Luxury Travel for 2008
January 2008
Trend Watch
Karen Weiner Escalera, founder of marketing and public relations firm KWE Group, and an expert in the luxury travel industry, identifies some of the top luxury travel trends for 2008:
Relationships with family and friends take center stage
Accelerating since 9/11 and fueled by a backlash against a contemporary world dominated by 24/7 work schedules and dehumanizing technology, family travel is growing at a faster rate than all other sectors of leisure travel. A recent survey of American Express travel agents revealed a significant rise in luxury travel among families—82 percent wanted high-end hotels with kids programs and 56 percent were traveling with nannies. Business trips with the whole family will become as common as tag-along spouses, while high-end business hotels and resorts will roll out the red carpets for families with special suites and villas.
Big money follows culture and is big news
From Miami’s burgeoning Art Basel to the celeb-filled Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, publicity seekers should take note of the international coverage that cultural events are receiving.
Art tie-ins also make good financial sense: Sotheby’s introduced a co-branded World Elite MasterCard, giving cardholders VIP access to cultural events and receptions, even guided tours of newly excavated, private areas of Angkor Wat. More and more hotels are realizing that art attracts a certain art-savvy clientele, who are happy to spend freely on suites, spa treatments and fine wines. We will continue to see hotels become houses of culture, with in-house museums, curators, artists as interior designers and stepped-up marketing efforts that embrace culture.
Health, well-being and looking good continue to move up in financial priorities
The New York Times recently documented the lives and beauty budgets of three women in different parts of the country. One, a real estate agent from Los Angeles, admitted she regularly spent several thousand dollars monthly just for “maintenance,” as she said, to “be in the game.” These motivations are driving the spa and medical tourism boom we saw in 2007. Spas are going well beyond the dedicated spa outlet or the home spa, and branching out into mobile spas, “macho” spas for men, and even for pets. Five-Star hotels are increasingly offering medi-healthy holiday packages in alliances with neighboring medical facilities. Next step? A key buzzword will be “age management” programs to help the rich look and feel young.
Saving time
This is the greatest luxury in our 24/7 world. So, any service that achieves this will be a big winner (as evidenced by the number of jet sales and private jet charter companies serving time-starved travelers and the boom in secondary airports). Major airports are becoming luxury shopping destinations, targeting power spenders on layovers.
Altruism and social responsibility are back
Differing from the cause-related marketing that prospered during the end of the ’90s, today’s wealthy consumers want to believe their consumption is also helping to save the planet or that there is an altruistic motive behind it all. In a recent HSBC luxury goods research report, a graphic of American psychologist Abraham Maslow detailed the hierarchy of emotional needs. The highest is said to be having oneself linked to a higher cause. He said: “The future of luxury will be about imparting real meaning into a product.” The product itself must be sustainable and show a genuine sensitivity to community. The operative words here, as succinctly put by London’s Future Laboratory, are the three “T’s”: truth, transparency and trust.
The affluent are becoming sated with product and are looking for unique experiences
Luxury is being redefined as experiences because consumers are overloaded with products. Today’s increasingly well-traveled individuals want new and exciting experiences to be intrigued, entertained and enlightened. They will spend top dollar to be reach the most remote, exotic places. Witness how quickly private suborbital flights and space travel took off.
Marketers (and planners) need to think big, imagining how to turn any product into a life-enhancing experience. This can mean asking how visitors could have interactive experiences instead of passively visiting the Forum in Rome or the pyramids of Teotihuacán. Acquiring knowledge and expressing one’s creative side also rate highly, with hotels, resorts and destination management companies going well beyond cooking classes to offer everything from videography and tea ceremonies, or instruction in the visual arts and even gallantry at Paris’ Belle Ecole.
Space, space and more space is luxury
Especially when it comes to first class-travel, airlines are vying to outdo rivals in offering the world’s largest airplane bed. Witness Singapore Airlines’ new private suites with double beds that sleep two. Refurbishing will come to mean over-sizing hotel guest rooms and ship cabins, not just the usual interior furnishings and amenities. And top hotel suites will get larger and pricier, appealing, as they must, to the super wealthy who are accustomed to homes of 10,000 sq. ft. or more.
• This article has been edited down from the original. Find more luxury travel trends from Karen Escalera at kwegroup.com/blog.
