Every hotel touchpoint is turned into a transaction.

Pillows cost $30, water bottles cost $10.

A robot scans your air conditioning usage, and hits you with a surcharge at checkout if you’ve exceeded their 25c limit.

The price of valet is exorbitant right now. An airport transfer is marked up to infinity (I recently paid $400 USD for a one-way transfer in Mexico, for a 30-minute drive).

This is the reality we’re heading towards, if hotel investors get their choice!

When people ask me what my MAIN issue is with hotels, I can give a plethora of different things. But to sum up in one word, it’s making every single interaction feel like a transaction.

Transactionality ≠ hospitality

What is transactionality?

Well, to me, it’s the feeling you get when despite having a good time, the relationship is based on the cost of something. You visit a Starbucks, and the barista shows a tip screen to you while staring at you so you feel bad about NOT tipping.

It’s the feeling when a hotel presents a folio at checkout.

And even if the service is good, or you WANTED to give a tip, it still feels odd.

Hotels are in the business of making money. The problem is that many hotels have forgotten guests don’t want to be reminded of it at every touchpoint.

The age of mass customization

We’re living through a massive transition. You can customize everything. Every single area of your life is becoming à la carte. Brands are leaning into optionality because optionality maximizes revenue per transaction.

To maintain the soul of hospitality, hotels must rebel against this machine.

Customization and optionality create two things guests secretly despise, even if they don’t vocalize it: decision fatigue and transactionality.

There are two elements of the fix. First, decision fatigue. Second, the transaction itself.

Decision fatigue

People do not want to choose.

Starbucks has a thousand menu items. You can buy phones in seventy-five colours. That’s fine for consumer goods you buy once. It’s not right within the context of hospitality.

If a hotel caters to a hundred different guest avatars with massively different preferences, it cannot scale personalization without demolishing its margins, or ruining the experience.

The future of good hotels is fewer keys, one specific customer avatar, and being disciplined about who the property is for. Less variability means more room for creativity. It also means less exhausted staff, cleaner brand standards, and higher margins per guest.

Most importantly, it gets you to the point where guests self-select; they choose the hotel because it fits what they already want. Once that’s true, they trust the property to make the small decisions for them. That trust is the product.

The reason luxury doesn’t scale is precisely because hotel brands try to broaden their scope. It’s impossible to serve everyone well. You must scale slowly, be specific about who you want, and abandon the traditional hotel investor playbook of “cater to three-plus avatars.”

If you want to run a tiny-margin hotel with middling reviews, sure. Cater to everyone. Otherwise, pick a guest avatar and commit.

The transaction itself

Once you’ve eliminated decision fatigue, you’re in a good place. The next step is removing transactionality. That doesn’t mean eliminating transactions. It means reducing the emphasis on them.

Consider the hotel checkout. Most hotels, even luxury ones, end the visit with a printed folio, a summary of minibar charges, and a rushed “you’re all set.”

The last emotional moment of the entire stay is mental accounting. Even at a property charging a thousand dollars a night.

There’s a common belief in hospitality that luxury travelers don’t care about price. That belief is completely wrong. They absolutely care. They understand value. They’re willing to spend. But they don’t want to have to think about it, and they especially don’t want to end a great stay tallying charges.

My focus is always on how we can shift the focus to being about the relationship you’ve built with the guest. There’s no illusion as to what it is; you’re paying for something. But let’s not remind them of that.

Folio → a handwritten postcard with a recipe from their favourite meal.

A parting gift.

A conversation with one of the staff members they enjoyed talking with.

This logic extends to the entire guest journey. Check-in. The bar. The restaurant. Every interaction can either feel like a moment or a transaction. Almost none of them have to be transactional.

Bake it into the price

I am a huge proponent of baking (small) charges into the rate.

Valets should be included at luxury properties. The guests who don’t really use it won’t notice, the guests who do will be shocked.

In room water, and minibar items? Include them. The statistics on this are quite clear.

Wi-Fi, gym access, small F&B extras? All in the price.

Most guests will barely notice a modest ADR increase. Especially at the luxury and ultra-luxury price point.

They will 100% notice and remember being charged for everything.

They’ll also throttle their usage. They won’t order the extra water. They won’t take the transfer. It will subtract from the overall experience.

A few months ago I stayed at the St Regis in Mexico. The beach was empty. I sat in a cabana for a second to put my shoes back on. A staff member ran over and asked if I’d booked it. I said no. He told me I had to leave in case someone showed up.

I found it ridiculous, because I’d been on that beach all day and no one had used a single cabana. The staff had the reservation list. They knew nobody was coming.

It was odd, and ruined the experience even so slightly.

Where hospitality is going

If I were a betting man, here’s my prediction:

Three directions.

1. Real luxury built on scarcity, identity, craftsmanship.

2. Value hotels that respect the guest, they don’t lie, they’re upfront about what they are a price accordingly.

3. Mid tier that tries to be kinda both, and this is the tier that fades away imo.

I’m bullish on brands (small or big) that scale slowly and stay specific. As well as the great independent operators who understand that hospitality is a craft.

I’m bearish on hyperscalers and brands owned by massive conglomerates. Not because they can’t operate good hotels, some of them do. Marriott has good properties. So does Hilton. So does…whoever else.

But they aren’t hotel companies anymore. They’re audiences with hotels attached. The decisions that matter such as capital allocation, brand standards, portfolio strategy, guest experience investments are made by people whose incentives are hitting performance KPIs and not getting fired.

Ryan
The Architecture of Experience

If this resonated and you want to explore working together — ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com. I work selectively with luxury hotels, developers, and hospitality brands building for the customer of the next decade, not the last one.

This is the modern “enshittification” of guest feedback.

You are speaking into the void.

This isn’t a fault of people who opt to work within the machine, the problem is the machine itself. Things get lost. Deprioritized. Fluffed up in management meetings, ignored. Data is passed through multiple hands, shifted to appear better than it is.

We also live in a time where the issue is not availability of data, it’s usage of that data.

So what’s the best way to go about customer feedback?

Read more

Before I get into why, there is a clear debate to be had on urban vs. resort properties, and the application, but I think it’s a debate worth having.

This topic came up because I was speaking to some investors, hotel operators recently about the topic of all-inclusivity. I’m not a hotel operator, but the concept of it makes sense on a psychological level, and in terms of the overall guest experience.

