Still thinking about Tuesday’s issue.

Tuesday was about the GM as identity custodian… the person in the building every day, holding the place’s worldview through small decisions most guests never see. Today is the harder question: what does it actually look like when a GM erodes that identity instead?

Because it rarely looks like anything. That’s the problem.

In today’s Sojourn:

• The four patterns that quietly erode identity under a GM’s tenure.

• Why erosion is almost always well-intentioned.

• What the GMs who hold identity do differently and how you’d recognize it.

First time here? Start here. Past issues are here.

Let’s get into it.

The Visible Layer

This week: Neri&Hu

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an interdisciplinary practice founded in Shanghai in 2004 by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu. I first came across Neri&Hu when I was living in Shanghai, stumbled into one of their projects in Jing'an, a restaurant called Together near my condo, and immediately wanted to know who'd done it. Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu founded the practice in Shanghai in 2004, and their work spans architecture, interiors, products, and branding. But what runs through all of it is one preoccupation: how a place holds memory. Not as nostalgia. As structure. The conversation between what a space has been and what it's becoming, built into the walls, the materials, the objects, the light.

The two projects here — The Waterhouse at South Bund and The Vertical Lane House — are both Shanghai buildings where the history of the site is the design brief. The Waterhouse is a former Japanese army headquarters from the 1930s, converted into a boutique hotel that makes no attempt to erase what it was. The industrial bones, the raw concrete, the preserved markings, all of it held deliberately, because the identity of the place is inseparable from what happened there. The Vertical Lane House does the same with the spatial logic of the traditional Shanghai lane house: the narrow proportions, the relationship between inside and outside, the rhythm of the shikumen typology, carried forward rather than replaced. Both are the physical counter-argument to everything this issue is warning against. The identity is in the architecture. It holds because it was built to. Find Neri&Hu at neriandhu.com.

Interpretation

Identity erosion in a hotel almost never announces itself. There’s no moment where someone decides the place should become something else. There’s no single bad decision you can point to. What happens instead is a series of reasonable calls, each one defensible, each one small, but that it compounds over time into a place that no longer ‘reads’ like itself. The guests who’ve been coming for years feel it first…. they can’t name it, they just know something has changed.

The GM at the center of this process usually doesn’t know it’s happening either… and that’s what makes it so hard to diagnose and harder to stop.

Four patterns come up again and again in hotels that drift under a GM’s tenure that show up in how the place runs, slowly, then all at once.

The first pattern: optimizing away the friction that was doing work.

Not all friction is bad. Some of it is load-bearing.

The long walk from reception to the first room. The absence of a spa menu at check-in. The dining room that doesn’t take reservations. These things can look like operational inefficiencies, and a GM trained to see through the lens and optimize will eventually fix them. What they don’t always see is that the friction was intentional. It was creating pace, creating discovery, creating a specific relationship between guest and place. Hear me out on this:

Read more

Hello and happy Tuesday!

Something I keep coming back to this week.

The founder builds the worldview. The architecture holds it. The hiring criteria carry it forward. But there’s one role that determines whether any of it actually lands in the guest experience — and it’s the one the industry least understands as an identity function.

The general manager.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why the GM is the most consequential identity decision a founder makes.

• What it actually means to be an identity custodian — and how most GMs are hired for something else entirely.

• The properties that get this right, and what they have in common.

New to Sojourn? Start here. Everything else is in the archive.

The Visible Layer

This week: Mikkel Adsbøl

Mikkel Adsbøl is a Danish photographer working across interiors, still life, and hospitality. His work doesn't try to document a space — it reads it. A chair in a particular light. A tray arranged a specific way. The worn edge of something that's been handled for years. He finds the character of a place in its objects and details rather than its architecture, which means what you see in his images isn't a room — it's a point of view.

That's why his work belongs here. The Identity Custodian argues that identity lives in the small decisions… the ones that don't make it into board reports, the ones that compound quietly over years into a place that either holds or drifts. Mikkel photographs exactly those decisions. The objects a hotel chooses, tends, and keeps are as much an expression of its worldview as anything the founder put on paper. His lens makes that visible. Find Mikkel at https://www.mikkeladsbol.dk/

Interpretation:

Every founder eventually steps back from the daily reality of the place. Not always intentionally, not always completely, but the distance slowly grows. The meetings get more strategic. The floor visits get less frequent. The morning briefings happen through reports rather than actual presence. And in that growing distance, one person ends up holding the whole thing.

