Luxury tips

If you haven’t heard much about Como Hotels and Resorts, I expect you will soon. The luxury brand is making distinctive moves worth noting.

Luxury hospitality juggernaut Aman is entering an unprecedented period of growth. After amassing 34 luxury hotels in 35 years, it now plans to open 11 hotels and resorts for its off-shoot brand Janu over the next four years, Skift has learned.

The high-end, experiential travel show Pure Life Experience, meant to take place in Marrakesh from 10 to 13 September, has been canceled.

This summer has seen a surge in the highest end of luxury across the world. Some of it is about revenge travel and increased global mobility: A lot of the Middle Eastern market parked closer to home in Covid and are now shipping their Bugattis to the streets of London and other haunts in Europe. The palaces of Paris, the best hotels in Europe, and five-stars in the U.S. did brisk business at eye-watering rates.

The Marriott-controlled ultra-luxury superyacht brand The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection would like to raise as much as $400 million to add two superyachts to its current three, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

Paul Gauguin Cruises, the luxury cruise line specializing in French Polynesia and the South Pacific, is launching three new itineraries as part of its Boutique Crossing Collection for 2025, focusing on transits between Fiji, Bali, Singapore and Australia. 

Conventional hotel design doesn’t merely get left at the tent flap at Naviva, Four Seasons’ first luxury tented resort in the Americas. It gets tossed to the side with a metaphorical journey that begins by entering via a cocoon-inspired bamboo bridge spanning a deep forest ravine.

While luxury boutique hotels have always appealed to a certain set, Small Luxury Hotels of the World is trying to create more converts. In October, it launched a marketing campaign around a so-called “private collection” to amplify the message that “smaller is better.”

The Portrait Milano debuts December 1 in the heart of Milan’s fashion district. The location makes sense, given that the 73-room property belongs to the Lungarno Collection — a group of Italian boutique hotels founded by the family of Italian loafer king, Salvatore Ferragamo.

Fosun International Ltd. is pondering whether to sell French luxury resort chain Club Med as it’s looking to ways to reduce debts, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Movie actor Ed Norton is working with the former president of Six Senses on developing a new eco-resort in Kenya.

Blink and you may miss the full tourism recovery of Dubai, as it focuses on returning to pre-pandemic levels of business.

Earlier this month, Roseate Hotels and Resorts said it is buying yet another luxury hotel in the United Kingdom — this time, a five-star boutique called The Dunstane Houses located in Edinburgh, Scotland. As with the three other UK properties Roseate has acquired, the brand will attempt to keep the decor and service practices localized.

A five-year anniversary would be a big deal for any new boutique hotel brand. But for Pillows Hotels, a luxury boutique hotel chain with locations in the Netherlands and Belgium, hitting this five-year mark might mean even more, considering the brand launched just a few years before the pandemic. 

The formula for luxury hotels has typically had two key ingredients. First, choose locations in the districts where the elite live. Second, focus on high-touch services encouraging guests to linger, and spend, at the property.

CEO Christopher Nassetta said Hilton expects to organically develop its own new brands rather than chase costly acquisitions in part because “we don’t want to have to fix other people’s problems.”

Travel giant TUI (TUIGn.DE) reported on Friday a boost in demand for luxury holidays, driving sales for the winter 2022/23 period higher than they had been in the corresponding 2018/19 period, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit international travel.

Hotel real estate investor and management company Highgate signed a deal to acquire Viceroy Hotels & Resorts as Highgate intensifies its quest to add luxury lifestyle hotels to its already ample portfolio.

When planning a trip to Italy, most people put historic, charming cities like Venice, Florence, and Rome on the itinerary. But Oasy Dynamo, a new luxury, wilderness retreat nestled in the Pistoia mountains of upper Tuscany, is hoping travelers want a taste of nature, too.

In some ways the Middle East is a victim of its own success: It weathered the pandemic relatively well, and the luxury market proved resilient. But now as tourism to the region swiftly recovers, the challenge is how do brands operating there stand out when inter-regional competition is so fierce?

An end to China’s travel curbs this month is expected to revive demand in the global luxury retail market, which has been starved of mainland visitors for three years, but many consumers now see more reasons to do their high-end shopping locally.