The Perception Problem

The problem people have with all inclusive hotels, is the same problem people have with buffets → perception. Even though all-inclusive luxury hotels do exist the perception in general is still the same:

“Wristbands, crowds, bottomless margaritas.”

But the problem isn’t the concept itself, it’s the price point.

As obvious as the seems, I ran a poll the other day asking about my audience’ opinion on all-inclusive luxury hotels and despite over 95% saying they love the idea, a few said “it means lower quality products.”

This is true if you’re charging $300/night.

Not if you’re pricing your rooms at $1,200/night+.

Luxury resorts are a thing, but there’s been a reluctance to fully embrace it until recently, as it’s been a mixture of perception problems/

There’s this belief within luxury hospitality that optionality = luxury.

That giving people more choices is what luxury guests want.

But if we look at human psychology, this could not be further from the truth.

Decision Fatigue

The reason for why I believe all inclusive hotels are the future, is simple: luxury travellers are trying to escape decision fatigue.

Modern travel amounts to endless choices.

Which hotel to pick, which restaurant to eat at, flights, should I book this spa package, which minibar item is worth it? Luxury travellers are more price insensitive, yes, but they understand and appreciate value.

One of my jobs during university was to work in sales for one of the top ultra-high-net-worth wealth managers in Canada. His clients, while exceptionally wealthy, were still price conscious. They’d book luxury travel, buy expensive things, but would haggle and examine value like nobody else.

Optionality means a choice. And choices mean decision fatigue.

People can optimally make 5 big decisions per day. And 20-30 smaller ones.

Despite this, researchers estimate we make tens of thousands of decisions every day.

In other words: the less decisions the better.

This doesn’t mean full-on programming (I’m not exactly big on this yet, because it ends up being too confining, and that’s not desirable either). It means removing the need to think about bills, invoicing, the cost of things.

The All Inclusive Guest Experience

When I map out guest journeys, I ask myself three key questions:

1. How can I make this experience as cohesive as possible?
2. How can I make this experience as frictionless as possible?
3. How can this experience match the vision in all areas?

Some friction is good (rituals), most friction is bad.

Signing a bill. Receiving an itemized list of transactions is bad. Labelling things in-room with prices, is bad. I don’t want to order a meal, and have to wait for the bill to come. I want to eat, leave a tip cash, leave.

Receiving one bill, is good.

At the end of the day, a great guest experience is a frictionless one.

One which enables you to truly disconnect. To be present in the moment, because only full presence enables the formation of wonderful moments, and memories (aka a connection with the property, staff etc…).

If I can get a guest to think as little as possible, I’m doing my job right.

I want them to come in, open themselves up to the experience, without having to think, even even subconsciously, about how much this whole thing is going to cost.

When you look at what hospitality is about, at its core, it’s “you’re my guest, come in, let me take care of you.” It’s not “come in, and pay $18 for a bag of crappy chips.”

I think this is the key of why all inclusive will win, especially in the resort setting.

The Exceptions

Obvious exceptions, I think, should exist: reserve liquor, wine, premium products, off-property excursions if people want more structured programming. But the core product, should be embedded within the price.

I recently stayed at a 5-star hotel in Mexico. I paid as much daily in F&B costs (almost) as the nightly rate for myself, and two others. I read reviews of the hotel online afterwards, and this was probably 50% of the comments, with people saying that while the hotel was nice, they are unlikely to return.

But guests, like myself, are willing to pay more if it’s baked into the price.

People are going to continue to self-select for that.

The common argument, as seen in the poll I ran on instagram is: “it’s operationally hard.” Or “it means lower quality products,” as I mentioned above.

I’m not a hotel operator. But in my experience operators tend to view things as they HAVE been, not how they COULD BE.

People, and companies launch rockets into space.

The all-inclusive model, is by definition, literally not rocket science.

Final Thoughts:

I think we’re experiencing a mix of two forces, or headwinds that will veer hotels in this direction.

The first, is increased online transparency. Everything is online now. Prices. Margins. The cost of products, goods, staff salaries. Even the most luxury-bent travellers and guests are seeking value. They understand they’re being massively overcharged at hotels.

The minibar is bordering on extortion. $24 cocktails just don’t make sense, even at luxury spaces. The itemization makes it feel expensive. But paying 20-30% more, is not as painful. It’s basic human psychology. And contrary to popular belief, this won’t cause people to abuse the “free schtuff.” Maybe 5% will. The other 95% will use the same as before. The tradeoff is increased loyalty, and a way better experience.

The second, is we’re in the age of information overload. People are making more decisions than ever, and they simply want to unwind. Analog hotels exist where you unplug from your phone. Hotels with FULL programming exist where every moment is coordinated. People do not want to think.

At the end of the day, I can see more big chains jumping into the all inclusive luxury market as they have the machinery to do so. Boutiques, as well, as they have the flexibility to make it operationally feasible, to try things big chains are afraid to try.

All I know is that if I were building a hotel, it would be all-inclusive.

Ryan,

The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your brand? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

Walk into any boardroom, in any industry, and you’ll hear the same words used a million different ways: customer experience, guest experience, user experience, brand experience, “care.”

The term has been stretched so thin, and used often as an excuse for bad policies, practices, and business strategy. “We’re going to increase profits by implementing AI, but we assure you it’s going to improve the EXPERIENCE.”

I’ve been designing customer experiences for a long time.

For 100s of different businesses, in many different industries.

From software, to DTC, to hotels, and bars.

Great experiences, across radically different contexts, share a number of identifiable elements. A dinner at a Michelin star restaurant. A luxury hotel. A phone support line for your favourite brand, an iPhone unboxing, a two hour conversation with a stranger on a train…There is no difference between a hotel, a bar, a coffee shop in Timbuktu, or pilates studio in Manhattan.

None of these have to do with each other on the surface, but they’re built from the same things.

In part one, I’m going to cover where so many brands go right, and how to right the ship within the following categories: expectations, anticipation, interactions and transactionality.

Expectations

Every experience is judged or compared against a standard the customer brought with them. Some of the time, you can’t control these standards (people have different perceptions, tell people about their experience).

But very often, they’re 100% within your control.