The GM.

The person in the building every day, making the calls the founder used to make, in rooms and conversations the founder no longer occupies.

Most hotels don’t hire for this. They hire for operational ‘excellence’, guest satisfaction scores, revenue management, team leadership. All of it legitimate. None of it the same thing. A case worth studying it…

Read more

Happy Thursday! Been sitting with this one since Tuesday.

Tuesday’s issue argued that the clearest hotels trace back to one person… a founder whose worldview became the operating system of the place. Today’s question is harder. What happens when that person leaves?

Not every identity-led brand is built to answer it. Some are founder-held: coherent while the founder’s in the building, quietly adrift the moment they step back. The difference between a brand that holds and one that doesn’t is rarely visible from the outside. It only shows under the pressure of absence.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why founder-held and identity-led brands look identical, until the founder leaves.

• The four places a founder’s worldview gets encoded or lost.

• What the properties that survive have in common, and why most founder-led hotels never build for this.

If this is your first issue, Start Here is the right place to begin. Everything else is in the archive.

Enjoy.

The Visible Layer

This week: Elza Young via Londolozi Fine Art.

Elsa Young came to photography through the stage with a BA in Dramatic Arts, years in set design, an instinct trained on understanding how space constructs meaning before anyone walks into it. She's based in Johannesburg and works across interiors, lifestyle, and hospitality. But what she's doing in every frame is the same thing: reading what a space was built to hold. Not inventorying a room, not documenting a property, finding the logic underneath and making it visible. Light, material, scale, negative space. Each one carrying the argument the place is already making about itself.

That's what connects her work to this issue. Holding Identity After the Founder argues that physical space is the most durable form of identity encoding, that a building can carry a founder's worldview long after the founder's gone. Elsa's photographs already understand this. Her work across South African hospitality, Londolozi, private residences that have a clear sense of themselves, shows what it looks like when the identity's in the walls, not just the marketing. Find Elsa at Londolozi.

Interpretation

Two hotels can look identical. Both founder-built. Both coherent. Both clearly expressing one person’s worldview. The difference only becomes visible after the founder steps back. One keeps feeling like itself, the same decisions get made, the same things get refused, the same details land right. The other starts to eventually drift at the level of small calls that no longer have a single lens behind them.

The first hotel was identity-led. The second was founder-held. That gap is one of the most important questions in hospitality, and almost no one asks it early enough.

A founder’s worldview is, at first, held entirely in one person’s body. It works through instinct. They approve the fabric because it feels right. They hire the breakfast chef because of something in the conversation. They reject the renovation proposal without being able to say exactly why. It’s real, consistent, and operational, but it lives in the founder’s soul, not the institution’s memory.

The test isn’t whether the worldview is strong. It’s whether it was ever encoded into something that can outlive the person holding it.

Where Encoding Happens And Where It Fails

Four places. Each one either transfers the worldview or leaves it unencoded.

Physical space. The most durable encoding is in the architecture itself. When the founder leaves, a building that carries the worldview in its materials, proportions, and spatial logic keeps holding the argument. You can change the GM, the ownership structure, the entire staff, the building still reads the founder. Aman properties carry Zecha’s silence into stone. The negative space, the scale, the relationship between interior and landscape, worldview decisions made permanent. It’s the least transferable lesson: you can’t redesign the lobby to solve an identity succession problem. But for founders who had genuine control over what was built, it’s the most reliable legacy.

Hiring criteria. The second encoding is in who gets hired. Founders of identity-led brands often hire in ways that are hard to systematize… they’re selecting for worldview fit, not credentials. The succession test is whether that instinct was ever put into language the next generation of managers can actually use. Singita’s tried. Their approach to hiring in remote environments, looking for the person inside the professional, the quality of attention before the technical skill, is an attempt to encode a founder’s instinct into something repeatable. It doesn’t always hold. But the effort matters: instinct only becomes institutional once it’s in language.

