneva, and an interesting demographic with a quarter of ticket buyers being under 25. For the Lobby’s first-ever House Guest section, I asked communications strategist and branding enthusiast Baina Eliseeva to tell us what she saw on the ground and the special inside scoop for hospitality people.

According to my Watches and Wonders insider Baina, hospitality has taken center stage at the event, especially at this year’s rendition which was bigger and better than ever.

”Inside Jaeger-LeCoultre’s ‘Valley of Inventions’ booth, I noticed clients trying on novelties at Le Chalet itself, where two-Michelin-star Swiss chef Gilles Varone was serving a cheese dégustation in an alpine-inspired setting built around the dairy heritage of the Vallée de Joux, JLC’s birthplace. Watch in hand, cheese on the palate, at the same table.

JLC had hinted at this in 2025 with the 1931 Café by chocolatier Mathieu Davoine, tucked inside a booth themed around the Reverso‘s polo origins. Four experimental chocolate creations echoed the watch’s Art Deco heritage. Open to public visitors, unusual for a programme of that quality, which normally stays behind the press-and-VIP curtain.

This year, the fair caught up. The Wake Up! Café by Michelin-starred chef Danny Khezzar opened inside Palexpo, and the event extended beyond its walls with a curated restaurant guide via TheFork and an evening Montreux Jazz Club pop-up on the lakefront.”

Baina points out that this same effect is happening in fashion. ”Prada’s Marchesi, Louis Vuitton’s cafés, Tiffany’s Blue Box Café, and others. Luxury is converging on the same idea. A watch catalogue tells you the specs, but a cheese dégustation reveals what to expect once you are inside the brand’s universe.”

The overarching pattern at W&W was that brands are investing into worldbuilding and staging experiences.

”Audemars Piguet, back at the event for the first time in six years opened the House of Wonders, which was more of an exhibition than a booth. TAG Heuer leaned full motorsport, with an F1 car and Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917 parked inside.”

With the conjoined history of watchmaking and timekeeping, sports have an ever-growing presence at Watches & Wonders 🏎️🏎️🏎️

”Last year, they had an Oracle Red Bull Racing simulator for clients to test their lap times, but this year there was a dedicated corner that told the Monaco’s story. Since taking over as F1’s official timekeeper in 2025, the brand reports a 15% jump in boutique footfall and 20% growth in F1 collection sales, and the space is clearly designed to keep that momentum going.”

Overall, the event is a giant case study in experiential retail. Baina mentioned Ulysse Nardin’s very freaky two-metre kinetic sculpture. ”Visually it recalled Gentle Monster’s flagships, where kinetic heads have become a signature. But Gentle Monster’s heads are anonymous while Ulysse Nardin’s had Ludwig Oechslin’s face, the watchmaker who designed the Freak in 2001, a watch so radical it had no dial, no hands, and no crown.”

”Hermès was the most theatrical. Artist Jean-Simon Roch designed a wooden automaton of ropes, pulleys, and counterweights, with movement woven into the architecture itself.”

The main takeaway for brands according to Baina: ”when every competitor has a beautiful product, the space around it becomes the differentiator”.

Preach! I could not agree more with Baina’s sentiment. Hopefully next year we can also have tPH reporting from the ground. Stay tuned!

What I'm reading, watching, or listening to; hospitality-related or not. Consider it a peek into what's influencing my thinking.

As some of you may know, I have a degree in global and comparative philosophy, which happened in my life before hospitality. During my studies I delved into (in addition to the Western philosophical canon) African, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Indian philosophical traditions.

While I decided not to pursue philosophy further academically (for now), I never stopped researching the topics that interest me, one of them being old Buddhist traditions. Right now, I’m brushing up my knowledge on the chakra system by reading Wheels of Life by Dr. Anodea Judith.

I got very inspired, hence I’m cooking up something fun for tPH.

A hotel that has been on my radar.