I went to a “luxury” hotel in Florence, and was sold this lifestyle luxury brand, with vibe, a good atmosphere but got an empty bar, quiet hotel, weak breakfast with confused service. Needless to say, my expectations were not met and I can’t see myself returning.

Most brand operators, owners, underestimate expectations.

They think expectations are vague. Or even worse, uncontrollable. But this framing lets the brand off the hook. Truth is, brands set the expectations themselves, and then live or die in the gap between what’s promised, and what’s delivered.

Marketing is the loudest signal.

Every photo on the website, instagram post, press packet, every paid influencer ad, these are promises. The customer sees a sun-drenched room with linen curtains billowing, as a Mediterranean breeze flows in. This is the exact expectation people have.

If the actual room faces an alley, the lighting is different, there will be a direct, and immediate “sigh,” if not subconsciously and almost nothing you do can save that experience. (I’ll write another post in the future about the service-recovery paradox, but ideally, expectations are met).

(The Sun not showing itself during the guests’ stay is something you can’t control, haha).

Price is another signal. A price tag is the most honest piece of marketing a brand can do. Charge $200/night, people expect a bed. Clean sheets. Charge $1,500/night, and the guest expects every single detail and touchpoint to be considered. Every interaction should feel deliverable. Price sets the floor the experience must reach. Brands often forget that raising the price raises the standard. They want the cash, without the obligation that comes with it.

Then of course there’s positioning. Where the brand sits in the market. Premium? Luxury? Ultra-luxurry? Mass-market? But ironically, positioning is one of the weakest levers, as people often forget positioning the second they walk in somewhere.

Brands control 90% of the inputs which sets expectations. So when there’s a gap between reality, and promises, it’s the brands fault. Great brands either deliver beyond what was promised, or they calibrate their promises carefully so the experience lands.

As the saying goes, a promise not made is better than a promise made and not kept.

Expectations are not static, either.

If experience #1 was great, experience #2 must be better, and be built upon. Many brands love to treat the first purchase with glamour, and care, and subsequent ones they forget about, and take for granted.

In every single company I’ve ever worked with, or managed, we set a clear company-wide policy: “Every day is day 1.” Every customer, guest, gets treated like it’s our first day engaging with him. This doesn’t mean we forget preferences, it means, we work as hard as possible to earn their business.

Anticipation

Great experiences start before they begin.

There’s a window of time, sometimes hours, weeks, when customer has committed to you but hasn’t yet arrived. They’ve booked a room, ordered a product, signed a contract, added a date to their calendar. In that window, they are thinking about you.

This is on of the most undervalued moment in any experience. Most brands treat it as dead time, or, they only optimize the day or two before, or after purchase. A confirmation, a welcome email. Policies. Amenities.

But anticipation is (in my view) its own kind of pleasure. It also helps to eliminate something that most people experience, yet never fully vocalize; buyers remorse, or buyers regret.

“I booked or bought this thing, did I make the right decision?”

Your job in the days, or weeks in advance of them receiving the thing, or arriving at your hotel, bar, restaurant, is to assuage those fears, to reinforce they made the right decision, and build positive anticipation.

The pre-arrival email that asks a real question instead of confirming logistics.

The butler who gets to know you before arrival. (I wrote an article about the hotel butler a while back, and how it’s fallen from grace):

The Architecture of Experience

The Hotel Butler: Where Is The Role Headed?

Luxury hotels around the world advertise their Butler’s as a selling feature…

Read more

5 months ago · 11 likes · Ryan

The brand that sends a hand-written letter upon purchase confirmation.

Most brands treat this gap between purchase and arrival, or adoption as a dead zone, but that makes it feel transactional. A brand that builds positive anticipation not only assuages fear and primes the customer for arrival, but they give the customer something they aren’t expecting.

And no, this is not a time to sell them something like a rewards program.

It’s cheap.

Anticipation (the time between purchase, or booking), and adoption is a great time to build community. Invite them to a private group. Send a welcome video from the general manager, or CEO.

There are infinite things you can do that don’t involve hitting them with policies, lame reminders, or inviting them to some rewards or loyalty program.

Be different, because different is very often better.

Interactions

The number one cause of avoidable churn (meaning churn, or customers leaving you, that can be prevented) is a poor interaction with someone on your team. Whether it’s the actual welcome at the hotel, a first interaction with your support staff, or even a receptionist, it sets the tone for your relationship with this person.

Your staff interactions will make or break an experience.

And this goes beyond scripting. Because scripts, like code, has limits.

What ultimately impacts guest interactions more than anything, is the culture you create internally. Is your company credo guest-focused, or profit focused? The difference does matter, because your policies, which stem from your credo, ethos, or core principles (whatever term you use) do impact interactions.

Is your team enabled to solve problems without managerial approval? This empowers your staff to solve problems, in the moment.

Do you have support-call, or interaction guidelines that prevent calls from going over a certain time limit?

Do you hire for cultural fits?

Great companies always focus on the customer. And inclusive in that, is an addiction to nailing interactions. While industries may have their slight intricacies, in general you’ll find commonalities: no customer support time limits, employees have the power to solve problems, staff have great personalities, love helping people, and are addicted to the company vision.

It really does start and end here.

As an addendum to this, I’m a big believer in hiring every single role for culture, even in non-guest or non-customer facing roles. You can’t predict when someone will interact with a staff member. Everyone should live and breathe the company values.

Transactionality

Brands tend to treat the customer journey as a series of transactional stages, but they are relationship-based at their core. Think about the last time you left a hotel, what was the experiment like?

Maybe you really loved the hotel. At checkout they give you an invoice, or receipt, and say “We hope you come back,” or “we hope you enjoyed your stay.” Suddenly, your experience, and emotional high comes crashing down.

Great experiences are not transactional.

Yes, everyone knows they’re paying money for something. This isn’t some secret.

But your goal is to remove the feeling of transactionality from any touchpoint. It must feel fluid, effortless, enjoyable, and relationship-based. Let’s compare two hotel checkouts.

The one above, with the following:

You checkout, you’re handed the invoice (or perhaps you aren’t, and it’s not even mentioned), and as you’re set to leave, the front desk staff tells you:

“We heard you dinned at an our hotel restaurant last night, and loved the pasta. Here’s a postcard, we had our chef handwrite the recipe on the back for you. We hope you enjoy this recipe at home, as much as we enjoyed making it for you.”