Operational. The third encoding is in the daily rhythms of the place… when the music starts and stops, how breakfast is timed, the pace of arrival, the shape of the evening. These were set by one person’s sense of how a day should feel. The question is whether they were written down before the founder stepped back. Borgo Egnazia’s rhythms… the agricultural calendar that shapes the programming, the evening gatherings, the pace borrowed from Puglia life rather than international hotel convention, have been consciously built into the operating model. They’re not habits that persist by inertia. They’re trained, documented, and held by a team that understands why they exist.

The articulated worldview. The rarest encoding. Not a brand manual, not a values statement with six words in a sans-serif font, something with more friction: this is what we are, this is what we refuse, this is how we decide when the decision isn’t obvious. Most founders never write it. It feels unnecessary when you’re still in the building making every call yourself. The urgency only arrives when it’s already too late.

The Two Failure Modes

Founder-held brands fail in two directions.

The first is over-personalization. The brand becomes so fused with one person’s biography that it has no institutional memory of its own. When the founder withdraws, there’s nothing left to hold the worldview. It was never separate from them. The founder’s personality was the atmosphere. When they leave, the atmosphere goes with them.

The second is drift by proximity. The brand was coherent as long as the founder was present and making calls in real time. The coherence wasn’t encoded, it was produced by their ongoing presence. The first GM hired without the founder in the room starts making slightly different decisions. Nothing dramatic. The aggregate, over two or three years, is a property that no longer reads like itself. Staff who arrived after the founder can’t name what’s changed. They only know something has.

Aman moved through this. The years following Zecha’s departure were years of visible uncertainty… new locations that felt like Aman without quite being Aman, decisions that respected the form without inhabiting the worldview. The architecture held. The operational identity was harder. Worth noting: Aman survived. The brand’s durable because the physical encoding was so strong. But the gap was real. Even the most coherently built brand in modern hospitality wasn’t immune.

What The Properties That Survive Have In Common

They asked the succession question before it was urgent.

The strongest examples: Borgo Egnazia, Le Sirenuse, Singita, aren’t waiting for a ‘transition’ event to start thinking about this. The encoding’s ongoing while the founder’s still present. The worldview is held by one person and written into the institution… into the people being hired, the way they’re trained, the physical decisions being made, the language used internally to describe what the place is and what it refuses to be.

The goal isn’t to make the founder redundant but to make sure the worldview can be held by more than one person before it has to be.

That’s a different project from running a hotel well. It’s a deliberate act of institutionalization, and most identity-led founders, absorbed in the operational reality of what they’re building, never begin it.

Bottom line:

The difference between a founder-held brand and an identity-led brand isn’t visible while the founder’s in the building. It only shows under the pressure of absence. The brands that survive aren’t the ones with the strongest founders but those where the worldview was encoded early enough into space, people, rhythms, language, and so on that it could be held by more than one person. That encoding isn’t a natural byproduct of building a coherent identity but a separate discipline. Most founder-led hotels never begin it but the ones that do are still recognizable twenty years later.

As always, the inbox is open. If something here landed, just reply. I read every message.

Hope everyone’s Tuesday is off to a good start.

The clearest hotels you can think of probably all share something:

It isn’t their geography, their price point, or even their design language. It’s a person. Behind almost every identity-led hotel sits one founder whose lens is the actual operating system of the place.

This week’s interpretation begins where the Identity-Led Model actually begins, with the founder underneath.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why identity-led hotels almost always trace back to one person’s worldview.

• The difference between a hotel with a director and a hotel with an author.

• What happens when the founder’s worldview is the operating system of the brand.

Enjoy.

The Visible Layer

This week: Salva Lopez — The New Palace, for Kinfolk

Photographed by Salva López for Kinfolk, The New Palace is one of those rare places that feels both cinematic and deeply human at once. Through López’s lens, the hotel becomes more than architecture or design… it becomes atmosphere, rhythm, and emotion. His work has a quiet ability to capture not only how a place looks, but how it lingers in the body: the light, the stillness, the texture, the sense of being suspended slightly outside of time.

