Seven months ago, before ILTM Cannes opened, I wrote not only one, but two, articles that hospitality was turning inward.

Not because the industry had suddenly discovered silence or because travelers had stopped wanting beautiful things. The shift I was watching was much deeper than that. From what a hotel provides to what it makes possible. From what a traveler sees to what they are able to feel, understand, or become because of where they are.

Since then, the language has started appearing elsewhere.

My take has always been about the fact that luxury is quieter. More reflective. More intimate. Less about display and more about meaning.

All of that is true.

But something important gets lost when the ‘inward turn’ is reduced to quiet luxury.

Here today:

• What it originally named.

• What the industry is turning it into.

• And why the distinction matters.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

The Visible Layer

This week: Hélène Binet

Hélène Binet is a Swiss-French photographer known for her work with some of architecture’s most known practitioners: Peter Zumthor, Daniel Libeskind, David Chipperfield, Zaha Hadid, and others.

She photographs buildings, but the building is never simply the subject. Light is. Material is.

The relationship between the two is:

Binet still works primarily with analogue photography. The process is slow. It requires her to stay with a place, to follow what the light is doing, and to accept that the image cannot be separated from the hour in which it was made. Love this!~ Just as place and people complement each other.

She has described herself as meditative. She likes tripods.

That sentence explains more than it appears to.

A tripod means the photographer cannot keep moving in search of the image. At some point she has to stop. To place herself somewhere. To wait as long as needed for the architecture to show what really is as a result.

Her photographs of Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals are dark, but darkness is not their subject. They are quiet, but quiet is not their meaning, too.

The images have weight: stone, water, shadows. A narrow ray of light crossing a surface. Body is often absent, but what it can/could be is everywhere. You do not look at the photographs and think only about what the building looks like, you begin to anticipate what the stone would feel like under your hand. How your voice might change inside a certain room. What the temperature of the water would do to your awareness of your own skin. Photographs you can ‘feel’ it.

Binet does not make the architecture look inward, she presents the ‘conditions’ through which the ‘architecture’ turns your attention inward.

Those are not the same thing, and that’s the inward turn I am referring to.

Not the stone, not the silence. The path of your own.

Find Hélène Binet’s work at helenebinet.com. Her Therme Vals series can also be viewed through Divisare.

Interpretation:

On July 16, Accor published an article titled ‘Luxury’s Inward Turn: From Flamboyance to Quiet, Depth and Meaning.’

The title stopped me, of course.

Seven months earlier, as ILTM Cannes opened, I had written:

This is the era hospitality turns inward. (see articles here and here.)

At the time, I was tracing a movement that had been developing across travel for years. Wellness had shifted luxury’s attention from external indulgence toward internal restoration. Culture and sense of place had made meaning more important than just perfection. Neuroscience, psychology, and human behavior had entered hospitality’s conversations. Emotional transformation had become part of what travelers were seeking, even when they did not use those words or had language for it.

The movement was becoming increasingly clear:

From amenities to identity.
From service to resonance.
From aesthetics to internal transformation.
From what you see to who you become.

The industry is now naming the shift.

But it is also beginning to narrow it.

What the inward turn is becoming:

In its most common interpretation, inward luxury means privacy.

Fewer people, less noise, more space, private entrances or access, hidden villas, intimate dining, slower rituals, discreet service, and yes, the ability to disappear from the world without anything feeling unavailable.

Accor’s article calls this controlled absence: the removal of crowds, stimulation, visibility, and displays of wealth. It translates the idea operationally through arrival routes that avoid public lobbies, protected dining and wellness spaces, private pools, larger suites, low-density resorts, and service that remains present without becoming intrusive.

This is a real change.

For decades, luxury made itself visible with the lobby, the materials announced, the service, the guest’s proximity to other people of wealth and status was part of what the experience provided.

Quiet luxury changes the signal.

Wealth is no longer demonstrated through how much the guest can access in public, but through how completely the guest can withdraw from it. The privilege is not being seen at the right table but instead having a table no one else can actually reach.

That is an inward movement of a kind.

But it is not the whole inward turn I’ve been writing about.

What quiet luxury gets right:

The first thing quiet luxury understands is that excess has become exhausting, and I think most of us agree with that.

A traveler who spends the rest of life surrounded by notifications, demands, decisions, visibility, and performance does not necessarily want hospitality to provide more.

Sometimes the most luxurious thing a hotel can offer is the ‘removal of pressure’.

The second thing it understands is that privacy changes perception… when the room is protected from interruption, time begins to feel different. Attention returns. The body loosens, what was inaudible becomes easier to hear.

And the third is that restraint can create meaning.

A place does not need to announce everything it knows, sometimes identity becomes more present through what has been left alone without touch: an old wall, a local ritual, a view without an object placed in front of it, a silence no one has tried to fill.

Quiet can create the conditions for an inward experience.

But conditions are not outcomes.

A silent hotel can leave a person still entirely unchanged.

What the inward turn actually is:

The inward turn is not a design language but a change in where the value of hospitality is located.

The traditional luxury experience directs attention outward. Toward the room, the view, the service, the object, the access, the perks, the evidence that something exceptional has been acquired.

