Today’s letter is fun, light, and sans paywall. It’s my birthday very soon and I’m in a good mood.

It’s also a long post with many photos from the week, and may be truncated in your email. You can view in its entirety on the Substack app or on a browser.

This weekend would be a good time to catch up on recent previous letters:

• Would you bet on the “itinerary play”? The American Mayfair, European pied-à-terres, and a new hospitality business strategy

• Not everyone can nor should do luxury hospitality. Saying what everyone is thinking but won’t say out loud. (Removed paywall on this one for now)

• Is there still a case for lifestyle hotels? Playing devil’s advocate

• Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

No new listings this week.

Current listings:

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Design week is always a treat - Milan lights up to welcome those in the creative industries who have traveled far and wide to participate in what I call the “Coachella for adults”. It’s an intense week full of exhibitions, cocktail parties, dinners, and meet ups with friends and industry colleagues you rarely see. Here’s what I got up to this week:

Sunday

18:35

Arrived at the cocktail opening of Laila Gohar x Arket installation, which was a carnival style carousel with giant fruits and vegetables instead of ponies. Unfortunately, the entire carousel was occupied by those taking selfies so I couldn’t get a good photo.

19:17

Arrived at DIMOREGALLERY, the studio space of the very chic Milanese design firm Dimore Studio. They’ve done some cool hospitality projects, such as Trattoria del Ciumbia (a favorite in Milan), and La Dolce Vita Orient Express trains.

19:45

Made my way over to David Prior’s Spaghettata, his annual Salone party at his Milan home / office. I arrived just in time to catch the beautiful sunset. Met Dave Barry, whom mutual friends have insisted I meet. Dave is a real estate developer in NY and has also worked on cool hotel projects such as Chiltern Firehouse. He also has a fun podcast with Mike Novogratz called Business Untitled.

21:00

My husband picks up me, Jeff Klein, and his husband John for a double date at Casa Cipriani. It’s been a while since I laughed that hard. We ordered cacio e pepe, carpaccio, and filet.

Monday

11:40

The St. Moritz tourism board graciously invited me for a tour of Villa Pestarini. Villa Pestarini is a private home designed by Italian architect Franco Albini. The house was decorated with furniture and objects made by Alcova’s curation of excellent artisans.

13:02

After the tour, we were ushered to The Wilde, where we had an intimate al fresco seafood lunch.

15:23

Headed home for a bit to catch up on some emails and recharge my social battery.

18:27

Met up with Jules Perowne, the only hotel publicist who has my number, and Dave Barry for an aperitivo at the very chic Bulgari Hotel garden. I love nerding out about hospitality with fellow geeks!

20:13

Arrived at the T Mag party at beautiful Villa Necchi, which was dedicated to the end of Hanya Yanagihara’s tenure as Editor-in-Chief. Met up with Andrea Franchini, Global Brand Director at Edition and W Hotels, and his lovely partner Cian O’Connor who write a great Substack ( , where he reviews spas at luxury hotels). The Lake Como Edition curated the cocktail bar, but didn’t have any water! Ran into plenty of familiar faces from NY and London, which is always wonderful. Said hi to the coolest Gen X person I know, . Ended my night at the party discussing peptides with The Stanza podcast alum Dr. Jonathan Leary.

Tuesday

9:35

Met up with some friends from Milan at the Cromo Tea pop-up on the roof of Torre Velasca, which will become a new members club called Madison House. It’ll be operated by Dubai-based Sunset Hospitality Group.

11:14

Visited the beautiful Nilufar Depot, which always has one of the best curations of furniture. This year, the theme was “Grand Hotel”, although nothing about the exhibition gave me “hotel vibes” other than the faux front desk reception desk.

12:27

Went back home to work on the next podcast episode, which I can’t wait to share with you all.

18:23

Arrive at Sant Ambroeus to celebrate the group’s 90th anniversary. There was a beautiful table full of all their best pastry treats, along with pastry chefs decorating giant princess cakes. Said hi to Cosimo Gherardini, Alireza Niroomand, Ana Mari Rovirosa at Sant Ambroeus, and ran into more familiar faces.

19:13

Finally get to the Artemest cocktail, which has consistently been one of my top 3 activations during Salone every year. Artemest is a platform curating beautiful furniture. Every year they decorate an apartment to showcase their curation of artisans. The dining room by Rockwell Group was particularly memorable.

20:04

My friends and I popped into the Flamingo Estate x Kohler event. I was today year’s old to learn that Kohler has apparently invested in Flamingo Estate. The event itself was more of a social event and not a true exhibition.

20:23

We walked over to the RH event, which is the talk of the town. It was chaos outside, with paparazzi swarming any blacked out van that emptied out any sort of recognizable person at the entrance. RH was very generous with the catering and none of it was done with negative intentions. It was just shocking given that the Milanese aren’t used to this level of spectacle. Some of the words eventgoers used to describe the event were: “disgraceful”, “ridiculous”, “ tacky”, and “savage”. Rumor says that RH spent $1.5M on catering alone, which included Vesper Martinis, Petrossian Caviar, a recreation of Bar Basso, Sant Ambroeus and more. See the invite below. I’m just wondering why they chose Hugel to DJ the party, and why they chose Margot Robbie and Zoe Saldana to make appearances given they have no obvious connection to Italy, luxury furniture, or the design world. Regardless of what people think of RH, the event was certainly a very American way to make an entrance into Milan, a city that leans towards discretion and understated elegance. One interesting comment I kept hearing was that RH furniture is too large for Milanese apartments. After all, the elevators here are tiny and moving typically requires crane lifting furniture from the street into narrow terrace windows. The restaurant may do fine, but I doubt the Milanese would buy RH furniture when they have the world’s best craftsmen in their backyard. After all, Milan is the design capital of the world.

21:30

Dinner at Rost with friends from NY and Milan. If you haven’t been yet, I highly recommend.

Wednesday

18:35

Stopped by The Thinking Traveller cocktail party at the beautiful home of the owners of Rocca delle Tre Contrade in Sicily. The Thinking Traveller is a villa rental platform operating in Italy, Greece, and France. There were Sicilian nonne making arancini from scratch in the kitchen, which is a great idea for a dinner party at home.

20:01

Met up with a friend at Nino, another great Milan restaurant that recently opened. Diego Rossi of Trippa fame opened Nino, a 1970’s osteria serving creative twists on the classics. Highly recommend.