One experience ends on a low. The other on a high.

Removing transactionality is not always easy, but it is essential.

Relationship building is the name of the game.

This extends to everything. Are you emailing customers to ask for something, is the only way for you to drive loyalty by mass-spamming your list with rewards points discounts, or coupon codes?

Or are you actually trying to build a real community?

That’s all for part one.

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your brand? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

Customer loyalty is dropping across the board. In the hospitality space, the physical product space, professional services, everything.

We can debate the causes; endless marketing creating shiny object syndrome, private equity buying brands and diminishing service quality. But to me, the root cause is far more obvious: a lack of innovation.

70%+ of consumers said they’ve switched brands in the past 12-months.

80%+ have said innovation is important to them.

You can’t ignore innovation. I’ll explain what that really means within the context of hospitality in a second.

In many ways hospitality, or more specifically the hotel space, is an old dog’s club.

People came into the industry because they loved the lifestyle: the parties, the events, the travel, as opposed to the love of people; their guests. Now, this is not always the case of course. There are many INCREDIBLE people in the space.

But you know the types I’m talking about.

In any industry, brands and market competitors go through dozens of iterations over time. DTC brands shift monthly, as market desires, demands, and technology forces them to do so.

Hotels have largely pretended to be immune from the basics of human psychology.

The refusal to innovate is a big problem in the industry. Even if they don’t see it yet.

A book I reference often is Trading Up (not an affiliate link).

It’s a little dated, but most of the concepts remain true. Inside the book, they talk about the New Luxury goods, and what goes into creating them. And while it’s not a book exclusive to hospitality, there’s a ton of crossover.

One of the core concepts is a detailed 8-part framework for what constitutes a New Luxury Good. One of the elements is innovation.

But what exactly does that mean?

When I think of hospitality, in specific hotels, I think of it as a club of insiders.

General Manager’s go to the same schools, hire people they know, or through the same hiring pools, and they tend to all follow the same scripts, and same playbooks.

Deliver service this way. Market this way. Speak to guests that way.

That’s all good and fine, but if you’re building a brand with the intention of being 1 of 1, that won’t suffice.

Innovation means viewing yourself as an outsider.

Even if you’re an industry leader, deeply embedded in din the space, with a long lineage, you must constantly question your beliefs, and return to first principles, N=1 thinking.

Within that, is a willingness to take risks, and accepting the potential that you’re wrong, but for every 9 misses, you may just find 1 hit that changes the game for you and your brand.

The best brands in the world always do at least something different.

Look at Zannier hotels. Even going to local bazaars to source furniture for their hotels is new. They didn’t innovate everything, but they swung and hit with that. Or the brands launching merch lines, learning from physical product brands, and their marketing, demand machines.

In many ways hotels have become lazy, due to the old dog’s club.

And what they don’t realize, is that innovation is at the core of exceptional guest experiences.

At the core of exceptional guest experiences is innovation, but what innovation really translates to in hospitality is novelty. In other spaces it’s ease, efficiency, speed.

When someone visit a hotel, they have a set of expectations. Over time, they expect both that the experience gets better, but also to be new in one way or another.

People expect consistent service. Unwavering.

But they want unique and novel experiences.

This doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bath water. It means trying new things. Bringing in outside ideas, and if anything, learning from these DTC product brands. These brands allocate a large portion of their funds on trying new things.

New marketing methods. New LTV strategies. They port ideas from hospitality (I know, I’ve worked with DTC brands), they port from everywhere.

Hotels tend to port ideas from…hotels.

When did 3pm, or 4pm become the standard check-in time? Which hotels are innovating there seeing if they can increase operational efficiency to make it 1pm; most hotels don’t even question it. It is because it is.

These assumptions leak into every element of operations, service, and the guest experience. And when people visit a hotel dozens of times, and the experience doesn’t get meaningfully better, or new in some (minor way), they’ll go to another brand the second something flashier comes on the market.

Not because they don’t like your brand. But because the other choice is new.

Is our existence was humanity nothing else but a series of us chasing something new?

Hospitality is no different.

I know this isn’t a “tactical” post, but I think more people need to start thinking outside of the box. More hoteliers need to study outside of their own industry, and have the courage to try something new. (As a side note, I know some brands are doing this, and I’m excited for that).

As with anything, first movers do tend to have the advantage.

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your hotel? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

A lot of philosophers have pontificated about luxury. Lifestyle. Status.

“Veblen goods” has become common verbiage.

Even more content creators like to reference these aforementioned philosophers.

The problem with talking about luxury is that it’s a moving target. And this present difficulties in staying relevant, without jumping on trends.

Previously, say in the 20th century, what we considered luxury would change every few years, sometimes every decade. The time it took for people to discover, then access this form of luxury would take a while. So it would be in demand for longer periods.

Then, eventually, luxury would scale and cease becoming true (not ostensibly) luxury.

Nowadays, with the internet, the time interval between when something is discovered and considered luxury, and when it becomes mainstream, has been shortened to a year, at most. Sometimes this interval is months!

The velocity of discovery is absurd, as is the capriciousness of the market.

To understand why this is the case, we have to dive into what makes something luxury.

I like to re-read Status & Culture by David Marx every now and again.

Recently, I read Blank Space, his newest book (from 2025).

I think these are some of the most accurate deep dives into status as it pertains to modern culture. The core thesis also doesn’t change with time, it’s meant to reflect what happened, what is happening, and what will.

And status is important because you can’t have luxury without status. The two are inseparable.

Let me explain.

David Marx doesn’t address luxury hospitality, specifically. His books are focused on status, and…of course culture. But his core thesis is pretty straightforward (and I’m paraphrasing):

The world is not composed of one singular mono-hierarchy, or group. It’s thousands of small groups jostling constantly for global status. People, individually, want to be high status inside of a specific, small, local group. But these groups want to be known globally as THE group, whether they know it or not.

Every group has their own hierarchies.

Gamers, skateboarders, surfers, tennis players. Each individual group has their own specific status signifier. For example, in the video game space it’s how skilled you are competitively, not how expensive your setup is.

But here’s the thing.

Luxury goods, services and experiences are primarily positional. They are designed to signal social standing to others. And yes, there are sub-niche of luxury, but generally…

Luxury is a global status signifier.

And as we just discussed, luxury as a concept is redefined, or rather the target is shifted, often.