An inward experience changes the direction of that attention.

The place still matters, the room and view and service still matter, but their value comes from what they make available inside the traveler.

Clarity.

Recognition.

Restoration.

Permission.

Perspective.

Creativity.

Inspiration.

A renewed awareness of something that daily life had made difficult to see or hear… and this does not require silence.

A crowded table can turn someone inward, so can music, conversation, a landscape too large to absorb, a city that makes a person reconsider how they have been living all along, a host who introduces them to a tradition that changes their perception of care.

An inward experience may be quiet, but it may also be vivid, communal, disorienting, playful, or alive with sound.

The defining question is not:

How little stimulation does this place provide?

It is:

What becomes possible within the person because of the experience this place creates?

What quiet luxury turns it into:

Once the inward turn becomes just a ‘luxury trend’, it becomes easy to reproduce aesthetically.

Stone.

Neutral color.

Low light.

A listening room.

A private ritual.

A solitary chair positioned toward a landscape.

The signs of inwardness become recognizable long before the experience itself has been understood.

This is how hospitality repeats itself.

A genuine human need appears, the industry detects it, design translates it into visual codes, those codes spread and eventually, hotels everywhere begin to signal the same old promise through the same materials, language, and images.

Stillness becomes a palette.

Meaning becomes programming.

Reflection becomes an amenity.

See the pattern?

The inward turn, which should make a hotel more specific to the person and place, produces another category of hotels that look increasingly alike.

The profile is beautiful, the language is correct, but the internal ‘movement’ the hotel promised may never happen.

What gets lost:

Three things, specifically.

The first is the body.

Inwardness is often spoken about as if it happens entirely in the mind. Reflection. Clarity. Perspective. But the movement inward usually begins through the body.

Temperature. Scale. Light. Sound. Texture. Movement. The quality of the air. The way a room changes the volume of your voice. The difference between entering somewhere quickly and being made to cross somewhere slowly.

When inwardness becomes an aesthetic, the appearance remains and the intelligence disappears.

The second is identity.

Quiet luxury is frequently presented as though the same conditions will produce the same value for everyone. Privacy. Silence. Absence. Seclusion.

But people do not return to themselves in identical ways.

One traveler needs retreat. Another needs encounter. One needs to disappear. Another needs to be recognized. One needs the forest. Another needs the buzz of a city where no one knows their name. See what I mean?

Identity-Led Hospitality™ does not assume that inward always means withdrawal. It understands the specific internal movement a particular place is capable of holding, and the person for whom that movement matters.

Aman offers stillness.

Habitas often works through participation and cultural encounter.

A family-run hotel may create belonging not through privacy, but through the feeling of being known.

The inward turn is not one emotional outcome but the movement toward the outcome that is true for that specific guest, in that specific place.

The third is change.

Quiet luxury is often designed around how the guest feels while they are there.

Protected. Unhurried. Undisturbed. Rested.

The inward turn asks what remains afterward…

Did the place simply provide relief from the guest’s life, or did it return them to that life with something newly visible?

Did it create escape, or perspective?

Did the traveler enjoy a quieter version of the same self, or encounter something that changed their understanding of who that self might be?

Not every hotel needs to transform its guests and that claim would become performative very quickly.

But when hospitality promises meaning, renewal, or reconnection, the question matters.

What, exactly, is being renewed?

What is the guest reconnecting with?

What can they see on departure that they could not see on arrival?

Without that movement, inwardness is not transformation.

It is simply insulation.

What the hotel loses:

When a hotel mistakes the inward turn for quiet luxury, it begins with the codes instead of the truth. It asks how to make the space calmer before asking what the place is capable of making someone feel.

It adds private rituals before even understanding what kind of relationship the guest should have with the property.

It borrows the materials of retreat, the language of meaning, and the appearance of depth.

The result may be beautiful but it may also be interchangeable with every other hotel responding to the same trend.

The hotel loses the opportunity to discover its own form of inwardness.

For one place, that may be solitude.

For another, belonging.

For another, a physical encounter with landscape.

For another, creative permission, cultural disorientation, sensuality, memory, or play.

Identity begins when the hotel stops asking what the market associates with meaning and starts asking what kind of internal experience only this place can project.

What the traveler loses:

The traveler may receive everything quiet luxury promises.

Privacy.

Ease.

Beautiful restraint.

Protection from interruption.

And still leave without having encountered anything other than comfort.

There is nothing wrong with comfort and sometimes comfort is just what is needed but comfort and inwardness are not synonyms.

The traveler loses when the hotel assumes that ‘removing’ the world is the same as helping someone ‘hear’ themselves.

They lose when silence has been simply designed but nothing inside it has been made meaningful.

They lose when a place protects them from friction so much so that it also protects them from discovery.

And they lose when the language of transformation raises an expectation that the experience itself has not been designed to capture in the first place.

Bottom line:

The inward turn is not quiet luxury.

Quiet luxury is one expression of a much larger change: the movement of hospitality’s value from what surrounds the traveler to what happens within them.

Quiet can make room for that movement.

Privacy can protect it.

Stillness can deepen it.

But none of those things guarantees it. It’s not a promise.