Guys, did you really think I was not going to mention the announcement of the Texas Aman? Amansanu is set to open in 2027 with standalone villas, and naturally, branded residences (it seems to be standard now).

I saw someone mention that there will be full-fledged horse stables. I am ready to finally fulfill my cowgirl dreams.

That’s all for this edition of The Lobby. I truly appreciate your presence.

🔑 Emma

A recent What the Luxe interview with design pioneer Stephen Bayley centered around the general disintegration of design, and how its sentiment of “effort and care beyond what is necessary” is now seen as frivolous.

Anant Sharma, the host, stated that:

“It has become so irrational to take the more charming path that it’s almost unjustifiable”

Yet, the converse is probably closer to the truth.

It is precisely through attention to detail and making said detail charming that we can unlock the most value and impact. This applies to both design of physical spaces and products, as well as experience design, no matter the industry.

When interacting with an offering is made as intuitive and emotionally resonant as possible, it will turn consumers into spokespeople.

Why are details so important?

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

This is a phrase often attributed to Zen Buddhism, but it is also one that Will Guidara mentions frequently in his book Unreasonable Hospitality. For Guidara, the phrase became a guiding principle in bringing his restaurant Eleven Madison Park from a great restaurant to the best in the world.

Translating this phrase into practice meant putting an unreasonable amount of effort into each detail in the restaurant; from silverware to coffee beans to placing the plate in a way where the guest has an easier time checking who manufactured it.

This purpose of this letter, however, is not to relay what Guidara has written. Instead, it is a curated list of details we find incredibly chic impactful, courtesy of two self-proclaimed hotel enthusiasts.

In this letter: a big boy list of absolutely life-changing details in hotels, curated by and , the tasteful mind behind The Other HAFH (a hospitality newsletter you do not want to miss)

Read The Other HAFH

50 details that make a hotel (or service experience) so f****** good

The following list is non-exhaustive, and includes examples from other areas than hotels, such as wellness experiences. Enjoy.

1. Handwritten notes from the hotel

2. A chic ‘do not disturb’ sign. Imagine a leather tassel hanging off the door instead of a flimsy plastic one.

3. A velvet tray where you can place your jewelry and watch during a facial, instead of having to throw them in your bag or on the table. This is the standard experience at Biologique Recherche.

4. High-quality stationery, such as a heavy-duty pen and envelopes (obviously in addition to a notepad).

5. Real, fresh flowers in the room or around the property(and preferably also strange or whimsical).

6. A signature fragrance that reminds you of the property forever and ever when you come upon it again. However, with nuance (see point 31)

7. Fresh newspapers with an intentional selection. I like to have FT Weekend at hand.

8. A REAL Finnish sauna, where you are actually allowed to throw water on the stones (Note from Emma: Yes, I’m a snob, I’m Finnish, this is my culture. I’m available for sauna consultancy).

9. When you are brought a beverage and your coat is taken for you at the very moment you set foot on the property.

10. Nice hotel slippers. I’m so over the flimsy, white, Temu-quality slippers. I’m calling it: the baseline expectation for luxury hotels from now on is high quality slippers that can be worn comfortably throughout the hotel, from the room to the spa to breakfast.

11. When they don’t ask: “Is this your first time staying with us?” (because they should already know, especially at luxury properties)

12. A Polaroid camera in the room because why not! (Bob W. has one in every room) Surprise your guests, they will tell their friends.

13. Thought-through staff uniforms, whether they are somehow unexpected or charmingly traditional. More important than the style, however, is that they are high quality and made from breathable, natural matierials.

14. Small keepsakes to take with. Belmond has a collectible sticker for each property. The Goring gifts kids a stuffed animal.

15. Little pockets of shared spaces, or a favorite, an in-hotel library.

16. Books that can be borrowed and read, that have something to do with the storytelling of the property. Rosewood Amsterdam has a shelf of books that were gifted by collaborators and friends of the hotel.