But luxury in isolation can not be separated from status.

Quality also doesn’t denote luxury.

How many luxury brands do you know of that are objectively low quality?

And how many high quality brands do you know that aren’t considered luxury?

Quality in isolation does not drive demand, price, or status.

There’s been this recent trend of people diving into purse, or fashion brands, and exposing how cheap the material is. But people are doing this, because these brands are losing favour. It’s not an isolated and random attempt.

This also proves that while luxury requires status, quality is seen as the bare minimum, as the internet is quick and ruthless at exposing the mismatch in marketing and reality.

But only once this brand has fallen out of favour.

And to ramble on this a bit more, this is also another example of a subgroup competing against another subgroup. A subgroup, maybe leather makers, or those who bow to the God of quality, is competing against another subgroup, the purse lovers of Chanel, or whoever else, to determine what is true luxury: brand, or quality.

Will the leather maker’s opinion sway those who are determined to own a purse? Probably not.

But will it sway other subgroups? Likely, yes.

A very important point here.

Why does this matter?

When we understand what drives status, we can understand how to position ourselves as a luxury brand. For the first time in a long time, the local and global status signals are coalescing a little bit. They are aimed in at the same target.

While groups continue to compete, the increase of social desirability, everyone wanting to create, to be known, to feel special has intensified.

Everyone has the same target when it comes to it.

And that target is to know things others don’t.

What’s become high status and thus luxury, is the hotel with no signage.

The place you can’t easily book.

The product that is sold out, with rare drops. Hermès still does this well.

Everyone knows Hermès, yet it’s still not hyper-accessible.

This has to be met with quality, of course, which is why true luxury is so rare.

This becomes even more difficult in the hotel space.

Hotels are well known for being allergic to staying small. To putting up barriers to access. A brand may start small, with the right intentions, but give in to big daddy private equity money. The incentive is strong.

And once investors get involved, profitability and margins become king and queen.

How do you drive profitability and margins?

Price point, sure. But also demand and scale.

Why make money at one location, when you can have 70?

And by definition, the brand becomes more accessible.

They have to walk the fine line between being well-known, but difficult to access, in order to drive that demand-supply crunch which creates luxury pricing and perception.

And to be clear, I’m not saying every hotel has to be luxury, or even that luxury is the right target and goal. But it seems to be the driving force behind so many hotels, which is why I’m addressing it here.

Do I agree with this?

No.

I feel luxury should be reflective of quality, and the price should reflect that. But the reality is we aren’t living in that world right now. That would mean staying small, scaling slow, and refusing big money from private equity, and outside investors.

And if we know anything about humans, it’s that we’re wired to want more.

So this is all unlikely.

The era of the internet has really cheapened a lot. It’s trained generations to accept something mid because it’s popular, in scarce supply, or pushed by their “model” of influencer, some social media personality they love.

It’s also trained brands that people don’t care about quality.

But, the game is the game.

The future

Despite all of this, I do think the tide is slowly shifting.

People are ditching polyester for cotton, from GMOs to organic food, and leaving BPAs and phthalates behind.

But I say slowly, because while online echo chambers would have you believing EVERYONE is on the quality train, in reality these brands continue to print money selling mid-tier junk, with exceptional branding, messaging and their marketing machine.

The big battle of subgroups will continue to be quality vs. brand.

So in some sense, we’re back to where we’ve begun.

I don’t know what the future holds beyond this year, because things change so fast.

But if I had to guess, I’d just stick to what we know about humans: we want more, we want things easier, and when we can’t have those things, we want them even more. In a world where everything is easy, a slight difficulty increases perceived value, frustration, and thus demand.

Like the girl who plays hard to get, the boys just want her more!

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your hotel? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

This is part three in a four part series I’ll be writing on how to increase, and build lifelong guest loyalty. For part one, check it out here.

In part one, we established the frameworks for the problems plaguing most traditional hotel loyalty programs, and strategies. Guests are drowning in points programs they don’t use, from brands they can’t distinguish from each other. People are enrolled in an average of 16.6 different loyalty programs.

When you strip away the promotional emails and the free breakfast vouchers, you come to the obvious conclusion that loyalty can’t be bought. It’s more fickle than ever, and must be earned.

In part two, I covered community.

This brings us to the second pillar of guest loyalty: personalization.

Personalization is seen as the epitome of luxury in hospitality. The more you know your guest, the better. The reason this is so important, is because subsequent hotel visits should compound.

Read more

Read the website copy of almost any new five star, or luxury hotel opening today and you’ll find the same thing: “blending modern luxury with local heritage.”

They’re hiding behind the same three words, sense of place.

For years now ‘sense of place’ has been the ultimate buzz word, fuelling the marketing engine of brands across the globe.

The problem is that ‘sense of place’ has largely become cosmetic.

Brands plop a local artisan trinket, some artwork, throw a cultural guide here and there, and voila! We’re now so niche, local, and definitely connected to the local environment.

Buying local decor isn’t sense of place, or world building.

It’s part of it, to be sure, but it’s only one element.

Someone asked me yesterday how I feel luxury hotels can differentiate themselves when everyone is offering the same thing, the same play book (and for good reason, sense of place is a legit thing people want).

The answer is simple but the execution is admittedly not easy, particularly for these big hotel brands and groups.

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But few understand the history of the role, and even fewer realize how corporate scale has distorted and broken it.

In today’s article, I’m going to dive into the history of the Butler, it’s modern dilution and usages, and how I feel they should evolve to survive the next zeitgeist, and era of luxury hospitality.

The Past

The word ‘butler’ comes from the Old French word, bouteillier, meaning the cup-bearer, or bottle bearer1. In medieval Europe, the butler initially served as the guardian of the lord’s, or castle’s wine cellar. Wine, at the time, was a primary symbol of wealth and status. The position of the cup bearer required meticulous care and trust.

Over centuries the role evolved beyond the lord’s wine cellar. By the 17th, and 18th centuries, Butler’s had become one of the more senior figures in royal, and noble households2. They had to balance the song and dance of organizing the households, staff.

Inns, grand hotels did have valet-style service, but the formalized Butler didn’t enter hospitality until the late 1800s, or early 1900s.

Some say it was Raffles Singapore in 1887, with their highly personalized service. But many would agree it was 1904 when John Astor IV opened the St. Regis in New York and formalized it.