22:34

Organized friends from various phases of my life to gather for the Silencio at Ronin pop up. Local celeb Simone de Kunovich DJ’d and it was a full house. Discussed peptides with a new friend from NY.

Thursday

Shot some fun content for the podcast on this day, which deviates from my usual interview format.

Friday

12:49

Caught the end of Giampiero Tagliaferri’s exhibition at his design studio in Brera: “Materials at Edge”. Art curator Truls Blaasmo and gallerist Chiara Rusconi collaborated on the art pairing. I first met Giampiero in Naples last summer and am excited to see that he’s having momentum in the design world.

That was my 2026 Salone! Back to regular programming next Friday. Have a great weekend!

Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

I’m mentally preparing for the Coachella of the design industries: Milan Design Week, and will be sharing highlights on IG stories.

If you are coming to Milan for Salone and need F&B recommendations, I compile all my recommended restaurants, bars, and cafes on the AmiGo app. It’s free to use with code THESTANZA. If we happen to be at the same events, please say hello!

Some news:

The Stanza has always operated on a foundation of credibility, unique insight, and storytelling. This is most likely the reason why you find it valuable.

As you know, The Stanza is not traditional journalism. I don’t copy and paste press releases, nor do I “cover”, “report”, or “break news”. I don’t accept inbound interview or feature pitches. All guests, whether for written interviews or the podcast, are invited by me through my personal relationships. This ensures the integrity of The Stanza’s brand and voice, and ultimately, a better experience for you as a reader and listener.

This newsletter is pivoting to a slightly different format to serve you all better. Each Friday, I’ll answer a big question or dissect a pertinent theme in the business of hospitality, with input from my personal network of leaders making decisions that impact the broader industry. The goal is to make each issue insightful, informative, and a genuine pleasure to read.

You can read last week’s issue as an example (paywall removed).

If you’ve been thinking of upgrading, now would be a good time to do it as the current annual price is the lowest it will ever be. Starting Monday, the price of an annual subscription will increase to $250, or the price of a power lunch in Manhattan for two. Paid subscribers are welcome to request topics or questions to dive into on Fridays.

Several of you have told me that this newsletter has helped you prepare for meetings, challenged your perspectives, or helped you develop a concept further. Others have told me that the voice of The Stanza cuts through the industry noise. These notes motivate me to become a better storyteller every day, and I’m incredibly honored to have earned space in your inbox.

Thank you for being part of The Stanza’s evolution.

-Nadine

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• What’s the investment case for design-led lifestyle hotels charging under $1K ADR?

• If lifestyle hotels serve a different customer than luxury and ultra luxury, how do you underwrite demand resilience in a segment that is more exposed to discretionary spending?

• Richard Caring’s empire of Mayfair members clubs and restaurants just traded at a 24x multiple. What does that say about how institutional capital is underwriting hospitality brands?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Current listings:

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

K-Shaped Hospitality, Part II: The Contrarian Argument for Lifestyle Hotels

It was great to hear such a strong response to last week’s newsletter on the impact of the K-Shaped economy on hospitality. The general conclusion was that while the ultra luxury thesis makes sense on paper, there are some big caveats to that thesis:

• Too many operators and too much capital are rushing into this ADR segment, which naturally erodes the returns that made it attractive in the first place;

• Most of the product resulting from this “rush” does not occupy irreplaceable and irreplicable real estate;

• Most of these operators do not have a unique and strong point of view, and therefore are not effective at telling their own brand story;

• They also do not intuitively understand what service means at the luxury level, and it shows through the staff interactions, which will make it difficult to survive the inevitable market contraction when the only paying guests left are the ones who are used to high quality service and experience (the exact HNWI traveler that everyone is chasing).

In today’s context during which capital is rushing into “ultra luxury” on the back of macro data on HNW/UHNW travelers, the contrarian argument surrounds the case to develop lifestyle hotels, not as a consolation prize for those priced out of ultra luxury, but as a category worth building toward on its own terms.

Read more

Thank you for your feedback on the interview I published this week with Jonathan Goldstein. If there is one interview you should watch from The Stanza, this would be it.

Last week, I asked you all to share with me any names of companies building the ultimate CRM for luxury hospitality. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that Dorsia is building an operating system for members clubs. The move makes intuitive sense. Dorsia has always been a membership business at its core, and the technology stack they built to manage reservations, payments, access, and member behavior in the restaurant vertical translates naturally to what a members club needs to run well. The platform covers the full stack: member CRM and lifecycle management, bookings and reservations, frictionless payments, access control, a white-labeled member-facing app, communications, and a data intelligence layer that gives club operators visibility into member behavior and engagement. They are covering switching costs for select early partners and offering a free demo to clubs interested in seeing the platform before committing. If you run a members club and have been looking to replace the system you are currently tolerating, reach out to knox@dorsia.com.

Enjoy reading this week’s letter,

Nadine

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Is the asset-light model incompatible with competitive ultra luxury hotels?

• Why do so many luxury hospitality brands look and feel the same, and when will that become a drag on returns?

• The next market contraction will expose why “brand” is overrated in hospitality.

• What is the most interesting whitespace in hospitality right now?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Current listings:

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

K-Shaped Hospitality

The year is 2026, and the world is obsessed with luxury hospitality. Open any social feed and you’ll see a plethora of LinkedIn poetry claiming to know what hotels get wrong about the guest experience, or green screen videos giving recycled cliff notes on Adrian Zecha-era Aman. And have you noticed the online fervor for hospitality whenever you see this type of content? It’s a direct reflection of the real world and where people are spending their time, attention, and money. Members clubs, social wellness, “Eurosummer”, 8PM Friday reservations, fashion & hospitality crossovers…we simply can’t get enough of hospitality. And for good reason - after a period of dismal lockdown, the urge to experience and connect with people and places has only seemed to intensify over the last five years. Plus, life is so much better when you’re spending it to experience your own subjective definition of beauty.

The term “K-shaped economy” has been coming up in many conversations lately, typically as a means to justify why a developer/operator/investor should pursue the ultra luxury hotel segment. at wrote about how the hollowing out of the aspirational middle is also not a hospitality-specific observation, and that it’s a dynamic across the entire built environment: retail, residential, office, and F&B are all exhibiting parallel patterns.