At Sojourn, we’re drawn to places that understand themselves… spaces with restraint, character, and emotional clarity. The New Palace feels aligned with that philosophy. Not because it tries to impress loudly, but because it creates a feeling that stays with you long after you leave. It’s the kind of place that reminds us why thoughtful hospitality and visual storytelling still matter.

Find Salva Lopez on Instagram and portfolio.

Interpretation:

There’s something the strongest identity-led hotels share that most observers miss. It isn’t geography, design language, or service style. It’s a person. Behind almost every hotel that operates on the Identity-Led Model sits a founder whose worldview is the operating system of the brand. The hotel isn’t a property they own. It’s a worldview they made operational.

Read more

Hope everyone’s Thursday is off to a good start.

For the past three months, the thread underneath every Sojourn issue has been the same. The operating model of luxury hospitality is changing. The old version optimized for what hotels offered. The new one optimizes for what they are.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why the operating model of luxury hospitality is quietly changing, and what’s emerging in its place.

• The four pillars of the Identity-Led Hospitality™ Model: identity clarity, friction removal, coherence, and restraint.

• Why the brands that build the four together will define the next decade of hospitality.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of Sojourn, I’d recommend that you Start Here, or read past issues here.

Enjoy.

Subscribe now

The Visible Layer

This week: Letizia Cigliutti — for Palazzo Edmondo (Puglia)

Letizia describes her own approach as intuitive and emotional: “the poetry of a moment rather than simply documenting reality.” That sentence does a lot of work. Most hospitality photography sits firmly on the documenting side. It records the room, the amenity, the angle. Letizia’s photography sits on the other side. It records what it feels like to be inside the identity of the place.

That’s why her work belongs to this issue. The Identity-Led Model is built on the premise that hotels with clear identity carry their meaning into every surface without effort. Letizia’s images do the visual version of the same thing — at Palazzo Edmondo, her frames don’t show you Puglia. They show you what Puglia understands about itself. The brands she’s worked with — Belmond, Aman, LVMH — are the ones already operating on the model the rest of the industry is still catching up to.

Find Leticia on Linkedin.

Interpretation:

There’s an operating model emerging underneath luxury hospitality, and most of the industry hasn’t named it yet. It isn’t a category. It isn’t a trend. It’s a shift in what makes a hotel durable, recognizable, and worth choosing: a quiet realignment of the things that actually drive preference and return.

Read more

Happy Tuesday all, grateful to be here with you.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why ‘where do you stay’ has quietly become ‘who are you when you’re there.’

• What changes when a hotel functions as identity, not just accommodation.

• Why the strongest hospitality brands now compete for who a guest becomes – not just what they want.

Read previous issues of Sojourn here.

A pattern that keeps showing up in how people talk about travel right now: they describe where they stayed less by what was offered and more by what it meant for them. A hotel becomes shorthand for a version of who they were on that trip — slower, sharper, more rested, more themselves.

That shift sounds soft. It’s actually structural. It’s quietly changing how brands get chosen, and what they’re competing for.

The Visible Layer

This week: Nicolas Quiniou — for “A journey deep into Yunnan, China” in Yolo Journal, Spring Issue 21.

Nicolas describes his work as “stories shaped by place, people, and time.” That sentence does a lot of structural work for this issue. Most travel photography sits on one of those three at a time — the place, or the people, or a moment. Nicolas’s sits on all three at once and lets them work on each other. His frames from the Yunnan piece don’t show you a destination. They show you what Yunnan does to the person inside it. I lived in China for several years. These pictures do it justice.

That’s why the work belongs to this issue. Travel signals identity because the place works on the person stepping into it. Nicolas’s photography captures that work rather than the inventory around it. Ten years inside hospitality, Belmond, Four Seasons, Accor, W gave him the brand fluency to know what’s identity work and what isn’t. That fluency comes through in the Yolo piece. The story isn’t where you went. It’s who you became.

Interpretation:

For a long time, travel decisions were framed as a problem of inventory matching. Find the right amenities, the right location, the right price. Hotels competed on what they offered. Travelers compared by what they could compare. The whole logic of the industry, search filters, star ratings, category labels, was built around that exchange.

