My Personal Notes on Why Interpretation Is the Most Underrated Tool in Hospitality Right Now
Skift covers the business. Condé Nast covers the aspiration. Nobody is covering what it means for the people building inside it.
I didn’t start Sojourn as a publication.
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.
The shift that’s been hiding in plain sight
Here’s what’s interesting about the identity shift in luxury hospitality. It didn’t appear suddenly. It’s been building for the past decade, and if you look at the ILTM timeline carefully, the pattern is unmistakable.
2019–2021: Wellness becomes the new luxury. Restoration, personal renewal, wellbeing. Luxury begins its turn from external to internal.
2021–2022: Culture and meaning lead the conversation. Sense of place, community-rooted hospitality. Travel becomes connection, not escape.
2022–2023: Human behavior enters the stage. Neuroscientists, behavioral experts, psychologists appear at ILTM. The industry starts asking what’s changing inside the traveler, not just around them.
2023–2024: Emotional transformation becomes the focus. Identity, purpose, reinvention. The question shifts from what are your amenities to how do people feel when they leave.
The publications were all circling it. Skift wrote about human-centric travel. Condé Nast wrote about luxury shifting from things to feelings. Travel Weekly wrote about emotional transformation as the next frontier.
They described the pattern yet nobody ‘interpreted’ what it meant for the people building inside it.
That’s the gap.
What strategic interpretation actually gives you
The brands already leading this shift weren’t chasing trends. They were building from a clear understanding of where human behavior was moving.
Aman built around stillness before stillness was a category. Our Habitas built around cultural identity before that language existed in hospitality. Rosewood built around sense of place when most luxury brands were still competing on marble and thread counts.
They weren’t smarter than everyone else, they just had a clearer lens.
That’s what strategic interpretation gives a founder, builder, or operator. Not a prediction and not a trend report. A lens for making better decisions earlier.
Because here’s what I’ve come to believe after a decade shaping how travel and hospitality brands communicate and two years of writing about what’s actually driving those decisions: the next generation of meaningful hospitality brands won’t be built by following trends, they’ll be built by people who understood the shift before it was obvious, and built accordingly.
Luxury is no longer about making everything premium. It’s about making something distinct enough to remain meaningful... and that requires a completely different way of thinking about what you’re building and why.
What Sojourn actually covers
Sojourn explores a simple idea: we choose places, and places shape us in return.
That second part is what interests me most. For a place to truly ‘shape someone’, it has to know what it is – clearly enough that something real can pass between the traveler and the environment.
This isn’t traditional travel content. I’m not covering destinations or summarizing trends, I’m more interested in what makes certain places stay with us, why some brands hold the keys while others dont, and what’s actually shifting beneath the surface of hospitality right now.
The free essays identify what is changing. The paid editions examine what those shifts break, and where advantage may be forming for founders and operators who are paying attention.
There’s also a third format – Strategic Features. Occasional standalone analyses of consequential decisions across hospitality and adjacent industries. Deep reads on specific brands, properties, or moments that illuminate something larger about where the industry is heading.
In the early days of building something in hospitality, you are the clearest expression of your brand. You are the vision, the point of view, the taste, the standard, the story. Everything. Before guests experience the place, they experience you. Before they trust the hotel, they trust the person shaping what it will feel like and why it deserves to exist.
Sojourn is for that person.
Why now
The industry is at an inflection point.
Identity has become the primary force shaping where people go, stay, and belong. Travelers aren’t choosing properties anymore. They’re choosing internal transformations. They’re choosing versions of themselves.
And most founders and operators are still thinking about it the old way, unfortunately.
Still competing on amenities, marketing features, and building without a clear enough answer to the question that actually drives preference, not what does your hotel offer, but who does your guest become there.
I am a firm believer that the brands that will define the next decade of hospitality aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most Instagram-worthy design. They’re the ones with the clearest sense of what they are and who they’re for: Identity-Led Hospitality™ & Identity-Led Travel™, two original concepts I’ve written.
Getting there requires more than good instincts, it requires a way of ‘reading’ the industry that most publications aren’t built to provide.
That’s what I built Sojourn to be.
Noise is temporary, clarity is strategy.
If you’re building something in hospitality and you want to think about it differently, I hope it helps.