It’s helpful to have historical context around the K-shaped economy: why is this pattern emerging now? Since 2008, the Fed Reserve cut interest rates to near zero and kept them there until 2015, then again during the pandemic to steer the US economy from an iceberg. Fourteen-odd years of near-zero rates were one of the most significant wealth creation events in modern history. Equity markets compounded, real estate appreciated, venture capital and the mass adoption of new tech generated returns that looked extraordinary by any prior benchmark, and the cohort of genuinely wealthy individuals expanded materially as a result. I’ve spoken several times before about the current Great Wealth Transfer, the largest transfer in history, which further underlines the K-shaped economy concept.

The ultra luxury hospitality thesis that is so in vogue today is, in part, a lagging reflection of that wealth creation. The logic absolutely makes sense: the top of the wealth distribution is insulated from rate cycles, inflation, and unemployment in ways that the middle is not. Capital markets identified the growth of the HNWI and UHNWI population, consultancies published the data, and the investment committee decks followed. This created a wave of capital from real estate funds and developers who understood the demand side well enough to get comfortable in a deal meeting, but had considerably less to say about the supply side, which is where the real differentiation lives, and where most of the risk is mispriced. Many of those decks were also built on return assumptions that made sense when the cost of capital was near zero. When the Fed began raising rates in 2022 at a pace not seen in four decades, it did not invalidate the demand side of the thesis, but it exposed how little attention had been paid to the supply side - specifically, whether the assets being developed to serve that demand were actually irreplaceable, or simply expensive.

Let’s start with the real estate. The most durable ultra luxury hospitality businesses in the world are not durable because of their brand, their service training manuals, or their loyalty programming. They are durable because they sit on land that cannot be replicated: not difficult to replicate, but genuinely and permanently irreplaceable. Aman is the most obvious case study in the industry. Most of their assets share a defining characteristic: they occupy sites that exist in finite supply by nature, regulation, or history. These hotels don’t compete on amenities or thread count. They compete on access to something that cannot be manufactured, and that access is the pricing power. The brand, guest experience, and the operator are what you layer on top of it, but the real estate is the foundation of long term value creation.

This concept of “irreplaceable real estate” was seared onto my young mind during my time at Cain, and unsurprisingly Jonathan Goldstein mentioned it during our conversation. It’s the thesis that gets you comfortable with taking on an enormous amount of risk: future residents of Aman Beverly Hills will have views to the Pacific and the Santa Monica range that are protected by development restrictions on new projects that would obstruct those views. This creates a scarcity aspect, which drives the sellout price per SF and ADRs, and ultimately and hopefully, compelling returns.

The implication for many investors and operators is uncomfortable, because a significant portion of what is currently being marketed as ultra luxury hospitality does not actually pass that test. Beachfront Miami is an interesting case study. Collins Avenue absorbed wave after wave of branded residential and hotel development, each project arriving with a flag and a premium price point, each one constrained in its ability to command a durable premium above the building next door. When barriers to new supply are low, RevPAR is a function of market saturation rather than product quality, and most operator flags offer limited protection against it. The ease of new supply can easily erode returns, and the rush of capital into ultra luxury product in markets without genuine barriers to entry is already doing what capital rushes always do: compressing the returns that attracted the capital in the first place. A meaningful portion of this product was also underwritten during the period of low rates, which massaged projected returns and lowered the bar for what counted as a viable site. Some of those projects will perform. Others will discover that the guest they were built for is considerably more discerning than the market research suggested.

The second problem with how the ultra luxury consensus is being applied is that “brand” is doing too much work in the underwriting conversation. In hospitality, brand without consistent, precise, and deeply personal execution doesn’t merit the valuation premium reserved for excellence. The properties that hold pricing and accrue value through and despite cycles are the ones where the guest experience has been designed by people with genuine taste and a coherent point of view, not assembled from a playbook borrowed from the last operator who got acquired at a good multiple. This is why no luxury “group”, with one or two exceptions, can replicate the Passalacqua’s of the world. Many of the brands currently presenting themselves as luxury, and being underwritten as such, would not survive sustained scrutiny from a guest who comfortably drops six figures on a single hotel booking, regardless of what’s happening in the economy.

Let’s be absolutely honest here: most of the time, the sense of place is declared as a marketing statement on a press release rather than felt. The design references are borrowed or outsourced to the same designers doing several other comparable hotels. The programming is uninspired or lazy. The service is inconsistent. What these brands share is not a point of view but an absence of one, papered over by a positioning document and a rates strategy. Luxury hospitality, at its best, is the product of operators who have dared to be everything for a specific type of guest rather than desirable to as many guests as possible. That kind of conviction requires taste, cultural exposure, and a willingness to alienate people who are not the intended guest. Most of the brands rushing into this space have none of those things, and the market has not yet demanded that they do. It will, and the contraction will sort them quickly from the ones who were building something long-term and truly iconic.

I’ve written in favor of ultra luxury hospitality many times before. Not because of the K-shaped economy argument, but because I’m a textbook taurus, I have always loved nice things, and the pursuit of beauty and material pleasures is what drives me. Therefore, please don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to say here: yes to the ultra luxury thesis, but with the caveat that most operators can’t execute the trophy-status version of it that has the pension and sovereign wealth funds willing to clip a 2% yield.

Now, the contrarian argument is more interesting than we give it credit for. This week, I asked investors in The Stanza’s universe the following:

“The K-shaped economy thesis has become almost consensus in hospitality investment circles - pile into ultra luxury, avoid the middle. But consensus trades rarely stay consensus for long. Do you still see a compelling investment case for lifestyle hospitality (not only hotels, but members clubs, wellness retail, F&B), and if so, what does it require to be true about the consumer, the capital structure, or the operating model?”

Paul, who I reference above, shared with me that the middle still works, but only for operators who can build something people love regardless of their net worth: community-driven, locally rooted, and free of the status signaling that defines aspirational luxury.

“The model I keep coming back to is Hillstone. They’re in the most expensive zip codes in the country — Palm Beach, Aspen, Dallas, Napa — but they’re serving chicken sandwiches and hot dogs in a sit down restaurant at a reasonable-ish price, and every location is packed every night. The trick is that they don’t feel like a chain. They brand locally — Honor Bar in Dallas, Palm Beach Grill in Palm Beach, White House Tavern in Aspen, R+D Kitchen in Napa — even though the menu and operating model are essentially the same everywhere. So I think the lifestyle hospitality concepts that survive the K-shaped squeeze will look more like that: locally authentic, operationally lean, tech-enabled on the back end to keep costs down, and built around community rather than aspiration. The hard part is that this is much easier to do as a one-off hotel, wellness concept, or restaurant than as a national brand — because the moment you scale, you risk becoming the very thing you’re trying not to be. The narrow path is building a platform that enables local authenticity at multiple locations without diluting it. Hillstone figured it out.”