That logic is quietly being replaced. Travelers aren’t just choosing properties anymore. They’re choosing versions of themselves. Where they stay has become a way of saying who they are, or who they want to be on this particular trip, or who they want to come home as. The hotel functions as identity. Not just as accommodation.

That’s a different competitive landscape than the industry was built for.

Read more

Happy Thursday from my corner of the world to yours,

Thank you for the incredibly kind feedback on Sojourn's new format, and for the notes that came in about Matteo Milan's Visible Layer feature. He truly has a trained eye.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why refusal is the most underrated form of brand-building in hospitality.

• The structural cost of a brand that says yes to everything, and how it shows up in guest behavior.

• Why the strongest hotels operate from an implicit ‘no list,’ not just a yes list.

For more, read previous issues of Sojourn here.

The hotels I think of as ‘unmistakable’ have something in common, and it isn’t the menu or the design. It’s the list of things they don’t do.

They don’t host certain events. They don’t accommodate certain requests. They don’t add amenities just because the segment has them. They refuse, often quietly, and the refusal is doing more identity work than most of their visible choices.

That’s what this week’s interpretation goes into.

The Visible Layer

This week: Sara Montalbano and Konstantinos Maximiadis from Montalbano Maximiadis — for Aman Venice

Most heritage hotel photography tries to ‘inventory’ the place. Every gilded ceiling. Every chandelier. Every reason it costs what it costs. Sara and Konstantinos’s doesn’t. They give you a hand on a piano. The wake behind a wooden boat. A shadow cut through stone. A coupe drifting across a fresco. The palazzo stays mostly out of frame.

That’s why it belongs to Aman.

The brand has been disciplined about what it says no to for over thirty years – no logos competing for attention, no activations multiplying the calendar, no proliferation of formats. The photography practices the same discipline. It refuses to over-explain. It trusts the viewer to fill in what’s been left out.

That’s how Aman Venice gets read as Aman – not by showing you everything it has, but by showing you only what it needs to.

Interpretation

Most hospitality brands frame themselves through what they offer. The amenities, the experiences, the levels of service, the places they say yes. That’s the visible part of identity. There’s another part underneath, doing more of the structural work – what the brand refuses.

The hotels with the clearest identities aren’t just doing more. They’re declining more. Declining to add certain rooms. Declining to host certain events. Declining to accommodate requests that would compromise what the place actually is. Each refusal is a choice, and each choice tightens the shape of the brand for the people who recognize it.

Refusal is identity made visible.

Read more

A little Tuesday hello to everyone here,

Sojourn started as a way for me to make sense of hospitality, and it is slowly becoming a destination for hotel identity.

As you know, Sojourn is not traditional hospitality coverage. You won’t find recycled press releases, trend roundups, or generic hotel features. Instead, you’ll find strategic interpretation shaped by my background in brand, strategy, and luxury hospitality.

Starting this week, Sojourn is pivoting to a new paid model to better serve readers. What started as a personal newsletter has evolved into something I care about deeply, and putting it together each week with the level of thought and care I want to bring to it is real work. I’ve reached the point where I want to give it the structure it needs for this next chapter.

Under the new paid model, subscribers will receive:

- 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 – twice-weekly strategic reads on hotel identity, atmosphere, discovery, and the shifts shaping hospitality now.
- 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀 (𝙣𝙚𝙬) – periodic conversations with founders, brand operators, and others building inside hospitality.
- 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 (𝙣𝙚𝙬) – a look at the photographers, image-makers, and visual choices that help a place feel distinct.
- 𝗛𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 – closer looks at individual hotels as expressions of identity, not just properties.
- 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗲𝘀 – personal notes and reflections on the ideas, questions, patterns, and shifts shaping hospitality.
- 𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 (𝙣𝙚𝙬) – my email will open for questions, and each Friday I’ll answer one timely topic or issue from inside hospitality.

Free subscribers will have access to written interviews from inside hospitality, The Visible Layer, plus previews of each issue.

If you’ve been thinking of upgrading, 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 to do it as the current annual price will also be changing. Starting next week, the annual subscription will move to $240/year – about the cost of one casual lunch each month. Paid subscribers are welcome to write me with questions or topics for the Friday Dispatch.