John Astor, in specific, wanted to build a world that replicated the private estates of European nobility for the American elite in NYC. The American elite at the time were used to having staff, so it was a natural element of world building that made Astor want to introduce Butlers.

Why deprive them of something they’re used to, but with a better, European twist?

From the perspective of the guest experience, a Butler is the great way to eliminate your guests need to do anything. It removes friction, anxiety about where to find things, and what to do, and creates a fond emotional memory of the property.

Butlers serve as emotional anchors for guests, removing guests from making decisions, and introducing them to the world, a common point of friction for people, especially those not used to the luxury environment.3

Butlers were the pinnacle of anticipatory service. They knew you, what you wanted, and delivered it before you even asked. Of course, they could do things you asked, within reason, but the goal was to have them know what you want before vocalizing it.

The Present

By understanding the rich history of the Butler, we can understand and diagnose where today went so wrong.

And keep in mind, that I’m not referring to every hotel on earth. Some do it right. Raffles, for example, in some locations.

Corporate mega brands loved the marketing cachet of the Butler, so they jumped on the opportunity. They took the concept of a Butler, and tried to scale it using the same cut and paste system.

Historically, the Butler was a highly trained, and niche profession. It still is, for example, The International Butler Academy (TIBA) has a very well known training program. But, Butler’s often come face to face with the realities of working for corporations. They take on some of the tasks known to the role; garment pressing, packing, delivering morning coffee, but rarely get to truly know the family.

This isn’t their fault.

They sit at the cross-section of staffing shortages, corporate guidelines, and marketing overpromises. You have Butler’s managing an inordinate amount of guests with immense pressure and workloads.

And with these guests they do manage, they can’t do much beyond pre-defined scripts, and they amount to a WhatsApp eButler. I recently stayed at a flagship luxury property, and didn’t physically meet my Butler until the last day.

Shift changes were awkward, and they sent pre-scripted daily messages, but never did anything else unless I asked.

This current model destroys the world building illusion. And maybe I’m alone in this, but I feel it doesn’t stay true to what Butlers were.

When a hotel replaces human anticipation with scripted texts, it ends up outsourcing the effort back to the guest. It breaks the fourth wall of luxury, turning a human relationship into a digital, exhausting, transactional relationship.

The Future

How should the Butler evolve for the modern era, and the future of luxury hospitality?

The big shift is going to be making a leap from a transactional relationship → to an emotional relationship. To creating family like loyalty, in keeping with the tradition of the Butler, that extends beyond the stay.

With the technology we have available now, there is no excuse not to be doing this.

The way I see it, Butler’s need to evolve in three ways.

First: hotel’s need to get onboard with AI as a second brain, to reduce the administrative burden (thinking, planning, tracking, organizing) that comes with being a Butler. AI right now is fantastic at analyzing data, and coming up with suggestions. Hotels have data, it’s just very scattered. Or worst of it, when it is organized, it’s not used as often as it should be.

AI should never be used to replace humans. It needs to handle the back end, the reminders, organizing, synthesizing, so that hotels can free up margin to hire more guest-facing staff.

This will enable Butler’s to reduce their own decision fatigue, by proxy of lightening their workload, and centralizing everything so multiple departments don’t need to organize with each other.

Second: hotels should to stop the generic. Personalization (not customization) is the future. Butler’s often use pre-defined, pre-scripted corporate slop, but hotels should be giving them more operational freedom and creative empowerment to make independent decisions.

The flagship hotel I stayed at had 124 rooms. I was passed around 3 Butler’s during my stay there, and most days, it amounted to one pre-scripted message. This is a mix of staffing shortages, but these teams not using technology properly.

Prior to being in hospitality, as you know, I designed customer experiences for an array of brands in different industries. Some of the systems I built had client success managers, managing over 100+ clients each (usually benchmark was 45-60), in high-volume, high demand industries. Yet, everything was customized because we used tech properly. Hospitality needs to get on the train.

Third: stories over stays. I’m a big believer that with the above, Butler’s can embed themselves more into their guests lives. With technology, we can understand guests based on their passions, their profiles, as opposed to their demographic. This allows Butler’s to create long term stories that continue even after you checkout.

A very simple example:

A young family visits your property, with kids. During the stay, the kids love the beach, the shells, the animals on the property. All is good, they checkout. A few weeks go by, and you get a ping on your phone; the Butler has sent you a video of an animal sighting, or they mail you a plushy of your favourite animal you saw.

Time this task takes: 15-minutes. Benefit? A family, a guest, for life.

This is not nearly as common as it should be. Yes, Butlers should be paid more.

But this becomes more possible with technology.

I guess my overarching point here is this:

If you’re going to advertise you have Butler’s, stay true to the tradition of the professional, its history and lineage. Go full out, maximalism, turn Butler’s into important parts of the families lives even beyond the stay. This will create irreplaceable guest loyalty.

And if you aren’t willing to do that, don’t even advertise them.

Because a broken promise is worse than a promise never made in the first place.

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, to create a world class guest experience and brand world for your guests? Email me ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

Hotels are diving headfirst into customization.

Customize your room, your view, and every little thing about your stay.

But what if this is the wrong move?

Welcome to the second edition in a series called ‘Hotel Hunger Games’ where I’m going to be exploring how hotels are building brand worlds, and guest experiences to compete for the loyalty of the next generation of luxury guests.

We live in an era of abundance.

An abundance of information, accessibility, and choice. You can get almost anything you want in an instant. The 2000s have been defined by rapidly accelerating customization; getting exactly what you want while ignoring what you don’t.

And for a while, this worked.

But times are changing.

Read more

What do hotel brands like Edition, W Hotels, Nobu, Andaz, NoMad and others have come in common? They’re part of a category of hotels called luxury lifestyle.

What you get with luxury lifestyle hotels: great design, “vibe,” a nice lobby, good service, and a slightly lower rate than traditional luxury hotels.

The premise behind the lifestyle model is simple—people are willing to sacrifice a little bit of service, in exchange for a design-forward, lifestyle driven hotel. I mean, in theory, why wouldn’t they?

But here’s the problem I’ve noticed visiting hotels in this category:

The premise upon which this model was built, is not true.

Three points here before we continue.

Read more

What comes to mind when you think of St. Regis Hotels?