17. Quality merch. Brand extension galore when you can live your favorite hotel’s aesthetic beyond the stay.

18. A proper hair dryer. Firefly in Zermatt has a Dyson in every single room.

19. Mini bar stocked with local goods, and hot take: the mini bar should always be complimentary at luxury hotels! (Note from Sanchita: YES! Don’t give me coca cola or sprite. I want to know the regional soda that nobody outside a fifty mile radius has heard of. I also want to know the local chocolatier, the small-batch preserve. Let me in on the surrounding area, and I’ll stop resenting the upcharge.)

20. Heated bathroom floors.

21. Turndown service and a refill of the aforementioned complimentary minibar.

22. A complimentary spa treatment. Mont Cervin Palace offers a 30-minute facial for all guests (Note from Emma: it rivaled a Biologique Recherche treatment, no joke!)

23. A tea, coffee, and snack station in the common area. Bonus points for (branded) takeaway cups so you can zoom out for a coffee walk.

24. Plug points where you actually need them. That could be next to the bed, near the desk, not hidden behind the wardrobe or requiring furniture rearrangement.

25. A room with one overhead setting and no bedside dimmer is a room designed to be photographed, not slept in. A reading light that doesn’t need the overhead should be non-negotiable.

26. Blackout curtains that actually black out. The gap down the middle. Always the gap down the middle. A design failure so consistent it might as well be intentional.

27. Mirror placement. The hotel that gives you a full-length mirror somewhere with decent light has understood my psyche.

28. Enough drawer space to actually unpack. The wardrobe rail with four hangers expects you to live out of your suitcase. Many of us just accept this, but we shouldn’t.

29. Speaking of hangers, they need to detach from the rail. I don’t know when the fixed anti-theft hanger became a thing, but I would be mortified if I found them at a so-called luxury destination. The hotel is essentially saying they don’t trust you.

30. The bathroom counter. Surface area. Most boutique hotels sacrifice it for the stone slab aesthetic and leave you balancing your toiletries on the edge of the sink. Like the one below; plenty of surface area.

    

31. I don’t mind hotels with a signature scent. That’s encouraged. But I don’t want it in the room. The room should smell of nothing, and a neutral scent is surprisingly hard to achieve.

32. The shower pressure. Temperature, too. Both need to be consistent but variable.

33. Towel quantity. Rule of thumb: stock rooms with more towels than necessary.

34. Also, bath sheets, not just bath towels. The size distinction is notable.

35. The bedside table surface area. Similar to the bathroom counter, the bedside table should have room for miscellaneous objects. Phone, water glass, reading glasses, trinkets, etc. (Note from Emma: and the 5-6 journals and books I’m always carrying with me)

36. Pillow choice. Firm or soft, offered without being requested. Hotels that do this have understood that sleep is a core product.

37. Water. Always. A full carafe, refilled at turndown, without it appearing on the bill. Charging for still water in a four-star-or-more hotel is abhorrent.

38. Adequate task lighting at the desk. The number of hotels with a desk that can’t actually be used for work after dark is an indictment of who they imagined was staying.

39. More lighting woes: wardrobe lighting. A dark wardrobe in a dark room requires a phone torch to locate dark trousers. Solved by a motion sensor costing less than the soap amenities.

40. A printed neighbourhood map or city guide. I love the Orso Guides that Orso Hotels print and leave in each of their hotel guest rooms in Paris.

41. Similar to this, a note about what’s happening in the city that week. Curated and dated.

42. Portable umbrellas. I appreciate that hotels can provide those massive ones when needed, but sometimes you just want one that slides into your bag when you’re heading out.

43. A proper shoe horn. Long-handled. The detail is so small and so cheap to get right.

44. Breakfasts that can be taken at an actually reasonable hour. Not 6:30 am for early flights or 10 am as the outer limit. Give me breakfast until noon on weekends.

45. A stocked needle and thread kit. I don’t know why a lot of hotels stopped providing this, but they’re great to have just in case.