The inward turn is not marble becoming stone, maximalism becoming restraint, or a crowded lobby becoming a private entrance.

It is not an aesthetic correction but a change in direction.

From the hotel as something the traveler consumes to the hotel as something the traveler enters into relationship with.

From atmosphere as appearance to atmosphere as an internal event.

From what the place contains to what the person can access because they were there.

Hélène Binet’s photographs of Therme Vals are quiet, but the silence is not the point.

The point is what becomes audible inside it.

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

I’ve been in Amsterdam this week, and if you’ve ever been, you know the city has a way of slowing you down without asking…

I spent time at the Pulitzer and what I noticed first wasn’t the rooms or the design, it was the courtyard. The crunch of gravel, a huge old tree at the center, a church bell somewhere nearby. The kind of details that make a place in my opinion feel like it has its own life, completely separate from whoever is staying there.

That’s my version of the Pulitzer in a nutshell.

The hotel is made up of 25 connected canal houses, originally built in the 17th and 18th centuries. Peter Pulitzer, grandson of Pulitzer Prize founder Joseph Pulitzer, bought the first twelve in 1970 with one guiding idea: ‘The house of your neighbor is for sale only once.’ He kept buying until the hotel had grown into something unlike anything else in the city.

At its center sits the Pulitzer Gardens is a quiet, hidden courtyard that most people walking along the canal would never know exists. Serene in the best way in the middle of one of Europe’s busiest cities. The kind of place that’s genuinely hard to find anywhere else, especially in a lively place like Amsterdam.

What the current copy says

Here’s how the Pulitzer describes itself online:

‘A luxury hotel with a unique blend of traditional and modern Dutch craftsmanship hidden amongst the city’s iconic canals.’

It’s very well written. The history is there, the design story is there, the craftsmanship is there. You get a real sense of what the place looks like and where it comes from.

What it doesn’t quite do ‘yet’ is speak to the person who actually needs this hotel and why.

Reading it through the Traveler First lens

Who it’s for. The Pulitzer isn’t for everyone, and that’s a good thing. It’s for the curious and the artistic, the traveler who wants to feel ‘embedded’ in Amsterdam, not just staying near the canals but actually inside the city’s history. Someone who finds it genuinely exciting that the building they’re sleeping in once belonged to Dutch merchants and aristocrats. Not a nice detail, but a reason to choose it.

What it serves. The desire to belong somewhere, even briefly. To arrive in a city that has been moving for 400 years and feel, for a few short days, like you’re part of its rhythm, the energy, rather than passing through it. The Pulitzer serves the traveler who is tired of feeling like a visitor somewhere random.

What it makes possible. A different relationship with time. Four centuries of history make your own sense of urgency feel smaller. Things slow down, not because the hotel ‘asks you’ to, but because the place has been standing there for so long, and in my view, there’s something grounding, and also fascinating, at the same time about sleeping in a room with that kind of memory.

What personal moment it meets. The cultural trip with more depth than most. The solo traveler who wants the pulse of the city but not the outside noise. The couple looking for somewhere that feels like a discovery rather than a destination. Anyone who has stayed in too many hotels that could be anywhere and wants, for once, somewhere that could only be here.

What the right traveler would recognize. The maze of connected houses, the library of Pulitzer Prize-winning books, the Collector’s Suites… imagined around characters who might have once lived there: an artist or creative, an eccentric book lover, a grand antique collector. The hidden garden at the center that most people walking the canal would never know exists. The feeling that this hotel has a life beyond hospitality.

That specific person would love this hotel immediately… I know I did. The question is whether the current language ‘finds’ them before they find the hotel.

In traveler-first language

What it says: ‘A luxury hotel with a unique blend of traditional and modern Dutch craftsmanship.’

What it could say: ‘For the curious and the artistic, those who want to spend a few days living inside Amsterdam’s history, not just looking at it.’

What it says: ‘The décor makes you feel at the same time at home and immersed in the city’s culture.’

What it could say: ‘400 years of Amsterdam in 25 canal houses, redesigned for how people want to live today. Every room has a past. Every corner has a story.’

Lastly, the first thing you see on the Pulitzer website right now is a suite promotion: ‘The Suite Life — Enjoy up to 17% off including breakfast.’ The image behind it is stunning… colorful art, tasteful decor, canal houses framed through tall windows, a room that looks like someone actually lives there.

The discount is real. But it’s doing the work that the experience should be doing.

What it says: ‘The Suite Life — Enjoy up to 17% off including breakfast.’

What it could say: ‘Wake up to Amsterdam the way it was meant to be seen. Suites now available with breakfast included.’

The offer stays. The traveler arrives first.

The lesson

The Pulitzer is already doing something most hotels can’t, it IS the city, not just located in it.

The opportunity is to say that more directly and to speak to the traveler who is looking for exactly this: a place to feel like they’re going back in time, without giving up the present.

That traveler is out there. The language just needs to find them.

If this sparked something for you, share it with a hotel founder, operator, or marketer who might be ready to see their property through a different lens. The more people thinking traveler-first, the better.

Traveler First is a Sojourn series studying the shift from inventory-first to traveler-first hotel storytelling and what it means for the future of hospitality.