Jonathan Lau is the Co-Founder & CEO of Art de Vivre, based in Paris. He has invested in both ultra luxury and lifestyle hospitality businesses. His read is that the aspirational luxury consumer has been abandoned, not because they lack relevance, but because hospitality lacks the flexibility that its adjacent industry fashion has always enjoyed. A luxury fashion house can launch a diffusion line tomorrow. A hotel can’t reprice its real estate overnight, so the industry’s response to the K-shaped consumer economy has been to push rate and quietly exit the aspirational segment altogether, leaving behind an enormous and underserved cohort:

We should not forget that these aspirational consumers represent the largest segment in luxury by volume and by spend.

What luxury hospitality has done instead is simply push price relentlessly, trying to extract more from the wealthiest consumers while effectively abandoning the aspirational segment altogether. Despite the product staying virtually the same and often depreciating without meaningful capex improvement, the result is a market that has mispriced an enormous consumer cohort. These are not budget travelers. These are educated, design-conscious, experience-driven consumers who believe that a great life is built on what you do, not what you own. They want taste, identity, and quality in their travel. They just don’t want to pay thousands of euros a night for it. And right now, very few people are serving them well. Particularly in Europe, the price-to-value equation in lifestyle hospitality has broken. The premium segment biases towards convenience and function. The true luxury segment has floated out of reach. There is genuine whitespace between the two. And if you believe in the long-term structural shift from goods to experiences, then that whitespace is a generational opportunity.

The parallel is already playing out in fashion. Brands like Reformation and Toteme emerged precisely because the aspirational consumer had been left behind. They offered design, quality, and cultural identity at a price point that felt honest. And they are building large, sticky businesses doing it. I believe the same bifurcation is coming in hospitality. The hard part, and this is where most owners & operators will fail, is the real estate. You need to source assets at a basis that lets you deliver a genuinely compelling product at a price the aspirational consumer will pay, while still generating attractive returns. That is a narrow needle to thread, particularly in the current pricing environment. But if you can thread it, you will own a consumer who is loyal, growing, and structurally underserved.

It brings me back to my original point, which is that the underlying real estate is the foundation of any hospitality business, whether ultra luxury or lifestyle. The difference is that in ultra luxury, an irreplaceable site supports eye-watering ADRs and/or condo sellout prices in ways that give you some margin on the entry basis. In lifestyle hospitality, the entry basis is the business model. Get it wrong and no amount of concept, community, or “brand” can save the returns.

Now I’d love to hear from you: who do you think will be the long-term winners, and why? I have my bets, but please don’t ask me to share them publicly!

• Kempinski has acquired the Augustine Hotel in Prague for an undisclosed price. The Augustine Hotel is a 101-key property set within the walls of an Augustinian monastery dating back more than 800 years, and is the brand's first acquisition in over 50 years. The deal is notable for what it signals about where Kempinski is going: away from the asset-light management contract model that has defined institutional hotel management companies for the past two decades, and toward direct ownership of heritage assets that ultra luxury positioning actually requires. The asset-light model optimizes for capital efficiency and scalability, but also compromises key governance rights over major decisions to owners whose interests do not always align with the operator's brand ambitions. I’ve always thought that owning the asset (or at least a majority of it) is a pre-requisite to competing at the ultra luxury level. The more interesting question the Kempinski move raises is what it implies for the large asset-light operators who have built their entire businesses on the management contract model, and whether the brands among them with ultra luxury ambitions will eventually face the same conclusion.

As always, feel free to reply to this email with your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

The Stanza is the best independent media platform discussing the business of luxury hospitality, and I owe much of that to my time at Cain. I'm excited to share a special interview with my former boss, Jonathan Goldstein, about what it takes to build one of the world's leading luxury hospitality & real estate portfolios.

Watch on Spotify or Youtube

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Part I: AI and the Future of Hospitality

Every hospitality operator is asking the same question right now: what does AI actually mean for my business? Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia, has a clear thesis: the operators who will define the next era of hospitality are not the ones who chase the technology, but the ones who double down on the art, the craft, and the magic that no algorithm can replicate.

In Part 1 of this episode, Marc shares why AI will finally deliver the hyper-personalized, frictionless experience that modern luxury has always promised, how it will change everything from the kitchen to the moment a guest walks out the door, and why the pace of that disruption is arriving far faster than most people in the industry expect.

This episode is made possible in partnership with Dorsia. To get access to Dorsia’s curation of impossible tables and cultural events, download the app and use code THESTANZA.

Part II: Early Conviction: Investing in Aman and the Future of Luxury Hospitality

Jonathan Goldstein is the founder and CEO of Cain International, a real estate investment and operating company managing over $14 billion in assets across luxury residential, hospitality, sports, and entertainment. Cain was formed in partnership with Todd Boehly and Eldridge Industries, built on a shared conviction that gateway cities and branded experiential real estate represented a generational investment opportunity.

Cain’s real estate portfolio spans some of the most scrutinized assets in luxury hospitality. At the center of it is One Beverly Hills, a $5 billion, 17.5-acre mixed-use development flagged by Aman in the heart of Beverly Hills. Jonathan also co-led the $900 million investment into Aman Group alongside Saudi PIF, subsequently partnering with Mubadala Capital to finance the brand’s expansion. Other assets in the portfolio include Six Senses Courchevel, Raffles Boston, the Delano Miami, and a stake in the Delano brand in partnership with Ennismore & Accor. Cain was investing in luxury and experiential real estate long before the pandemic made the thesis obvious to the broader market.

I worked on One Beverly Hills for Jonathan at Cain, which gives this conversation a level of access and specificity that is rarely present in interviews at this level of the industry.

Interview Highlights:

• Approach to risk and creating an asymmetrical outcome in business

• The story behind the Aman investment opportunity

• What sets Aman apart from the rest

• What it takes to earn the trust of sovereign wealth funds

• How Cain assembled the One Beverly Hills site

• The buyer profile of Aman Residences in Beverly Hills

• Developing other luxury projects: Six Senses Courchevel & Raffles Boston

• Repositioning the Delano brand & Miami hotel

• Jonathan’s approach to choosing a hotel management partner

• The personalization problem luxury hospitality has yet to solve

Learn more about Cain’s portfolio ⁠here⁠.