As I shape Sojourn into something sharper, more useful, and more valuable, what has meant the most to me are the notes I’ve received from readers along the way...

Some have said it has clarified how they think about hospitality, hotel identity, and the kinds of places they’re drawn to. Others have said it gave language to something they had long felt but never quite articulated. That kind of response means a great deal to me and pushes me to keep raising the standard of what I publish.

Thank you for being part of this evolving chapter.

-Ana

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of Sojourn, I’d recommend that you Start Here, or read past issues here.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why the equation ‘premium equals more’ has quietly stopped working – and what’s replacing it.

• What editing actually costs a hotel, and why that cost is paid in conviction rather than line items.

• Why a hotel that offers everything now reads as a hotel that stands for nothing – and what the strongest brands are doing instead.

I’ve been thinking about the hotels I actually return to. None of them are the ones that gave me the most. They’re the ones that knew what to leave out.

Less in the room. Less on the menu. Less programming on the calendar. Less of the busy attentiveness older luxury treated as proof of care. The ones I keep coming back to feel almost defiantly uncluttered, and that uncluttering is doing more work than most of the addition I see elsewhere.

It’s been on my mind. So this week’s interpretation goes there.

The Visible Layer

This week: Matteo Milan — for Casa Luce, designed by Flore Venezia Architecture Studio (Apulia)

Most hospitality photography tries to give you the whole place at once. Every angle, every amenity, every reason to book. Matteo’s doesn’t. He picks his moments, and does an incredible job. A slant of light. A corner of the pool dissolving into the olive trees. A few loungers with towels left where someone left them. A chair sitting just right beside a doorway. The rest stays out of frame, on purpose.

That’s why it belongs to Casa Luce, by Missing Collection. Designed by Flore Venezia Architecture Studio just outside Ostuni, the villa is a ‘study in subtraction’ with rooms that know how to be empty, a palette that never lifts above amber and cream, landscape always present in the next room over. A different photographer could have made it look impressive, perfect, polished. Matteo made it look legible. That’s the difference. Matteo also helped shape the initial launch website for Elo Hotels, a new project of mine – part of how I came to trust his eye, and it’s now the whole subject of this issue.

Interpretation

For most of luxury hospitality’s history, premium was something you added. More service. More amenities. More layers of attention. The reason a property charged more was because it gave you ‘more.’ That equation worked for a long time until quietly stopped working.

Walk through any of the hotels travelers describe as unmistakable right now and you’ll notice something. They don’t have more. They have less, deliberately. Fewer choices on the menu. Fewer items in the room. Fewer interruptions in the day. Less explanation, less showing off, less of the busy attentiveness that used to read as luxury.

That subtraction isn’t a budget cut, it’s a position, and it’s becoming one of the most distinctive things a hotel can do today.

Read more

A brand I’d been hearing about for months kept showing up in my feed, my inbox, my targeted ads. By the time I finally clicked, I noticed something strange: I knew the name perfectly. I couldn’t tell you a single thing it actually stood for. The visibility had outpaced the identity. Once I saw that, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere.

Interpretation: Hospitality has gotten very good at buying attention. Performance marketing budgets have grown. Targeting is sharper. Retargeting & repurposing are everywhere. Brands now appear in front of the right people more times than they ever could in the pre-digital era. And still, something is slipping. The brands buying the most attention are not always the ones being remembered. In many cases, they’re the ones being forgotten the loudest.

A brand that has to keep reminding people it exists hasn’t built recognition. It has built a ‘subscription to visibility’.

Read more

A pattern I keep noticing in hospitality right now: the more uncertain a brand is about what it actually is, the more programming it tends to put on the calendar. A wine night. A wellness panel. A pop-up dinner. A residency. Another residency. The activation calendar gets fuller, but the brand somehow gets harder to describe. That’s not coincidence.

Interpretation: Programming has become one of the most overused tools in hospitality, and one of the least examined. It tends to get treated as a sign of vitality, as proof that a brand is alive, current, in ‘conversation’ with culture. But constant activation isn’t the same as meaning. In many cases, it’s actually a substitute for it. When a brand doesn’t have a clear enough point of view, programming starts doing the work that identity is supposed to do. And it can’t, at least not for long.