If this resonates, there's more here on the ideas behind it, and on what's being built around them: Identity-Led Travel™, Identity-Led Hospitality™, Elo Hotels™

Hello and happy Thursday,

This is the last issue of the arc, and the one the last two were building toward.

Issue 048 named the model: inventory-first discovery begins with supply and works backward toward the traveler. Issue 049 went inside the gap: what specifically disappears in that translation. This issue asks the opposite question. What does discovery look like when it starts from the other end… from who is traveling, and how they want to feel?

In today’s Sojourn:

• What traveler-first discovery actually means and what it requires.

• Why self-selection is one of the most underrated forces in hospitality.

• Three hotels that are already built around it.

If this is your first Sojourn, the archive is a good place to start. Link.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

The Visible Layer

This week: India Mahdavi

India Mahdavi is a French-Iranian designer based in Paris whose work is immediately recognizable — bold color, sensual form, spaces that feel like they were built for a specific kind of person rather than a general audience. The Bishop’s Bar at Sketch in London, Hotel Thoumieux in Paris, interiors across four continents. Her projects are emotional before they are functional. They ask, first: how should someone feel inside this room?

That question is the foundation of traveler-first thinking. Mahdavi does not design for features, she designs for a state. The warmth of a particular pink, the weight of a chair at a specific height, the way color changes a room’s atmosphere at different hours. These are not just aesthetic decisions, they are decisions about the person who will inhabit the space, and what the space should do to them.

The connection to this issue is direct. A traveler-first discovery model asks the same question Mahdavi asks: not what is available, but who is this for and what do they need to feel? The hotels that answer that well are the ones worth finding. Find India Mahdavi’s work at india-mahdavi.com and on Instagram at @indiamahdavi.

Interpretation:

Inventory-first discovery asks: what is available?

Traveler-first discovery asks a different question first: who is traveling and what do they actually need?

The second question is harder because it requires knowing something about the traveler that goes beyond dates and budget, a kind of understanding that can’t be entered into a filter… of identity, of state, of what a person is looking for even when they can’t say it clearly. And it also requires hotels whose identities are specific enough to meet a real need rather than a general one.

Most discovery systems were not built for this. But some hotels were.

Read more

I have spent years studying how identity, atmosphere, and emotional fit shape the way people choose places, and how the strongest hotels become legible through clarity, restraint, and a precise understanding of the traveler they are truly for. That work has made one thing clear: hotel storytelling is at an inflection point. The industry is still organized around inventory. The next era will be organized around the traveler. Traveler First is where I study that shift.

Most hotel descriptions answer the same questions.

Where it is, how many rooms, what it offers, what makes it design-led, locally inspired, or carefully considered. These are useful things to know. They tell you what a place is. They do not tell you whether it is right for you.

That gap is what Traveler First is built to study.

The standard hotel profile begins with the property and moves outward, from the building, to the features, to the guest. The traveler arrives at the end of the description, if at all. What is assumed is that a precise enough account of the place will help the right person recognize themselves in it. From the outside in.

That assumption is incomplete, in my view.

People do not choose hotels only by what they offer, they choose places by how they expect to feel while there: rested, creative, clarified, restored. The need behind the stay is often more specific than the destination itself.

And the way a hotel describes itself online, across its website, social media, booking platforms, and every touchpoint where a traveler might first encounter it, is where that question of fit is either answered or ignored.

A more precise approach begins somewhere different.

The Traveler First Framework

Instead of describing the hotel, the Traveler-First Profile profiles the fit.

Not: what does this property offer?
But: what does this property understand about the person who needs it?

The framework moves through five questions:

1. Who it’s for. Not a demographic. A state of mind. The traveler between one chapter and the next. The person who needs silence more than stimulation. The creative who has been producing for months and needs a place that asks nothing of them. Identity, not age range.

2. What it serves. The inner condition the hotel addresses. Restoration. Clarity. Solitude. Expansion. The need underneath the booking decision, the thing the traveler is reaching toward, even before they have named it.

3. What it makes possible. Not what the hotel provides, but what it creates conditions for. A slower pace. A return to self. The kind of thinking that only happens when the setting stops demanding attention.

4. What moment it meets. Hotels are not neutral containers. A solo trip after a difficult year is different from a working retreat. A honeymoon that should feel like arrival is different from a celebration that needs to feel significant. The right place meets the specific moment.

5. What the right traveler would recognize. The details, the atmosphere, the pace — the signals of fit that make a particular kind of person think: this was made for me. Not for everyone. For me, right now.

These five questions do not replace a hotel description. They complete it.

The standard hotel profile asks: what is this place?

The Traveler-First Profile asks: who is this place for, and what does it understand about them?

Both matter. But for decades, hospitality has done the first with precision and the second almost not at all. The result is a market full of beautifully described hotels and travelers who still struggle to find the place that actually fits.

What Changes When You Use It

A property that describes itself through the standard profile organizes everything around what it offers — on its website, its Instagram, its booking copy, its Google listing. Every surface answers the same question: here is what we have.

A property that describes itself through the Traveler-First Profile leads with recognition, wherever a traveler encounters it. It tells the right person — before they check availability, before they compare rates — that this place was made with someone like them in mind.