Follow⁠ ⁠The Stanza on Instagram

If you or someone you know is building a CRM for luxury hotels, and you truly understand what “luxury” means, please reply to this email and introduce yourself.

The next podcast episode debuts next week, and it’s a very special one!

Happy Easter weekend,

Nadine

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Is the ultra luxury hospitality business model as we know it being reinvented?

• Could Palm Beach become the American answer to Mayfair?

• Why Europe is a better (and certainly more glamorous) market for branded residences.

• The restaurant-to-hotel brand play: genius or disaster?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Current listings:

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

The Travellers Club on the Champs-Élysées occupies the Hôtel de la Païva, the last surviving example of the grand private mansions that once lined the avenue. The building was commissioned in the mid-19th century by Esther Lachmann, known as La Païva, a courtesan of Russian origin who had allegedly vowed as a young woman, after being thrown from a carriage onto the pavement of the Champs-Élysées, to one day build the most beautiful house on the street in revenge against all the men who had mistreated her. She eventually secured both the name and the fortune of Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, one of Europe's wealthiest industrialists, who financed a mansion with a construction cost estimated at the modern equivalent of nearly a billion dollars. Auguste Rodin worked as one of its sculptors. Paul Baudry, who would later go on to paint the Opéra Garnier, painted the frescoes. The yellow Algerian onyx staircase remains the only one of its kind in the world. La Païva fled Paris under suspicion of espionage during the Franco-Prussian War and died in Germany at 64, after which the mansion stood empty for decades before becoming the Travellers Club in 1904, a gentlemen's club that, ironically, only recently opened its doors to women.

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If you’re a reader of The Stanza, you probably enjoy going to restaurants that require a bit of chess to reserve, but you likely don’t enjoy the chess part. I first discovered Dorsia two years ago and found it to be a nice solution to that. I don’t love texting anyone for reservation favors. It feels a bit burdensome, and even if the operator on the other side says they don’t mind, I can’t imagine that it’s fun having your friends blow up your phone for bookings. One of my favorite use cases for Dorsia is getting direct access to places like Jondal Ibiza in July, or other impossible reservations such as Torrisi or Straker’s on a Friday at 8PM, all without asking for favors or paying cash to a random concierge person. I also love that it allows you to “dine and dash” as it stores your card information and automatically takes care of the bill, removing the awkward payment part at the end of a meal.

The solution Dorsia offers to hospitality operators is also compelling. Rather than competing on inventory like a traditional booking platform, Dorsia operates on a minimum spend model: members commit to a per-person spend in exchange for guaranteed access to venues and experiences that are otherwise nearly impossible to get into. This optimizes revenue for primetime tables and avoids the issue of giving these tables to groups that don’t order much but are there to take photos.

Beyond restaurants, Dorsia is expanding its platform to travel and events. As The Stanza continues to explore various facets of hospitality, particularly on the demand side, I’m excited to share that I’m continuing my partnership with Dorsia this year to share more on how hospitality will evolve with tech and AI.

The Stanza readers can get access to Dorsia here (code: THESTANZA).

Marc Lotenberg is the founder and CEO of Dorsia. He has worked in hospitality since he was 13, moving through nearly every role in restaurants, events, and nightlife before pivoting to media, where he acquired W Magazine from Condé Nast. When COVID brought that chapter to a close, he moved to Miami and turned his attention to a problem he had been thinking about for years: why is it still this hard to get a good table? Dorsia was the answer. In February 2025, the company announced $50.4M in seed and Series A funding at a $146M valuation, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Invus Group and individual investors including Naomi Gleit of Meta, Sweetgreen co-founder Jon Neman, hospitality figures Mario Carbone and David Grutman, and operators Simon Kim and Jeff Zalaznick of Major Food Group.

There has always been an invisible economy around prime tables. You know the maître d’, you text him, and as long as you’re a regular he’ll get you in. But now you’re formalizing that, and finding a way to create value for both the customer and the restaurant. What made you want to do that, and why now?

A few things collided at once. COVID hit, restaurants outsourced so much of their product to tech companies, and the tech was really bad. They lost control of their dining room, and cancellations and no-shows are hard to avoid. And at the same time, the world was moving from restaurants doing 2,000 covers a night to 200 covers a night, but the tech was built for the old-school legacy systems. That curation of who’s in the dining room is important. Understanding how much people are spending and what they are spending it on is important. So that timing was what created the ‘magic moment’. We knew that eventually people were going to come out of COVID and there was going to be this mad dash for experiences.

And then on the unit economics side: there was all this demand, but the money wasn’t all going to the restaurants or the servers. It was leaking into this invisible economy through grey market reservation platforms. So I was looking at all that and thinking there’s a better way to do this: by curating which people should be coming in, get them to commit to a spend so that everyone can win in the ecosystem.

Social media has effectively crowd-curated the same 30 most popular restaurants in every major city. How do you see that changing the way people access these places, and what’s Dorsia’s role in the curation?

In a world where everything looks “good” as a baseline, the ultimate distinguishing traits are going to be taste and critical thinking ability. There will be a future in which the phone disappears, and the focus will be on entertaining your customer. Most of these companies with websites, bad experiences, and OTAs are gone. You’re not going to be scrolling through a list of things trying to filter which hotel, which nights, what availability. You’re just going to be talking to your AI agent, and your agent is going to be booking places based on your patterns and what you already want.

What we’re building is closer to Netflix or Spotify than to a reservation platform. It’ll be about entertaining you and bringing you on a journey, and telling you where you’re going, when you’re going, who you’re going with, why. And you’ll feel like you’re just covered.

When a restaurant or hotel goes viral, you have very little control over who comes through the door, and it can very quickly lose its desirability. You don’t want the crowd that’s there just to take a photo. You want the crowd that genuinely loves the experience and wants to support the business. How is Dorsia helping operators manage that?

Social media was almost like a death sentence to restaurants in so many ways, because it filled dining rooms with influencers going to these restaurants for social clout. They clogged up the dining room just to create content, which creates a weird vibe. And then it brought their audience to the restaurant, which is not what restaurants actually want or need. If that’s not the audience you’re going after, you’re just clogging your whole system with noise and the wrong people, and losing your point of view.

