Comment: Luxury on top

I must admit: I’m not a luxury hotel person. You’re more likely to find me booking a budget hotel or an Airbnb, rather than a swanky five-star resort with a walk-in closet the size of my room.

However, it is undeniable that the times that I have stayed in luxury properties, the experience has been worth it. And certainly, despite the rise of the mid-market sector, luxury travel and luxury properties are extremely relevant. It still remains a highly lucrative and sought-after business, one which does reap dividends.

Realising and accepting the importance of this sector, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts worked with Fortune 500 futurist and consultant Faith Popcorn to look at luxury travel trends of the future, with a specific focus on guest experience, service, destinations as well as hotel design. Virtual reality was cited as one of the differentiators for luxury travel, along with fashion playing a role in the form of customised wardrobes.

She also said that with 70% of the world’s population set to be urban by 2050, the design and structure of luxury hotels will “change dramatically with brands set to adopt new architectural solutions such as ‘building down’, to fit to the changing landscape”.

And IHG is definitely focusing on the luxury segment. For example, its COO Pascal Gauvin reported that the operator is set to open its first InterContinental in Fujairah next year, and that “this is an especially important hotel as it is our first resort under the InterContinental brand in the Middle East”, he said.

Signs of luxury are seen all across this issue — from the interview with the global CEO of Shangri-La Greg Dogan (pages 32-37), to the article on the newly opened Conrad Makkah (pages 38-40), and right through to our sneak peek at the Anantara Al Jabal Al Akhdar (pages 116-122).

And it’s not just hotels, but luxury travel as an overall sector is here to stay. Amadeus IT Group released a report recently titled Future Traveller Tribes 2030: Understanding Tomorrow’s Traveller, where the key finding was that luxury travel is actually growing faster than overall travel. Over the next decade, revealed the report, the growth rate in outbound luxury trips is projected at 6.2% — almost a third greater than overall travel (4.8%).

Specifically about the Middle East, the report revealed that over the next 10 years, the overall travel market will grow by 4.4% while the luxury market will expand by 4.5% in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, with Lebanon, Iran, Jordan and Egypt marked as emerging luxury markets in the long-run.

And remember: it’s not just millennials, or the baby boomers, or any specific generation, that’s reaching out for luxury travel. Some people may assume that an older generation with more disposable income are going in for these experiences. But what W Hotels Worldwide global brand leader Anthony Ingham said to me a few months ago really resonated when it came to my impression of luxury travel. He said: “For all of the Starwood brands, W has the highest proportion of the 25-35 year old bracket of any Starwood brand, and so within all big — particularly luxury hospitality brands — W has quite a young leaning. Which is sometimes surprising because W is an expensive brand, from a price point of view.”

So it’s not really about age. It’s actually a sign of the times where personalised and bespoke (and believe me, I hate that word) travel experiences are what people are looking for, where they don’t mind spending that little extra to ensure a comfortable stay on their terms.

So while cheaper rates and smaller rooms are driving in more tourists, there’s no denying that the number of travellers looking for something special isn’t going to end...