That shift changes everything downstream: the language on the website, the stories told on social, the tone of the booking experience, the guests it attracts, and the loyalty it builds over time.

Clarity is a form of hospitality.

A hotel that can say — precisely, without hedging — who it is for and what it makes possible in them is not only better described. It is more trustworthy. It is more legible. And it is far easier to choose.

How This Series Will Use It

The Traveler-First Profile is the lens behind every piece in Traveler First.

In the mini-audits, it becomes the diagnostic: how does this hotel describe itself online — across every surface where a traveler might encounter it — and does that language help the right person feel recognized? Where does it succeed? Where does it default back to inventory?

In the case studies, it becomes the frame: what does this hotel understand about the traveler it is truly for, and how does that understanding shape everything — from the homepage to the caption to the way the property appears on every platform?

In the language breakdowns, it becomes the translation tool: what does traveler-first language actually sound like, and how does it differ from what most properties are still writing?

The goal is not to critique. It is to teach a more precise way of reading a place — and a more human way of expressing one.

The future of hospitality will be organized around the traveler. This is where that thinking begins.

Traveler First is a Sojourn series studying the shift from inventory-first to traveler-first hotel storytelling and what it means for the future of hospitality.

If this resonates, there’s more here on the ideas behind it, and on what’s being built around them: Identity-Led Travel™, Identity-Led Hospitality™, Elo Hotels™

Last issue named the structure: inventory-first discovery begins with what’s available and works backward toward you, the traveler. This issue goes inside the gap. Not how the system is built but what ‘disappears’ inside it. The things that make a hotel what it is, that determine whether a stay is right, that the traveler needed and the platform couldn’t reveal.

Today: one hotel. What it is. What a platform turns it into. And what that costs.

If this is your first Sojourn, the archive is a good place to start. Link.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

The Visible Layer

This week: Roberta Dall’Alba

Roberta Dall’Alba is an Italian photographer and the founder of Dall’Alba Studio, based in Parma and working internationally across luxury hospitality and travel. Her approach is not documentation, it is translation. The question she brings to every project is not ‘what does this place look like?’ but ‘what does this place feel like, and how do I hold that in an image?’

I’ve been following her work on LinkedIn for several months now, and she has described her craft as shaped by documentary sensibility, art direction, and an immersive approach. And I can see why. What that means in practice is that she stays inside a place long enough to understand it before she photographs it. The light she captures is not set up, it is found. The atmosphere in her images is not produced, it is already there, and she knows how to wait for it.

A hotel like Miramonti: built at altitude, layered with nine decades of family ownership, its identity in the forest and the light and the view rather than any single feature, which is exactly the kind of place that requires that sort of patience. The platform shows you the rooms. Roberta shows you ‘what’ the rooms feel like to be inside. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is what this issue is about. Find her work at dallalbastudio.com and on Instagram at @dallalba.studio.

Interpretation:

There is a hotel above Merano in South Tyrol called Miramonti. It sits at 1,230 meters and it has been family-owned since 1932. Elle Germany described it in four words: hard to find, hard to forget.

Those four words are the subject of this issue.

What Miramonti is:

Read more

Happy Tuesday everyone,

The last three issues were about the traveler, what they’re really looking for, how to read a hotel before you arrive, and what it feels like when the right place finally lands. This issue starts a new arc.

Now the lens moves to the system in between.

In today’s Sojourn:

• How hotel discovery is structured, and why that structure gives the wrong result.

• What the inventory-first model compresses, and what it costs.

• Three hotels that lose the most in translation and why.

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

The Visible Layer

This week: Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were German photographers who spent four decades cataloguing industrial structures across Europe and North America. Water towers. Blast furnaces. Coal bunkers. Winding towers. They photographed them all the same way… straight on, grey sky, no shadows, no people. Then they arranged the images in grids, ‘typologies’, they called them. Always the same kind of structure, repeated across nine or twelve or sixteen frames.

I’d say the work is ‘unsettling’ in a way that’s hard to name, it’s a feeling. Everything feels right, nothing is wrong, and yet something it missing… the specific place, the specific light, the specific moment. And here’s what stays: the category, the type, the data point.

That is what a booking platform does to a hotel: it photographs each one the same way… pool, room, exterior, restaurant, and arranges them in a grid, and calls it ‘discovery.’ Every image correct yet every essential thing removed.

Interpretation:

The case for inventory first…

When you open a booking platform, the first thing it asks is where and when. Not who you are or how you want to feel. Not what kind of place you’re looking for in any meaningful and human sense. Where. When. How much.

From those three inputs, the platform gives you a list: filtered, ranked, and sorted. Thousands of options into a grid of images, a star rating, a price, a review score. You scroll. You compare. You book.

This is inventory-first discovery. It begins with what’s available and works backward toward you. It is the main model for finding a hotel for the past decades, and it has a problem that no amount of better photography or smarter filters has managed to solve.