46. Learn the name of the guest and use it correctly. The recovery from mispronunciation isn’t to abandon the name and replace it with ‘ma’am’ for the remainder of the stay (Note from Sanchita: this has happened to me and is worse than the original error).

47. A bath that fits a human body comfortably. It sounds absurd to even have to say it, but so many are sculptural first and functional second.

48. The exact placement of the bedside lamp switch. If I have to lean past the lamp to find it, I’m out.

49. Tissue boxes that aren’t deeply recessed into stone or wood that you have to dig for the first tissue.

50. Curtain tracks that don’t catch halfway. The uneven glide is a mood kill.

It is simple to applaud, congratulate, and thoroughly enjoy a property that gets these details right.

And luckily, oftentimes great details are free (or cost the same) to execute, but make the world of a difference.

What did we miss? Hard agrees or disagrees? We’re dying to know!

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We hope you enjoyed your stay,

🔑 Emma and Sanchita

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce (valued at $97 billion), meditates with spiritual gurus in India and has installed meditation rooms across every Salesforce office, and Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, is into long, silent, and ascetic Vipassana retreats where he eats like a bird and talks to no one.

Silicon Valley fixture Tim Ferriss’ thing is shamanic ceremonies and ayahuasca, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, is also touting the benefits of both meditation retreats and psychedelic ceremonies.

The tech bros, now infamously speaking against introspection, are quite paradoxically all aboard the hallucinogen train. A Google search for “psychedelic-assisted leadership training” returns over a million results.

Welcome to the consciousness revolution (corporate edition).

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The infrastructure of the awakened CEO

The tech bros themselves saw their growing interest in borderline spiritual leadership training as a market gap, which birthed the Costa Rica -based 1heart. This eco-luxury retreat center has hosted over 500 business leaders who are giving raving testimonials, all accompanied by a picture of a C-suite person exuding love for the world.

Alumni include billionaires, World Economic Forum delegates, TED speakers, and NGO founders, with 70% of participants are first timers with ayahuasca, and 80% come via referral from other executives.

Testimonials include:

• “It fundamentally transformed how I related to others nearly overnight.”

• “I felt this oneness. I felt connected to everyone and everything. I felt a lot of love for all the people in my life.”

• "You don't need to be that Goldman Sachs guy who just plays with ones and zeroes. You can be that and, at the same time, have a super expressive, artistic mind."

  

Essentially, if you strip away the hallucinogens and shamanic chanting, these retreats touch on the very basic human needs of presence, human connection, and shedding the impossibly heavy armor of professional identity. The attendees are on the very top of the corporate food chain, and on paper, have all the influence and material security in the world to feel fulfilled.

Yet, they still felt the call of the jungle. Why is that?

We’re transcending the ego, boys

Philosophers have over millennia written about a certain hollowness that seems to be inherent to human life, and different possible cures for it. In the light of these ideas, CEOs being obsessed with unlocking the next realm seems almost consequential.

The traditional view of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has food and shelter at the bottom of the pyramid, with self-actualization as the very last tier to check off.

However, Maslow himself was dissatisfied with his own creation, and before his passing, added another layer: self-transcendence.

Maslow defined self-transcendence as:

The very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.

In other words, the ultimate goal is to transcend the self through understanding our interconnectedness with others (groundbreaking, I know, especially considering Eastern traditions had been saying this from the beginning of time).

I think this is what the tech bros are chasing at these ayahuasca retreats. They have self-actualized, every lower rung of the hierarchy has been crushed, checks on all boxes from safety to achievement. But it’s not enough, is it.

Only through encountering the face of the other, as Emmanuel Levinas would say, facilitated by a total change of environment and identity (and yes, probably a shaman) did they stop seeing their fellow human beings as resources or metrics to optimize.

Transformative hospitality

Transformative hospitality, where people enter as one person and leave as another, is on the rise.

The options for experiencing corporate enlightenment are only proliferating, with the spiritual wellness segment currently valued at $190 billion, and wellness tourism as a broader category projected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2035.