A calendar isn’t a brand. It’s only an indicator of how often you’re trying to be one.

Read more

AI will make hospitality smoother.
I don’t think there’s much debate there.

It will make communication faster, recommendations sharper, itineraries more responsive, and guest preferences easier to remember. In many ways, that’s a great thing. Hospitality has always depended on attention, and technology can definitely help recover some of the attention that busy teams no longer have the capacity to hold manually.

But the part I keep coming back to is this:

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 033 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

I’ve been thinking about a specific kind of disappointment that doesn’t show up in reviews but shapes return behavior more than most brands realize. It’s the feeling you get when a hotel’s photography, copy, and promise point in one direction, and the physical experience of being there points in another… just enough that something doesn’t settle. You arrived expecting one thing and found something else.

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 032 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

There’s a specific feeling you get in certain spaces… where without anyone telling you anything, you already know what kind of place this is. How loud to be. Whats the pace. Whether this is somewhere you settle into or pass through. The room communicated all of that before you consciously processed it. That’s atmosphere doing something far more structural than setting a mood.

Interpretation: Atmosphere is one of the most underrated tools in hospitality. It tends to get filed under aesthetics… a conversation about materials, lighting, and visual language. But atmosphere isn’t primarily visual, it’s behavioral, and it shapes how people move, how long they stay, how much they speak, how present they become. A space with the right atmosphere doesn’t just look good, it creates a specific kind of time - and that time is the actual product most guests are paying for, whether they’d describe it that way or not.

The brands that understand this aren’t just designing spaces. They’re designing behavior.

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 031 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

I keep noticing how differently two types of hospitality brands grow. One type expands aggressively – more locations, more markets, more visibility. The other grows more selectively, sometimes slowly, but something about them stays sharp. The first type ends up everywhere. The second ends up somewhere in people’s minds. Those are not the same thing.

Read more

It’s where I find clarity. Where I shift perspective. Where I come back to parts of myself everyday life cant quite capture. The right hotel, the right pace of a place, reminds me who I am when everything else is telling me something else.

That’s why I care about hospitality the way I do. Not as an industry but as somewhere thats actually changed me when I needed most.

For two decades, I worked at the intersection of brand, identity, tech, and luxury hospitality: showed up, paid attention, did the work underneath the work we’ve all very much know about it yet I didn’t always feel recognized the way it should of in return.

Not unrecognized entirely, just recognized through a lens that wasn’t mine.

That experience shaped me before I could even name it, but once I could of, I started seeing a version of it everywhere I looked in travel.

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 030 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

Something I keep noticing when a hospitality brand expands: the first few locations feel like the brand at its most itself. Then somewhere around location four or five, something starts to shift… the design language is still there, the name is still there, but the feeling is somewhat different. Something got looser in the translation..

Interpretation: Growth is one of the most reliable ways to blur a brand – not because scale is wrong, but because it amplifies whatever clarity (or lack of) already exists. A brand that knows exactly what it is can grow and remain legible. A brand that is still figuring itself out tends to drift with each new location, each new concept, each new hire who interprets the identity slightly differently. The problem isn’t scale. It’s that scale makes the gaps visible.

Most brands don’t notice this while it’s happening. They notice it in the numbers, in return rates, when the press coverage starts feeling generic, when guests begin describing the brand in inconsistent ways.

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 029 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

I’ve been thinking about what makes a stay actually stick. Not just feel good in the moment, but stay with someone… the kind of place they find themselves describing to people weeks and weeks later, or thinking about when they’re planning the next trip. It’s rarely just one moment. It’s something more like a feeling that stayed all the way through. Nothing contradicted it, every part of the stay said the same thing.

Read more

Entry No. 05 — Hotel Storytelling Series. You already know the difference between a place that hosts you and a place that changes you. This series is about the second kind. 25 properties. Each one named for the state it makes possible, not the amenities it offers. A study in how intentional places recalibrate the way we move through time, self, and space.