Read more

Fivelements is not a spa hotel. It is not a wellness add-on. It is a place that was built, from the beginning, around the belief that healing is inseparable from environment, ritual, human connection, and meaning. That healing cannot be packaged as a program or listed as an amenity, it has to be woven into the fabric of how a place exists. At a time when the word ‘wellness’ has been applied to almost everything, that kind of clarity is rare and the reason I invited Ingo for this first interview.

GOCO Hospitality operates across a growing portfolio of wellness destinations, advisory work, and strategic partnerships that share a common orientation: the future of travel belongs to places that help people live better, not simply stay somewhere comfortable. Ingo has built his career around that distinction. He was building toward it long before the industry caught up.

What makes this conversation particularly resonant is that Ingo’s relationship with wellness is not abstract. Having faced cancer himself, the question of what it means for a place to genuinely support human health became personal. That experience sharpened something in how he sees the role hospitality can play, not as entertainment or escape, but as a form of prevention, restoration, and care.

This is the first interview in the Sojourn Conversations series, a set of written exchanges with founders, operators, and thinkers building something distinct inside hospitality. I am glad to be starting here.

1. Fivelements has long been rooted in wellness, ritual, and place. What do you think it understood early that the wider hospitality industry is only now beginning to recognize?

   Fivelements understood early on that wellness is what guests experience through how a place makes them feel. Long before wellness became mainstream, Fivelements recognised that healing is deeply connected to the environment, ritual, human connection and a sense of meaning.
   
   What many in hospitality are only now beginning to realise is that wellbeing cannot sit on the sidelines as an amenity or a spa programme. It needs to be embedded into the DNA of the guest experience, from architecture, food, sleep, movement and emotional restoration to the quality of interactions people have with one another and with nature.
   
   At GOCO Hospitality (the owning company of Fivelements), this philosophy resonates deeply with how we think about wellness destinations. The future belongs to places that support people in living better, longer and more meaningfully, while remaining authentic to their cultural context. Fivelements approaches wellness as a way of living inside a place, and that perspective feels increasingly relevant today.

   ---

2. Wellness hospitality has expanded dramatically over the last decade. What do you think the industry still misunderstands about what people are actually seeking?

   I believe the industry still underestimates how emotionally driven wellness really is. Too often, wellness is reduced to facilities, diagnostics, treatments, or an ever-growing menu of experiences. While these have value, people are ultimately seeking something much deeper.
   
   Guests today are often overwhelmed, disconnected, stressed, or simply searching for a greater sense of balance and meaning. What they seek is restoration, vitality, clarity, emotional grounding and a feeling of being genuinely cared for. Increasingly, they are looking for experiences that improve not only how they feel during a stay, but how they live afterwards.
   
   This is why wellness hospitality must evolve beyond transactional service toward transformation. Success is measured by whether a guest leaves feeling healthier, calmer, more connected and better equipped for everyday life.

   ---

3. Many hospitality brands continue to add more experiences, programming, and personalization. Do you think luxury is shifting from abundance toward something else?

   Absolutely. I believe luxury is moving away from abundance and excess toward relevance, intentionality and meaning. For many years, luxury hospitality was defined by scale, choice and visible opulence. Today, guests value time, privacy, calm, authenticity and experiences that feel personally meaningful. The most sophisticated form of luxury may simply be feeling better.
   
   We are seeing a shift from accumulation to curation. Guests want what matters most to them. That may mean highly personalised wellbeing, restorative sleep, time in nature, meaningful human connection, or access to preventative health and longevity support.
   
   In wellness hospitality in particular, luxury means personalised care, emotional intelligence, and the ability to help someone reconnect with themselves in an authentic way.

   ---

4. You’ve worked across multiple cultures and markets. Are traveler expectations becoming more globally similar, or more emotionally specific?

   In some ways, both. There are certainly global shifts shaping expectations. Travellers across markets increasingly value health, sustainability, personalisation, preventative wellbeing, flexibility and experiences. The desire to feel healthier, live longer, sleep better, reduce stress and find balance has become remarkably universal.
   
   At the same time, expectations are becoming more emotionally specific and personal. Guests now want experiences that reflect their life stage, priorities, emotional needs and sense of identity. A high-performing executive managing burnout may seek something very different from someone navigating menopause, recovery, family stress or simply a desire for reconnection.
   
   This means hospitality cannot rely on standardisation alone. The future lies in creating frameworks that are globally relevant but emotionally adaptable, allowing guests to feel genuinely seen and supported.

   ---

5. In your view, what separates hospitality experiences that feel transformative from those that simply feel well-designed?

   Design creates atmosphere, and transformation creates change. A beautifully designed hotel may impress guests, but transformation happens when people feel something shift within themselves. That often comes from intentional programming, thoughtful human interaction, a sense of emotional safety, and experiences designed around genuine outcomes rather than entertainment.
   
   The most memorable hospitality experiences combine physical environment with purpose. They help people slow down, reconnect, reflect, restore energy, improve habits or gain new perspectives. At Fivelements, transformation is about creating the conditions in which guests naturally reconnect with what they need most.

   ---

6. At Fivelements, wellness seems to be treated less as an amenity and more as a way of living inside a place. How do you think about that distinction?

   This distinction is fundamental. An amenity is something you add. A way of living is something you experience throughout the entire environment.
   
