y 2030, millennials and Gen Z are expected to represent nearly 70 % of the more than $ 400 billion in annual global luxury spending, according to Bain & Company. They are already redefining it: The gap between what they expect and what most new hotels are delivering is widening faster than the industry appears willing to acknowledge.

For a long time, luxury travelers were comfortable with coded signals of quality: quarries for lobbies, formal service rituals, brand pedigree as shorthand for trust. The arriving generation reads those signals differently: They are not opposed to formality or grandeur, but they are skeptical of anything that feels formulaic. What they want is specificity— a sense of place that could not exist anywhere else and the feeling that the people who created the experience cared

about the details, and them as guests, not just the rate.

Capital is flooding into luxury hospitality to meet this demand, but much of it is missing the mark. Between 2019 and 2024, hotels commanding $ 1,000- plus average daily rates tripled globally, from roughly 150 to 460 properties, according to CoStar. That is not a tripling in demand for extraordinary experiences, but capital chasing the highest per-key returns in the industry. Meanwhile, social media has flattened the reference pool. When every designer and every client is drawing from the same algorithmic feed, the output inevitably converges. You get hotels that look like they were designed by the same mood board.

They might photograph well, but in person, they feel like nothing unique. The issue is rarely a lack of money, ambition or visual polish. It is a lack of

conviction: Too many hotels are shaped to satisfy underwriting models, trend cycles or launch imagery before they are shaped around the emotional logic of the guest experience. The result looks expensive but feels generic.

The economics reinforce the urgency. Luxury RevPAR grew more than seven times faster than economy segments in early 2025, according to Pace Dimensions. Affluent travelers are the most reliable source of revenue in the industry, but reliability at the top of the market is earned through experience, and the properties that cannot deliver on their promise will be exposed. This generation researches deeply. For many, an entire trip is oriented around a stay at a specific property. Over half already receive travel recommendations through AI tools and a large percentage would prefer to book through large language models.

HONEST DESIGN Properties with genuine character and a point of view generate attention and the greatest chance of being surfaced. We approach this challenge by designing through the lens of both guest and host. Designing through the guest lens alone can produce beauty, but not always ease. Designing through the host lens alone can produce efficiency, but not always magic. When both perspectives are integrated early in the design process, the result is a space that feels refined while remaining intuitive for the operations team running it day after day. A guest should never sense the operational mechanics of a hotel, but those mechanics should be embedded in every design decision. A mark of success is when a hotel staffer can share with a guest something distinct surrounding the hotel’ s design, not because

42 hotelsmag. com May / June 2026