Maybe nothing, maybe something specific, or perhaps you’ve never stayed at a St. Regis.

But would it surprised you to know that, in many ways, the St. Regis brand set the standards that many luxury hotels today now use?

In the first edition of ‘Architecture of Experience’, I’m going to be diving into the origins of the St. Regis, from the lens of the guest experience; what they did well, where they innovated and the brand traditions and heritage.

In part two, I’ll cover where the brand is at now, and in part three I’ll cover how I’d fix the brand.

This will be a recurring series I’m going to write on a slew of different brands.

Each written article will be paired with a condensed Instagram video.

Here is the video from part one:

St. Regis Hotel was founded in 1904 by John Astor, one of America’s richest men.

Eight years later, he would die on the Titanic, but he left a legacy as a visionary, and in many ways a hotel industry trend-setter.

When he built the hotel, he wanted to make St. Regis, located in New York City, the lavish epicentre of the city’s culture, for New York’s elite, carrying on the tradition set by his mother.

He intended to mix gilded-age opulence, a hint of European aristocracy, with American innovation. The hotel was supposed to be a beautiful place the elite wanted to spend all of their time.

It wasn’t supposed to be just another hotel.

And for nearly a century, the St. Regis had only one location, until Starwood acquired it in 1998. Today, St. Regis is owned by Marriott with over 60-locations worldwide.

So what did St. Regis do well? How special were there origins? And where did they innovate when it came to the guest experience?

Knowing Your Guest

Astor knew his guests well.

He built the hotel not for a dozen different guest profiles, he built it for one.

A wealthy guest, who valued convenience, attentive service, and luxury.

But he wasn’t alone in building a hotel for this guest. Traveling across Europe at the time would present you with an infinite array of hotels targeting this specific type of guest.

What Astor did well, is that he took this initial set of guest expectations, but paired with the American sense of innovation. Guests in America at the time, were in in awe of technological prowess.

And he wanted to tap into that.

Not Just An Ordinary Hotel

At the time, the St. Regis was the first hotel to have a telephone in the room.

Why was this so important?

One could argue it was obvious. When you have wealthy guests, you want to provide them every convenience. Having a phone, in your room, was at the time the ultimate form of convenience.

It’s like having mobile, in-room ordering now.

Open your phone, press a button, have food delivered in under 30-minutes.

Or a WhatsApp chat with your concierge.

These are obvious things, which, at the time, were revolutionary.

But John didn’t stop at telephones.

He created an innovative heating and cooling system for the rooms, so his guests always felt comfortable, during the summer heat, or winter freeze.

This took a simple concept, like hotel, and turned it into a social hub with modern amenities and conveniences.

The St. Regis was so famous, that at the time, it was called America’s “Finest Hotel.”

The Butlers

Taking from the personal assistants of European nobility, Astor decided that he wanted his guests to do as little work as possible, so he introduced the St. Regis Butler.

St. Regis was not the first brand to introduce butlers.

However, some give St. Regis the credit of systemizing, and making popular, anticipatory service. In other words, predicting the guests needs before they vocalize them.

St. Regis walked so Aman could run.

The Butlers would press your garments, carry your bags, bring your morning coffee, fold your clothing. They were more than bellhops, they were an actual personal assistant for each guest.

The St. Regis Butlers are inextricably linked with the growth of the St. Regis brand.

The Rituals

The hotel was opulent.

It was a vibrant social hub.

It had American technological innovations.

They implemented the butlers from European nobility.

But that’s not enough.

Central to creating world class guest experiences, is meeting an initial set of expectations, then once these expectations have changed (as they aren’t static), meeting them again.

The way to do this, to slow guests down and get them to enjoy the moment, is to elevate the simple things through rituals.

Astor introduced Sabrage to the St. Regis.

Invented during the 18th century in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the technique originated with Napoleon Bonaparte’s Calvary officers, who used their swords to quickly open a bottle of champagne to celebrate victories.

St. Regis, famously took that, and applied to mark the transition between night and day, a tradition that is still honoured to this day.

They’re even credited with making the Blood Mary popular, a claim that is constantly (hilariously) disputed.

Luxury, Reinvented

There were plenty of luxury hotels at the time.

But few cared about the guest experience, in a modern sense, like John Astor.

Few saw technology as a way to innovate the experience, or that it even mattered at all. And nobody was mixing technology, with opulence, and European aristocratic values like the St. Regis.

While many don’t give St. Regis its dues, in many ways Astor and the St. Regis team reinvented luxury at the time, and created the right foundations for what would become future global luxury hotel brands.

Lessons & Takeaways

When I started researching this brand, their origins, I noticed three main takeaways for modern hoteliers. And this is coming not from the perspective of an investor, but as someone hyper focused on building world class guest experiences.

1. Guests don’t like bad friction, at all.

2. Guests do like good friction. Ritual (Sabrage), is an example of beautiful, timeless friction that slows guests down. I wrote about friction in a previous post, here.

3. Hotels need to continually innovate. Astor’s hotel had no real predecessors, it was decided to give people what they wanted, and what didn’t know they wanted. He, I’m assuming, looked at what was working and ask himself how can I make it better. Traditions are important. but you can maintain those while elevating, and making these easier for your guest.

Anyways, that’s all for today.

In the next article in this series, I’ll cover where the brand is at now post-Marriott acquisition. I’ll also be visiting a few properties and recording the experience at those.

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your hotel deliver a world class guest experience? Send me an email, at ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

This is part two in a four part series I’ll be writing on how to increase, and build lifelong guest loyalty. For part one, check it out here.

In part one, we established the frameworks for the problems plaguing most traditional hotel loyalty programs, and strategies. Guests are drowning in points programs they don’t use, from brands they can’t distinguish from each other. People are enrolled in an average of 16.6 different loyalty programs.

When you strip away the promotional emails and the free breakfast vouchers, you come to the obvious conclusion that loyalty can’t be bought. It’s more fickle than ever, and must be earned.

This brings us to the first, and perhaps most misunderstood pillar of guest loyalty: community.

Hoteliers often treat community as a buzzword used in marketing. Or, they understand it’s important but they don’t know how to define it. Community, however, is a real profit-driver. It’s the architecture, and pulse of your space.

Guests should feel like they’re surrounded by people like them. Who share their same values, aesthetics, and cultural capital.