   At Fivelements, wellness is reflected in the rhythm of the day, the connection to nature, rituals, food philosophy, architecture, human interaction, movement, rest and the emotional quality of the experience itself.
   
   We think of wellness hospitality as creating ecosystems for better living. The question becomes: how does every touchpoint contribute to helping someone feel healthier, calmer, more connected, more energised or more inspired? When wellness becomes part of a place’s culture, it moves from service to lifestyle.

   ---

7. What shifts do you believe will most redefine hospitality over the next 5–10 years that the industry is still underestimating today?

   The biggest shift is that hospitality will move from serving comfort toward supporting human performance, resilience and longevity. We are entering an era in which preventative health, diagnostics, longevity science, recovery, mental wellbeing, sleep optimisation, and emotional resilience will become much more integrated into travel and everyday living.
   
   At the same time, I think the industry still underestimates the importance of regenerative thinking. Guests want experiences that feel restorative not only for themselves but for communities, culture and the environment around them.
   
   Technology and AI will also transform hospitality, but I believe the winners will be those who use technology to create more human, not less human, experiences. Technology should enhance personalisation and free people to focus on empathy, care and meaningful connection.

   ---

8. Is there a place, property, or experience that fundamentally changed how you think about hospitality?

   Rather than a single property, I would say it has been the cumulative experience of working across hundreds of wellness and hospitality projects globally, combined with personal experiences that have shaped my understanding of health and wellbeing.
   
   Having faced cancer myself, wellness became deeply personal. It reinforced my belief that hospitality plays a much greater role in supporting healthier, more meaningful lives. Hospitality is not simply about comfort, entertainment or escape. It can actively contribute to prevention, restoration, education and quality of life.
   
   Places like Fivelements, Glen Ivy, and many wellness pioneers around the world continue to reinforce an important truth for me: great hospitality is ultimately about care. When people truly feel restored, supported and inspired, hospitality becomes far more meaningful than a stay.

Thanks for reading. Find more at Sojourn and follow along on LinkedIn.

Hello and hope you’re doing well.

This is the last issue of the traveler arc. Issue 045 named the gap, what people are really looking for but can’t say. Issue 046 looked at the signal, how a hotel speaks before you arrive, and what gets lost. Today is about what happens when both sides are right. When the traveler’s real need and the hotel’s true identity meet. What that produces. Why it’s the thing worth building toward.

In today’s Sojourn:

• What the match actually feels like and why it’s different from a good stay.

• Three hotels that produce it, three different ways.

• Why this is the hardest thing to engineer in travel and the most important.

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

The Visible Layer

This week: Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri was an Italian photographer who worked mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, and died in 1992 at forty-nine. He photographed the Italian landscape, not the dramatic version of it, not the postcard version. The ordinary version. A roadside sign. A garden outside of the coliseum. A stretch of beach in winter. A door in a town nobody visits.

His images are quiet. Nothing happens in them. But you look at one and you feel, very clearly, that you are somewhere. Not just anywhere. Somewhere specific. That feeling of being in exactly the right place, of recognizing a place you’ve never been, is what Ghirri spent his life photographing.

That is also what this issue is about. The match is the moment you arrive at a hotel and feel that. Not ‘this is nice’ but something more specific. Something closer to: this is so right. This place was made for where I am right now, at this moment. That feeling is not accidental. It is the result of a hotel knowing what it is and who they serve, and a traveler, finally, finding it. Find Luigi Ghirri’s work through Matthew Marks Gallery and in Kodachrome, published by Mack Books.

Interpretation

There is a kind of stay that goes well. The room is clean, the food is good, the staff are kind. You leave satisfied. You might go back.

And then there is a different kind. The kind where something happens from the moment you arrive… a feeling of being in the right place at the right time that doesn’t require explanation. You know it immediately. The light is right. The pace is right. The smell of the air when you open the window is right. Nothing is out of place. Everything is just what it is. And what it is happens to be exactly what you needed.

That second kind of stay is the match. A match made in heaven. And it is much rarer than a good stay.

Read more

Hello everyone and happy Tuesday.

Last issue was about the gap: what travelers are really looking for, and why they can’t always say it. This issue is about what comes before the stay. Before you book, before you pack, before you arrive. The signals a hotel sends out into the world and what those signals do to the person who receives them.

In today’s Sojourn:

• What a signal actually is, and why it matters more than most hotels think.

• The difference between signals that carry identity and signals that flatten it.

• Three hotels, three different ways of sending the right message, featuring:
  Casa Angelina, Zannier Hotels Phum Baitang, Hotel Tugu Bali.

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

The Visible Layer

This week: Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor is a Swiss architect who has spent his career building things that make you feel something before you understand why. His thermal baths at Vals, carved from local quartzite stone, are dark and quiet and warm. You walk in and know immediately where you are, not because of a sign or a logo, but because the building tells you. The stone tells you. The light tells you. The silence tells you.

In 2006, Zumthor wrote a short book called Atmospheres. It asks one question: what makes a building feel the way it feels? Not what it looks like. What it feels like. He talks about the sound of a space, the temperature of surfaces, the quality of light at different hours. He is talking, in the end, about signal, the way a building communicates before anyone opens their mouth.