Initially shared on LinkedIn as the first of the series, Ka bru Beach clearly became The UnHotel, here’s why:

most hotels make it clear from the moment you arrive that you’re a guest. There’s a check-in process, a welcome drink, someone explaining where things are and what’s available. The whole arrival is designed to orient you — to remind you, gently but consistently, of your role in the transaction. You are being taken care of. You are the guest. The hotel is the host.

Ka Bru Beach doesn’t do any of that.

Paid subscribers, the inbox is open. Questions, follow-ups, or a topic you’d like me to look at — reply to any issue. I read every email.

Read more

Welcome to Issue No. 028 of Sojourn. An independent publication delivering strategic interpretation for leaders shaping the future of travel and hospitality.

Good morning and happy Tuesday everyone,

Quick note: if you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of Sojourn, I’d recommend that you start here.

For today’s issue: something I keep coming back to: the hospitality market has never had more options, and yet finding something that feels genuinely distinct is harder than it’s ever been. More properties, more concepts, more openings, and somehow the field feels, narrower? Everything is referencing the same things. The same materials, the same palette, the same language around wellness and intention and craft and so on. The category is expanding and shrinking at the same time…

Interpretation: Sameness spreads fast in hospitality because the signals of quality have become a shared vocabulary. Warm neutrals, raw textures, considered lighting, these things once communicated restraint and care. Now they communicate category. When every property in a segment speaks the same aesthetic language, the language stops doing differentiation work. Travelers stop seeing individual brands and start seeing ‘types’, and types compete on price. Identity, real identity, not aesthetic identity, is what interrupts that dynamic. It’s what makes a brand visible as itself rather than as a representative of a category.

The strange thing is that as the market fills up, distinct identity becomes easier to spot and harder to replicate. There’s more noise to stand out from. More sameness to differentiate against.

What identity actually is: It’s not a logo or a color palette or a carefully chosen font. It’s a consistent point of view about what good looks and feels like, held across every decision the brand makes (touchpoints), from the architecture to the menu to how staff speak to guests. When that point of view is clear and genuinely held, it creates recognition. When it’s borrowed or taken from references, it creates a property that looks right but doesn’t feel like anything specific.

The brands with real identity tend to be slightly polarizing. Not everyone responds to them. That’s the point. A brand that everyone finds appealing is a brand with nothing strong enough to say. The ones that attract a specific kind of person deeply are the ones that last.

Why this matters now more than before: There's more supply than ever, and travelers have more information than they've ever had to navigate it. That combination means more comparison, and comparison, when brands aren't distinct enough, drifts toward price. The properties holding their ground right now aren't doing it through advertising or distribution. They're doing it because their identity is clear enough that the right guests find them and don't need much convincing.

That’s a different kind of resilience. And it’s becoming the primary advantage in a market where everything else can be copied.

Paid subscribers, the inbox is open. Questions, follow-ups, or a topic you’d like me to look at — reply to any issue. I read every email.

Bottom line: The market is full. The brands that cut through aren’t the ones with the most reach, they’re the ones with the clearest sense of who they are. Identity is what makes a brand findable by the right people, memorable after the stay, and worth returning to. In a market where sameness spreads fast, clarity is the differentiator that compounds.

What does your brand’s identity actually say, and is it specific enough to attract the right people and quietly turn away the wrong ones?

Leave a comment

I started it as a personal newsletter in June 2025. A way to think out loud. To process what I was feeling and seeing in an industry I’d spent two decades inside – the last decade of which working directly with travel and hospitality brands as a brand strategist and creative director.

I wasn’t trying to build a media brand. I was trying to make sense of something on the inside, and the more I wrote, the more I noticed something. The people finding Sojourn weren’t casual readers. They were founders, builders, operators, and leaders in hospitality asking the same questions I was asking, and not finding answers anywhere else.

That’s when I understood what Sojourn actually was.

Not a personal newsletter, not a media brand, something in between and more specific than either: a publication built around a gap none of the existing voices were filling.

Not a gap in coverage, but a gap in interpretation.

What I kept looking for, and couldn’t find, was something that went underneath the reporting and asked the harder question… not what is changing, but what does it mean for the people building inside it. Not what the trend is, but what it breaks, what it creates, and where the advantage forms for founders and operators who understand it early.

That’s what Sojourn became.

Read more