Our solution for restaurants is: one, curating the right customer for them. Two, getting them the right revenue optimization. And three, increasing the overall hospitality experience. You’re going to be walking into a restaurant soon and they’re going to know you’re approaching, your table is waiting, your glass of wine is on the table, and there’s a special menu based on your behavioral patterns that wouldn’t ever be possible without that technology. Restaurants can’t build this themselves. They don’t have the tech infrastructure. Someone who really understands hospitality has to build the apparatus for them, so they can focus on the entertainment, the show, the theater.

Dorsia has an application process, which is an interesting component of the product and the experience. Walk me through how that works. How do you decide who gets in?

It’s not just in or out; we use degrees of separation and connectivity points. When I was promoting back in the day in high school, I was literally collecting names and addresses, building charts by schools. It was about the quality of your black book. Then email came along and it became about volume. All that did was dilute the quality of the outreach. The whole point of digital was supposed to be precision, and we lost control of that.

We’re about to come into the era of ultimate precision and personalization. For the hospitality tech companies that have cleaned and sanitized their data, and know how to curate a crowd, winner-take-all models are about to occur. For us, we’re focused on ‘top of pyramid’. We’re not everything to everyone. We don’t do any paid marketing. It’s all through degrees of separation, people nominating their friends, and those friends nominating theirs. When we bring the social components into Dorsia later this year, you’ll be able to see your circles and your connectivity points, and we’ll help you connect the dots on who you should be having dinner with when you’re both in the same city.

How would you describe the typical Dorsia member?

It’s hard to put a specific person to it. It’s people who appreciate nice things and don’t mind spending money on experiences. They appreciate the acts of dining, relationships, community, and meeting new people. We’re not the best app for the homebody who wants to eat at home six, seven nights a week. We cater to people who want to live life and experience our version of what living life is.

It’s more about a state of mind than a specific person. We have people that are 21 years old using the app and people that are 81. We have grandfathers, sons, and grandsons all using the app, and the referral chain often goes in unexpected directions. When you watch the trees of how these people are connected on screen, it’s pretty remarkable.

Let’s talk about the founding story of Dorsia. Was there a specific moment that inspired you to start the business?

I bought W Magazine from Condé Nast, and by the time COVID hit I was done with media and print. I moved to Miami and started talking to different hospitality groups. And I kept coming back to the same obsession: a dinner reservation is such a pain to get. Even when I wanted to go somewhere, I had to text owners and ask favors, and I always felt weird about it. As an owner, you want people like that in the place. But then they feel weird texting you, and you’re getting blown up on your phone all the time. No one’s happy with the outcome.

I started working through the model with Simon Kim (Founder of Gracious Hospitality, Cote and Cocodaq) early on. He got it immediately and understood we needed to bring Major Food Group on board to make the launch work, and he helped make that happen. When they joined, it really accelerated everything.

And when I went out to raise money, I didn’t even have to ask. Friends who had never put a penny into anything I’d done in media were calling me: “I’m in. Will you take my money?” That told me it was clearly a problem affecting a lot of people.

The name. I love the reference.

The second I saw it I knew that was it. But nobody wanted me to use it. I went to a top PR agency and their executive team said they wouldn’t work on the account if we kept it. The owner texted me afterward: “Look, I can’t take the account, but if you’ve got strong intuition about it, go with it.” Every single co-founder told me not to use it. I had such a strong intuition about it from the start. And I think that’s so important. Hospitality is going to be about whoever has a really strong point of view and conviction.

If you had to boil it down to its core, what problem is Dorsia solving?

Access, removing friction, and personalization. Those are the three. The part we haven’t fully solved yet, but are aiming for this year, is who you should be spending your time with, where you should be spending your time, and when you should be going. When we nail that, it’s going to change your entire outlook on what you think a tech platform can be.

There’s a version of this story where a platform like Dorsia could replace the maître d’ and the human layer of hospitality with a tech product. What’s your take on that?

Right now, maître d’s are looking at us like: I don’t know if you’re my friend or my enemy. What I can assure you is that in a short order of time, they’re going to look at us as their most important tool. We can’t do what they do. There’s a complete art to it. They’re personable, they remember everything about the customer, they speak multiple languages, they know how to read a room. That’s not tech-based. What we’re going to do is give them the ability to really shine and be the best versions of themselves they’ve ever been able to be. That’s when they’re going to say: I cannot perform at this level without Dorsia.

And I’ve seen what happens when that changes. There are restaurants I’ve been to that I loved, partly because I had a great connection with the maître d’. When that person left, the food didn’t change, nothing changed. But the welcoming changed, and that magic changed a bit. That role is going to become so incredibly important. Every restaurant is going to need a high EQ, relationship-based person there, who’s part of the show and welcoming guests. We’re not here to replace that in any way, shape or form. We want to be the tools that help them do the best they can consistently.

Thanks for reading this interview. For more of The Stanza, subscribe to the weekly digest and follow on Instagram.

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I apologize for a late letter and thank you for your patience.

This week I had the pleasure of living in a few very beautiful hotels, and I wanted to share an experience that has left a big impact on me.

Upon arrival at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, as my butler, Angel, was pouring me a welcome drink and talking me through the iPad room controls, I noticed a stuffed brown dachshund keychain on the coffee table, along with a welcome note and a case of mini pastries. If you know me IRL, you’ll know about my brown dachshund named Miuccia, who is my sidekick and comes with me almost everywhere in Milan. It was a perfect coincidence that I had spent the car ride from the airport to the hotel looking at pictures of her because I was missing her!

It was the most thoughtful and personalized welcome gift that I’ve ever received at a hotel. Angel let me know that the guest services team did a little “stalking” prior to my arrival. It was a simple gesture to let me know that the hotel is thinking of how to make me feel welcome and looked after. There couldn’t have been a better arrival experience.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Everyone wants hotel exposure, and LVMH is no exception. But consumer sensibility alone isn't enough to create value in hospitality real estate.

• What does it take to close a $4.3B loan for an ultra-luxury hotel and branded residential project in this environment?

• What is the most undervalued component of the guest experience right now?

• Points programs were built for a different era. Who is paying the price for that today?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Hotel Acquisitions Lead, The Six Bells

The Six Bells — the Brooklyn-rooted hospitality brand behind a Michelin-rated Hudson Valley inn — is seeking a seasoned Hotel Acquisitions Lead to drive their next chapter of growth. If you have 7+ years in hotel or hospitality real estate and a network of owners, brokers, and developers you can actually call (not just LinkedIn-connect), this is a rare consulting opportunity to work directly with a founder building something with genuine soul. You’ll source and advance acquisition opportunities — hotels, inns, adaptive reuse properties — across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and South, with the autonomy of a lean team and the credibility of a brand that’s already earned its Michelin star. Independent hotel instincts are a must. Email hiring@thesixbells.com.

For Sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

A rare chance to acquire one of Mykonos’s crown jewels: a fully operational, 5-star luxury boutique hotel set directly on the water. The property spans nearly 5,000m² of beachfront estate with approximately 40 keys, a mix of luxury suites and private villas, framed by a private beach, multiple pools, indoor and outdoor F&B venues, and a full spa and wellness center.

A recent €3M renovation means the infrastructure is in place and the asset is ready to operate. The opportunity is in repositioning: the hotel currently runs an ADR of ~€600, and a new operator with unified design and optimized F&B and wellness programming can push that well north of €1,100.

What makes this especially compelling is what you can’t build anymore. Mykonos now has a strict ban on new hotel developments, making existing beachfront assets like this essentially irreplaceable.

Inquire here.

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Artist Paolo Del Gallo’s historic family home in Rome. Full tour on ’s Substack.

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Today’s newsletter is a longer one, so I won’t waste my breath up here.

Thank you everyone for your continued feedback on the new format of the podcast. Links to the latest pod episode can be found here.

Enjoy,

Nadine

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Where is 3 and 4-star hotel product trading in Rome and Mallorca right now?

• Jeff Klein on how to value a members club business.

• The same segmentation playing out in hotels is happening in members clubs.

• Blackstone, Richard Caring, and the inevitable institutionalization of members clubs as an asset class.

• Amidst conflict in the Middle East, I asked four industry leaders the question everyone is thinking about.

• When price is no object: the data behind ultra luxury’s structural resilience.

• One compelling concept is all it takes to build a hospitality empire.

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Hotel Acquisitions Lead, The Six Bells

The Six Bells — the Brooklyn-rooted hospitality brand behind a Michelin-rated Hudson Valley inn — is seeking a seasoned Hotel Acquisitions Lead to drive their next chapter of growth. If you have 7+ years in hotel or hospitality real estate and a network of owners, brokers, and developers you can actually call (not just LinkedIn-connect), this is a rare consulting opportunity to work directly with a founder building something with genuine soul. You’ll source and advance acquisition opportunities — hotels, inns, adaptive reuse properties — across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and South, with the autonomy of a lean team and the credibility of a brand that’s already earned its Michelin star. Independent hotel instincts are a must. Email hiring@thesixbells.com.

For Sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

A rare chance to acquire one of Mykonos’s crown jewels: a fully operational, 5-star luxury boutique hotel set directly on the water. The property spans nearly 5,000m² of beachfront estate with approximately 40 keys, a mix of luxury suites and private villas, framed by a private beach, multiple pools, indoor and outdoor F&B venues, and a full spa and wellness center.

A recent €3M renovation means the infrastructure is in place and the asset is ready to operate. The opportunity is in repositioning: the hotel currently runs an ADR of ~€600, and a new operator with unified design and optimized F&B and wellness programming can push that well north of €1,100.

What makes this especially compelling is what you can’t build anymore. Mykonos now has a strict ban on new hotel developments, making existing beachfront assets like this essentially irreplaceable.

Inquire here.

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

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I’ve just spent a few days in Paris, where the hospitality scene seems to be thriving and lively as ever, although I could have just felt that way as I caught the tail end of fashion week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to the new and stylish wellness club, Sant Roch, which was opened by a former boutique fitness entrepreneur Jules Bouscatel. It offers contrast therapy, along with breathwork and meditation guidance. I like how the offering is very specific and clear, which is something that I think more wellness businesses could fine tune in order to sell their value proposition cleanly.

Thank you for all your kind words on the new format of the podcast this year. The season debuts with Valentina De Santis, owner of the iconic Grand Hotel Tremezzo and creator of one of my favorite hotels in Europe, Passalacqua. Several of you shared that you found her perspective on building a legacy vs building for an exit particularly insightful, and that’s exactly the reason why I chose to debut the season with Valentina.

While there will be several guests on the show that are either backed by institutional capital or are the institutional capital, I thought that starting the season with Valentina’s long term “family business” mindset was especially pertinent in the current era of “hospitality mania” we’re in. In the interview, Valentina shares some of the big operational decisions she’s made in order to prioritize the guest experience and longevity of the business, such as the decision to avoid doing weddings on Lake Como (which is one of the most popular wedding destinations for wealthy Americans) and the decision to be generous with the small details, such as bathroom amenities.

My goal in highlighting these operational differences is to share the perspective that scale is not the only marker of success in hospitality.

I can’t wait for the rest of the season to unfold!

Links to the episode can be found here.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Why are lenders now comfortable underwriting hotels where half the revenue comes from restaurants and bars?

• Why are European hospitality brands racing to build branded residences in Miami right now?

• Can AI replicate taste, or is taste the last competitive advantage humans still control?

• Are we entering a world where luxury hotels compete less on rooms and more on culture, taste, and community?

• If oil prices spike again, will it hurt luxury travel, or actually make elite destinations even more exclusive?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

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You can also watch this interview on Spotify, listen on Apple, or watch on YouTube.

Thank you for supporting The Stanza and please do share your thoughts on the episode!

-Nadine

Part I: The Business of Six Figure Travel

How does one quantify the thesis that affluent consumers are prioritizing experiences over possessions? Luxury travel advisory SmartFlyer reports a 75% year over year increase in trips exceeding $500,000, alongside a 41% rise in bookings between $100,000 and $499,000.

In this mini segment, SmartFlyer COO Erina Pindar shares what is fueling this growth, from multi-generational safaris in Botswana to Antarctica by private jet and yacht-hopping across the Mediterranean. She explains why modern luxury is defined by privacy, access, and highly personalized execution.

At this level, it’s not just about the hotel. It’s about designing a journey that feels entirely your own.

This episode is made possible by . Follow ⁠@smartflyer⁠ on Instagram or visit ⁠smartflyer.com⁠ to learn more.

Part II: Dreams Don’t Have a Price”: The Philosophy Behind Lake Como’s Most Iconic Hotels

Valentina De Santis is a third-generation hotelier and the owner of two of Lake Como’s most celebrated properties: the iconic Grand Hotel Tremezzo and the intimate 24-room villa hotel, Passalacqua — which debuted at #1 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels list in 2022.

