In 2025. Highsnobiety and Boston Consulting Group surveyed 6,710 luxury consumers across 11 markets for a white paper with a blunt title: Luxury Redefined: Stop Selling the Dream. Start Fitting Into Reality.
It is a study of fashion buyers, not hotel guests, but if you read it as a hotelier, it might sound like it has a point that can be transfered to your industry and property.
It also confirms the claim we made in our last post across every generation and market: buyers have turned on the marketed fantasy and want substance instead.
Rude awakening
"a constructed mystique, a marketing machine that ran out of fuel."
Luigi Bernasconi, quoted in Luxury Redefined
For years, luxury sold an aura. The name, the heritage, the promise that a high price signalled something you could not quite see. What changed is that buyers can now see through it. Reviews, transparency, and their own rising expertise expose the gap between the story and the product.
The hotel equivalent is easy to spot: the infinity-pool photograph, the word "luxury" in the headline, the generic promise of escape. That is selling the dream, and today's guest recognises the marketing machine behind it.
In the survey, 80% of core luxury buyers said they value brands that make subtle cultural references that resonate with them, which the report reads as a demand to be addressed with intelligence rather than sold at.
Everybody is not an audience
"Try to satisfy everyone and you'll satisfy no one."
from Luxury Redefined
The report diagnoses the so-called luxury crisis not as falling demand but as homogenisation: for years brands chased every buyer until they all blurred into one another.
For hotels, this is the interchangeable-property problem. The hotel that could be lifted out of one city and dropped into another has no reason to be chosen except price. A quarter of the buyers surveyed said they no longer see the value in paying for a famous name. The positioning that once felt safest is now the most exposed.
Distinction beats reach
"originality and dynamic voices will continue to break through."
Jesse Hudnutt, Fashion Consultant, New York City
Even in a saturated market, the report finds, buyers actually reward craft, clear values, a point of view, and independence. What they discount is exactly where the marketing machinery leans on hardest: collaborations, celebrity creative directors, influencer hype.
For hotels, the encouragement is real. You do not need the biggest marketing budget to cut through. A property with a genuine identity and the confidence to stand for something specific has an advantage the chain playbook cannot manufacture.
The takeaway
The report's own closing line works for hotels word for word: trade spectacle for substance, and status for storytelling. Across 6,710 buyers in 11 markets, the verdict matches what the youngest cultural leaders are already signalling. The dream stopped selling. What sells now is a brand, or a hotel, that knows exactly what it is.
That is the conversation we are bringing to Best Stay 2027, 18-19 February, Sheraton Zagreb.
Book your seat and bring your team.
P.S. Every Early Bird ticket includes the Hospitality Playbook 2026-2027, last year's Best Stay distilled into practical 90-day action plans for owners, GMs, revenue, sales, marketing, HR and operations.
Photo credists: Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI)