Why the Most Compelling Luxury Hotels Start With a Point of View

On a recent visit to 7 Spring, a backgammon café in Nolita, one thing stood out immediately. There were no open laptops, no headphones and no one half-working while they waited for their coffee. Every table was occupied by people absorbed in a game. A café had given people a reason to look up. In a city overflowing with options, that specificity created something scarce: a genuine sense of belonging.

7 Spring’s concept and focus lingered because hotels are wrestling with a remarkably similar challenge. When everything is available, abundance stops feeling luxurious. Relevance and finding your niche does. For decades, the industry defined luxury through accumulation: more amenities, more thread count, more choice. Those things still matter, but they no longer distinguish a property on their own. When a beautiful room becomes the price of admission, the more compelling proposition is relevance. 

In turn, travelers are increasingly defined by their interests rather than demographics. Age, income and nationality tell you surprisingly little about what a person wants from a stay. A shared obsession with wine, golf, wellness or even knitting can tell you far more, and shapes where people choose to travel. 

From abundance to relevance

We’re seeing knitting groups moving as a pack from the west of Ireland to Florence, bound by nothing more than a shared passion. While interest-led travel is not new—golf resorts have existed for generations—the extent to which luxury hospitality is now built around communities of interest rather than traditional market segments is novel. You see this at play at The Kithmore, newly opened in Scotland’s golfing mecca, St. Andrews, where a sense of belonging manifests in the name itself: “kith” is an old Scots word meaning friendship, familiarity and a sense of home. 

When we set out to create The Kithmore brand, the intention was never to create a themed hotel or fill the space with golfing clichés. Quiet references—like the guest room notepad and pencil that take their cues from a vintage scorecard and the small pencil carried on the course—are subtle enough to pass unnoticed by some guests, but recognizable to those who love the game. For them, the pleasure is in discovering that every detail has been curated, selected and considered through a golfing lens. That sense of being understood, without the idea having to announce itself, is what makes specificity feel luxurious.

Passion-based digital communities—from Reddit to niche group chats to social platforms—have accelerated this shift by making it easier for people to find others who share even the most particular interests, then build trips around them. Hospitality’s opportunity is to translate that online affinity into a physical experience: a place where guests do not simply consume a service, but recognize themselves and one another. 

Why specificity pays 

There’s a clear commercial logic to this approach, too. A generalist five-star hotel can become little more than an expensive base from which guests experience the surrounding neighborhood. A property with a distinctive point of view earns a greater share of their time, not by keeping them captive, but by offering experiences they cannot assemble elsewhere.

Piquette, a wine-focused hotel in Oregon, is a useful example. It wouldn’t necessarily be considered luxury in the old-fashioned sense. Yet for someone who cares deeply about wine, it can feel more luxurious than a conventional five-star stay. The glassware, the language staff use, the on-site winemaking, the tasting rhythm and even the digital experience before arrival are all considered through the same lens. The guest feels understood before they ever have to ask.

That said, designing for a narrower audience is not the same as designing for fewer people. It changes the question from “Will everyone like this?” to “Will our people love this?” That shift affects more than aesthetics. It influences how guests gather, what they do throughout the day and which spaces deserve the most attention. Bars and restaurants become social anchors, and retail outlets become places to signal identity. Programming stops feeling like an amenity calendar and becomes the reason to book.

The wider luxury market is moving in the same direction. Bain and Altagamma’s 2026 update found that consumer sentiment towards luxury experiences was growing 1.5 times faster than sentiment towards tangible goods. McKinsey estimates that travelers already spend between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion a year on experiences, and its survey found that 52 percent of Gen Z travelers splurge on experiences compared with 29 percent of baby boomers. 

The preference isn’t simply for more to do, either. Some 83 percent of Millennials and Gen Z respondents to American Express Travel’s 2026 global survey said they prioritize unique, authentic experiences over popular tourist attractions, while 91 percent were interested in unconventional accommodation. The message for hotels is straightforward: distinctiveness is no longer a layer of marketing, it’s part of the offer.

Specific doesn’t have to mean loud 

But a clear point of view doesn’t have to mean a loud theme or a packed schedule. Working on a Waldorf Astoria property, we found that its target guest wanted the opposite: discretion, calm and space to reset. Rather than filling the calendar with activations, we designed for restraint with fewer, more intentional moments, a softer operational rhythm and service that felt personal without becoming intrusive. That was every bit as specific as a wine hotel, but the “niche” was a state of mind.

This can be a challenge for legacy luxury brands. Consistency is their strength, but it also potentially flattens the character of an individual property. The answer is to give each hotel enough local relevance—through food and beverage, programming, partnerships and service—to feel rooted in its destination rather than overlaid, without discarding the brand promise.

Build a platform, not a costume

The risk, of course, is getting it wrong. Misread the community and the concept falls flat. Push the idea too far and it curdles into pastiche. Authenticity and restraint are what separate a place that feels considered from one that feels contrived. The best hospitality concepts are platforms, not costumes: clear enough to create recognition, but flexible enough to evolve as their communities do.

The future of luxury hospitality doesn’t belong exclusively to the hotels with most amenities, the grandest lobbies or the longest list of activities. It belongs to the properties with the clearest point of view that understand what to leave out, and who will notice. The greatest luxury may simply be walking through the door and realizing, “These people understand why I’m here.”