But that’s the theory.

How can you, in practice, use community to bolster guest loyalty?

Read more

Clothing brands are launching hotels, hotels are launching merch lines.

What the heck is going on?

Welcome to the first edition in a new series called ‘Hotel Hunger Games’ where I’m going to be exploring how hotels are building brand worlds, and guest experiences to compete for the loyalty of the next generation of luxury guests.

The Ritz-Carlton recently launched a collection of hotel-inspired apparel, ranging from tailored jackets to joggers, in a collaboration with Late Checkout, a Madrid-based fashion label.

Read more

Before getting involved in hospitality, and creating guest experiences, I ran a paid advertising. The thing about the agency game is, no matter how good the results you get for clients, they will eventually leave you if they get bored.

What I eventually realized, and took with me to hospitality, is that what people want is consistent results (or in hospitality, standards, and quality), but they want novelty of experience.

You could be the best in the world, and a certain percentage of people would back to you for the consistency. But the second something else comes up on the market, their loyalty will sway.

Any business is a combination of consistency x novelty.

There’s a simple reason for why people crave novelty.

When people buy from a business, they have an initial set of expectations. Once these expectations are met, for bad or for worse, people want something else. Expectations aren’t static; they’re dynamic.

The most basic example I can give is Amazon.

Years ago, people would be happy if they ordered something and it arrived in a few weeks. Decades ago, you couldn’t order things online. Now? If people don’t receive their parcel of useless junk within a day, they start to throw a fit.

Expectations change, constantly, and businesses aren’t aware of these changes because they a) think expectations are static, and b) aren’t getting enough real feedback from their guests.

While you may be delivering exactly what you promise, and people may be coming back a second, or third time, loyalty sways, and what you promised and delivered isn’t enough anymore.

This doesn’t mean you need to change your entire business.

But it does mean you can’t rest on what’s working, and what has worked.

Embedded in the guest experience is learning, as an owner or operator, how to manage, and gauge expectations.

Innovation has to be engrained in your company culture.

Trying new things, getting feedback from your guests, finding out what they love and don’t love about the experience.

It’s adding new experiences themselves, but also adding new elements to the experience. When Ennismore came out with Dis-loyalty, it kind of came out of left field. But it was brand new, and innovative. 20-50% off new hotels in their portfolio for $12 a month? Such an easy win.

You don’t need a massive overhaul like that to try new things.

The hotels that survive are the ones that test small, iterative changes, get real feedback (we have easy ways today to get data, to collate and analyze), and introduce novelty without breaking the world.

Consistency builds their trust, novelty keeps their attention and loyalty.

It’s a tough line to walk, but it is the way to becoming the best.
​
Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience.

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your hotel? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

​

The term throughline is used in marketing often.

But perhaps more importantly, it apples to the guest experience, and the overall guest experience.

A throughline is the connective tissue of a hotel.

It connects the guest journey from beginning, to the end.

From the marketing, to the first interaction, the experience itself, the end, and how to get guests to come back (i.e never lose a guest again).

Read more

This is going to be part one in a new series I’ll be writing on how to build lifelong guest loyalty. In part two, I’ll dive into each of the three strategies I talk about here in more depth.

Read more

I made a video a few weeks ago on the new rules of luxury.

In it, I talked about how the younger generation of buyers values intentional friction.

People in the comments didn’t know what I meant, or they didn’t believe in any friction being valuable.

Let’s dive into the concept of friction in hospitality.

By definition, in hospitality, friction means an inefficiency.

But friction, used properly, can be a powerful positive force.

There’s good and bad friction just like there’s good and bad stress.

Mental stress, anxiety obviously aren’t good. But good stress, like your muscles experience during an intense workout, is a good form of stress which pushes your boundaries and capabilities.

An example of bad friction in hospitality: QR codes. A line at reception. A webpage that doesn’t load. Calling a support line and needing to navigate a robotic pre-recorded voice before getting ahold of a human. Needing to enter your points number before accessing wifi.

These annoy people. And nothing you can do can save the experience if you, knowingly or not, utilize bad friction.

Brands don’t realize how bad it can get, and they rarely audit it.

Good friction, by contrast, is something that reduces your guests cognitive load.

Things that force your guests to be slow down.

A drink at reception. A service ritual.

At the heart of it, creating exceptional guest experiences is about reducing cognitive load, managing emotions, expectations, and elevating the simple moments while telling a compelling story.

This is only possible when you slow your guests down. Reduce their decisions.

When you make them present to the moment, and in a mental state that enables them to an accept, and enjoy the experience. People come in, are likely stressed, it’s your job to help them put their worries to the side while they’re with you.

This is done by utilizing intentional friction during key touch-points throughout the guest journey.

Slowing them down, without them realizing what you’re doing.

If you can achieve this, which few brands rarely do, you’ll create a space people associate good memories with, and want to keep coming back to visit.

Ryan,
The Architecture of Experience

Enjoyed this, and interested in working together, or seeing how I could help your hotel? Send an email to ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com with a little information about your brand, and I’ll get back to you.

This is part two in my series on luxury hospitality.

For part one, head here.

What’s the future of the luxury hotel industry? What do luxury buyers want?

I could answer these questions directly.

Instead, I’d like to walk you through how I’d build a world class, luxury hotel.

Or rather, what elements make a world class hotel?

Read more

The Architecture of Experience is a newsletter devoted to the guest experience in hospitality.

Content is broken down into four pillars.

1. Breakdowns: These are longer-form deep dives I do into hospitality brands, groups, and experiences. On my Instagram, I’ve done breakdowns of Fairmont Hotels, W Hotels, the Westin, and more. Here, these will be much more in-depth and researched.

2. Playbooks: These are guides on what you can do, immediately, to improve your guest experience. These range from deep dives on haptics (physical elements of the experience), to how the service unfolds, to how your organic content and branding impact perception and the experience.

3. Case Studies: Case studies will be real-world interviews, and documentary posts, videos, on brands I work with.

4. Interviews: Coming soon, are interviews with experts in hospitality, brand owners, people in the space with interesting perspectives as it pertains to the guest experience.

Welcome to the Architecture of Experience.

I hope you enjoy your stay.

And if you’d like to reach me via email, you can here: ryan@luxuryworldbuilding.com.