It’s important to note that in order to be transformative, psychedelics or tantric rituals need not be involved. The truly transformational ingredients, at the end of the day, are immersion and connection.

Here are some properties to earmark to experience transformation (maybe try this before cutting your own bangs!), curated by .

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1. Soltara Healing Center, Costa Rica

This one is included in the enlightened-CEO starter pack. Ayahuasca, ocean air, and just enough infrastructure to make ego dissolution feel like a well-run program. You arrive as a founder, you leave texting your team about “heart-led leadership.”

2. Esalen Institute, Monterey, CA

The original California consciousness lab. Hot springs overlooking the Pacific, somatic workshops, and a lineage of people who have been trying to feel their feelings since the 1960s.

3. SHA Wellness Clinic, Mexico

Where biohacking meets linen robes. Blood panels, macrobiotic cuisine, and bowing down to the gods of optimization. In addition to the Riviera Maya property, the longevity galore is also available in Spain. The staff includes an impressive number of doctors and other specialists to give you the best detox of your life.

4. The Ranch, Malibu, CA

You hike, you sweat, you don’t eat very much, and somewhere around day four it starts feeling like clarity. Obviously the property has an infrared sauna, a regenerative garden, a cold plunge, a body composition analysis device, something called a ‘massage village’, and a ginormous gym.

5. Amanpuri, Thailand

Not explicitly “transformational,” but there is space and service so precise it can reorganize your entire nervous system. One of their signature holistic wellness journeys is called ‘Amanpuri Awakening’, which is so enlightened CEO core.

6. Six Senses Douro Valley, Portugal

Wine country meets wellness narrative (red wine is good for your heart I hear…). Forest bathing, spa rituals, etc. for hardcore dnd. The property’s vegetables are home grown and there’s even a pickle workshop.

7. Sensei Lanai, A Four Seasons Resort, Lanai, Hawaii

Larry Ellison’s version of inner peace with data-driven wellness. You stretch, you sip something herbal, you can do aerial yoga and guided garden walks… probably at some point your body is tricked into behaving differently.

8. Azuma Farm Koiwai, Japan

A slow-living cosplay property in rural Japan, by non other than Adrian Zecha, the founder of Aman. Guests are invtited to step into what could even be described as an ascetic rhythm of land, craft, and stillness, where the primary activity is simply being (but obviously expensively). It also happens to be brand spanking new, officially open in April 2026.

A higher realm of hospitality?

It is rare to find a (luxury) property nowadays without some sort of wellness offering. In fact, it would be an almost outrageous thought for a property to not adress well-being in some sort of way.

But looking at these signals (the enlightened CEOs, the democratization of biohacking and longevity practices with the proliferation of wearable tech and the mainstreamification of health optimization), hospitality is reponisitioning itself towards this demand by offering transformation as opposed to just experience to meet the evolving demands.

And it is, indeed, a repositioning and not a reinvention, as great hotels already are places where strangers attend to you with care and where you are temporarily freed from the machinery of your own life.

🔑 With shamanic greetings,

Emma and Michaela

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As you probably know by now, I am, to my core, a philosopher. I enjoy the intangible, the abstract, and spend much of my time in that realm.

However, there are times, when the other side of me takes precedent. She is from the 80s, a shark in Swiss finance who made it to the top of the food chain.

Today’s edition of The Reservation™ is brought to you by her.

Welcome to The Reservation, a tPH letter including long-form analysis and cultural criticism of the hospitality industry and relevant trends.

In this letter: Wall Street is lusting for asset-heavy businesses, AI is coming for global hotel companies, giving the hospitality industry a facelift.

I believe we are currently living, experiencing some version of the dot com bubble. Software companies have disproportionately dominated portfolios and been the golden children of finance bros.

But the winds of change are blowing, my friend, and the direction is favorable for the hospitality industry 🏳️🏳️🏳️

Financial Times recently wrote that Wall Street is experiencing AI anxiety and thus gravitating towards HALO stocks, standing for Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence.