That is exactly what this issue is about. A hotel sends signals long before a guest arrives. The signals are in the photography, the copy, the name, the architecture, the materials. They say: this is what kind of place we are. This is what you will feel here. The hotels that get this right don’t need to explain themselves. The ones that get it wrong spend a lot of money trying. Find Peter Zumthor’s work at zumthor.com and in Atmospheres, published by Birkhäuser.

Interpretation

A hotel is talking to you before you arrive.

It talks through the images on its website, whether they show you what a room looks like or how a room feels. It talks through its copy, whether it says ‘an unforgettable experience’ or something true and specific. It talks through its name, its location, the way it describes its food, the words it chooses and the ones it leaves out.

These are signals, and travelers read them… even when they don’t know they’re reading.

The problem is that most hotels are sending the wrong ones. Not because they’re trying to deceive anyone, because the tools they use to reach travelers such as booking platforms, review sites, social media, and so on, reward a very specific kind of signal. The generic kind. The kind that performs well in a feed and says nothing about what the place actually is.

What a signal actually is:

Read more

This issue starts a new arc.

The last three have been about the hotel: the GM, the erosion, the brief. Today the lens flips. Not the operator’s side of the identity question, the traveler’s.

In today’s Sojourn:

• The gap between what travelers say they want and what they’re actually seeking.

• Why that gap is structural, not personal, and what it costs.

• Three hotels that meet the unstated need. Three different needs, three different mechanisms.

Read previous issues of Sojourn here.

The Visible Layer

This week: Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer whose work has nothing to do with documentation. She photographs a geyser erupting beside a figure too small to register its scale. Flowers in a glass on a white surface. Sparks raining onto a body standing still in the dark. A woman with a white umbrella turned away from the viewer in fog. She finds the sensation inside the ordinary and the elemental both… the feeling of a moment rather than the record of it. You look at a Kawauchi photograph and feel something before you understand what you're looking at.

That is exactly the problem this issue is trying to name. Travelers arrive at a hotel seeking something they often can’t articulate… a quality of light, a pace, a feeling of being in the right place at the right time. Kawauchi photographs that kind of knowing. Her lens is tuned to the thing you feel before you have a word for it. The connection to hotel discovery isn’t incidental, it’s structural: if you can’t name what you’re looking for, no search box can find it. But the right place can still deliver it, and the right photographer can still document it. Find Rinko Kawauchi’s work at rinkokawauchi.com.

Interpretation

When someone searches for a hotel, they type a city and a date. Sometimes a price range, a neighborhood. What they almost never type is what they’re actually looking for… because what they’re actually looking for is much harder to name.

Not a room. Not a pool or a restaurant or a gym. A state. Something about how they want to move through the next three days, how they want to feel when they wake up, what they need more of and what they need less of. The search box can’t understand that. So they translate it into something the system can process instead.

The translation is always partial, and the gap between what was searched and what was needed is where a lot of travel goes wrong.

Read more

The last two issues have been circling the same problem.

Issue 042: the GM is the most important identity decision a founder makes, and the industry almost always hires for the wrong version of the job. Issue 043: four patterns that quietly but surely unmake a hotel's identity, each one with good intention yet none of them obvious, all of them happening in the same absence.

This issue is about the frame itself.

In today’s Sojourn:

• Why a brand manual is not an identity brief and what the difference produces.

• What the brief actually contains: five components most hotels never put into language.

• The cases: Coqui Coqui, Palazzo Daniele, and Jnane Rumi — three briefs, three mechanisms, three different levels of risk.

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

The Visible Layer

This week: David Dumon

David Dumon is a Belgian photographer whose work sits at the edge of interior and fine art photography — cinematic in feel, specific in attention, built around the atmosphere of a space rather than its documentation. He was brought in to shoot all the photography for Jnane Rumi, which is where his work first came across my radar.

What his images of the hotel do is hold the brief visually. The light in the tea room. The zellige tiles in shadow. The layering of objects… European antiques against Moroccan arches, Samy Snoussi’s gold ceiling fresco above a quietly placed chair. A photographer who can read a hotel’s brief and translate it into image is doing something close to what the GM needs to do: hold someone else’s specific worldview faithfully, without flattening it into something more legible to a broader audience. Dumon doesn’t shoot for broad legibility. He shoots for accuracy, to the feeling of the place, not the inventory of it. That’s a brief he carries into every project.

Interpretation

Most hotels give their GM a brand manual. Yes, some of them are thorough: logo usage, color palette, tone of voice guidelines, photography direction. A well-designed ‘brand manual’ can be a real document… considered, detailed, genuinely useful for the marketing team + brand communications function.

It is not an identity brief.

A brand manual answers one question: what does this hotel look like? An identity brief answers a different one: what is this hotel, specifically enough that the person holding it can make a call the founder would have made, without the founder being in the room.

The brief is the document most identity-led hotels need and almost none have. Its lack of absence is why a reasonable GM can make four years of individually defensible decisions and produce a place that no longer reads like itself.

The brief isn’t long. It doesn’t need to be. But it has to answer five questions the brand manual doesn’t ask.

Read more

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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