Business models that are built on human or digital capital (software, consulting, asset management, etc.) are threatened to be abolished, made obsolete, by AI.

Now, suddenly, after asset-light has been all the rage, markets are repricing companies whose value is derived from physical assets that are expensive (and more importantly impossible for AI to) replicate. The big boy category of power grids, pipelines, utilities, transport infrastructure, and critical machinery.1

Since the start of 2025, Goldman’s basket of capital-intensive HALO stocks has outperformed capital-light stocks by roughly 35%.

Considering this, oh boy do I have the pitch for you.

The “asset-heavy” predicament in hospitality

For the past three decades or so, the prevailing wisdom in hospitality, validated by public market performance, was that owning physical assets was a liability. The hottest companies in the industry went asset-light and became brand houses that get recurring franchising and management fees without the burden of actually owning hotels.

Shareholders loooove the asset-light configuration, because it generates higher margins and predictable cash flows. Marriott and Wyndham have been able to scale their businesses to become the world’s biggest hotel companies with this business model.

But maybe we’re starting to outgrow this view. HALO-bros2 are looking for physical spaces, accumulated expertise, location, design, atmosphere, and all the other stuff that AI cannot replicate.

Furthermore, these large hotel companies turned management and distribution platforms are now officially getting the heebie-jeebies from AI, as it’s threatening what’s left of their value proposition.3

Hotels are the definition of heavy assets with low obsolescence. A well-designed property in a prime location with an expert team with seasoned hospitality professionals. Michelin-starred kitchens, the warmth of a human being remembering your name and how you take your coffee. Call me silly but I don’t think that can be automated any time soon (or ever).4

As if to prove my point, Europe’s oldest hotel company Kempinski just made its first hotel acquisition in 55 years. CEO Barbara Muckermann explicitly described it as a "strategic shift towards an asset-heavier approach”. This is because direct ownership leaves no variable of the guest experience into someone else’s hands, which, at the end of the day, is more of a liability than owning some real estate.

Giving the hospitality industry a facelift

The hospitality industry has spent years feeling insecure about its “old economy” status, seen as slow to innovate and even dusty.

Tech companies were celebrated for being asset-light, scalable, and disruptive, the prom queens and kings, hotels were seen as slow, capital-intensive, and unsexy. The companies that managed to make hospitality more tech were rewarded.

But the logic is different now, and being hard to replicate is now where the value is at. The characteristics that made hospitality seem outdated such as physical presence and the impossibility of scaling a feeling are exactly what makes the industry in my opinion more resilient against AI disruption.

Hospitality did not need to become more like tech! The world has seen enough tech bros.

How to attract HALO-bros™ 101

If the HALO thesis outlined above holds, the implications for hospitality are significant.

Here’s how to make sure your hotel business fits the bill

1. Change how you position physical assets. They shouldn’t be (solely) framed as cost centers or liabilities. The building and its location and distinct design are the very reason you cannot be disrupted, thus desirable. You’re welcome.

2. A knowledgeable human team is your most unreplicable asset, which is why you should invest in staff, and their training, and wellbeing. This way they can deliver hospitality properly, and its the hardest asset you can have.

3. We should unsubscribe from asset-light orthodoxy or, at the very least, reexamine its premises. The franchise model has clear financial advantages but physical ownership should not be treated as inherently inferior - because it isn’t! In a HALO world, owning your own hotel might just be the smartest thing you can do.

4. Stop apologizing for the industry! Hospitality is built on human care, physical spaces, and experience that are impossible to replicate with machines. That’s the value proposition and I think it’s time to make it sexy.

I hope this edition of the Reservation did two things, them being 1) instilled some confidence in our industry (we are not slow to innovate, we are ✨HALO✨) and 2) did justice to my hotel finance studies.

I would love to hear your thoughts! Especially if I have any HALO-bros in the audience.

🔑 Emma

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