Her family has shaped Lake Como hospitality for over half a century. In the 1970s, her grandfather acquired the historic Grand Hotel Tremezzo — originally built in 1910 to serve Europe’s aristocracy — and restored it to its former grandeur. What began as a bold entrepreneurial leap became a generational legacy rooted in independence, long-term stewardship, and an uncompromising belief in beauty.

Born and raised on the shores of Lake Como — quite literally in the back corridors of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo — Valentina grew up immersed in the rhythms of hospitality. Today, she serves as both custodian and visionary for her family’s portfolio, expanding it thoughtfully while preserving its soul. Alongside her parents, she led the acquisition and transformation of Passalacqua, an 18th-century villa that had been a private home for over 200 years before reopening as one of the most celebrated boutique hotels in the world.

In an era dominated by global hotel groups and private equity, Valentina remains fiercely committed to family ownership, financial independence, and building for continuity — not exit. Her philosophy blends instinct with discipline, emotional intelligence with operational rigor, and above all, a deeply Italian belief in villeggiatura: the art of slow, meaningful travel.

This interview was filmed at ⁠Casabianca⁠ in Lake Como, the De Santis’ family’s art gallery showcasing their personal collection of modern and contemporary art.

Interview Highlights

• Growing up inside the Grand Hotel Tremezzo and witnessing Lake Como’s evolution

• The four-week auction battle that led to acquiring Passalacqua

• Restoring an eighteenth-century villa under Italy’s preservation laws

• Winning number one in the world and choosing to change nothing

• The philosophy of villeggiatura and creating hotels that slow guests down

• The subtle operational details that quietly define true luxury

• Designing for conviction instead of guest expectations

• Why financial independence is non-negotiable

• Defining success through continuity rather than exit

If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll also enjoy reading The Stanza’s Friday weekly newsletter

Subscribe now

Connect with ⁠Valentina on Instagram⁠

Follow ⁠Passalacqua⁠ and ⁠Grand Hotel Tremezzo⁠

Follow ⁠The Stanza on Instagram

I hope that you’re all doing okay despite what’s happening in the world right now. If you’re in the Middle East or have family and friends there now, I pray for everyone’s safety.

The world is changing at an astonishingly rapid pace right now. Just last week, I was having a conversation with a restaurant operator who was optimistic about the future of hospitality in the Gulf region and its growth potential. I don’t know if that same conversation would take place today, just a few days after. Middle Eastern capital has traditionally flowed to the west because cities like London and New York have been perceived as safe havens for capital preservation. In recent years, that trend has been increasingly reversed as investors seek yield in emerging markets.

As the conflict unfolds, I’ve seen contradicting messages online. For example, some Dubai residents are sharing that their daily lives haven’t been as impacted as much as the panicked sentiment on social media dictates. Others who were visiting have indeed been panicking about finding a way back home, and have shared photos of mattresses with fine linens in the garages of luxury hotels, surrounded by the cars you’d imagine to be parked there.

I’ve been reflecting lately how the concepts of safety and freedom won’t be taken for granted in the future reality of AI and a changing world order. With that context, how will the future of hospitality evolve to adapt? It’s a fascinating question to think about because hospitality and travel have been intimately impacted by the world’s most groundbreaking and catalytic events: the 90’s dotcom boom and birth of OTA’s, 9/11 and its impact on travel regulations, Airbnb and its disruption of the hotel industry, and now with the Great Wealth Transfer underway, adoption of AI, and political conflict. Through all of these big changes, one thing remains constant: people have always paid for experiences - whether that’s dining out, traveling, or weekend socializing / entertainment. So while everything happening can feel unsettling, rest assured that those who are well prepared for the 4th industrial revolution are about to experience asymmetrical outcomes.

Consider this to be the opening thread discussing the future of AI and hospitality. More thoughts continued below…

I made a rare appearance as an interviewee on Zach Busekrus’ podcast called Behind The Stays. Zach is a 2x exited founder - his second start up StayWatch was acquired by Journey, where he now leads growth. Journey is a loyalty platform for independent hotels and private vacation rentals, and they raised a seed round from Lerer Hippeau, Slow Ventures, and Brian Kelly (The Points Guy) back in August. We chatted about what goes into a project such as One Beverly Hills, my takes on distribution vs scarcity, and where I think the future of ultra luxury hospitality is heading. Listen to the episode here.

You may have noticed that The Stanza has a new look. Huge thank you to Pedestal Design for understanding the brief and exceeding my expectations (+being professional and timely). If you’re looking for unique and well-researched branding design, I can’t recommend them enough.

Lastly, here’s an update on the 2026 podcast season.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• I correctly predicted that Blackstone would invest in members clubs.

• Can Soho House successfully create a branded residential product?

• Serving a wealthy family from the Gulf and a recently exited Silicon Valley founder at the same hotel: two vastly different approaches united by AI and choreography

• What separates hospitality operators who will thrive in the AI era from those who won’t?

• Would you pay $40 for pasta made in a kitchen run by robots?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Read more

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts about wellness programs in hotels. A lot of you either own, develop, or manage hotels and are trying to understand how to adapt to the broader “wellness” trend. I think it’s safe to say that wellness programs will vastly differ according to brand and market, and therefore we can’t fall back on having a “playbook”.

Here are some interesting messages/comments some of you shared:

I’m sick of the clinical. I don’t want a hotel/doctor, I want to go to a hotel to be held. I wanna be stroked and caressed and feel like I’m returning to the womb, not be shoved out on a podium to perform. Wellness in hotels should nourishing, nurturing and makes you feel safe enough to rest your head and your nervous system. It should be an extension of your mother tucking you in bed at night. Isn’t that what we all really want?

Wellness as a concept will be so expected in a few decades that every hotel will need to invest in upgrading there. But hotels will be focused on passive not active wellness. That way people don’t have to think about it. So I’m as bearish on wellness focused hotels as I am wellness membership clubs.

I pitched an entire upcoming project on the idea that a plate of pasta in Italy (i.e. overlooking the Portofino coast at the Splendido) can make you feel just as well...or likely more...as any formal “wellness” ritual.
I think framing wellness through these moments is essential when we talk about it in the context of hotels.

Being in the wellness space I don’t think travel and hotels need to double down on what the customer is doing at home but a well thought out exercise facility does pay off…and most hotels completely miss this!

I think hotels need to figure out what Wellness to their customers mean vs what's trendy. As in most trends, words are used without any implementation for the demographic served. If you are a boutique hotel stay in your lane with your offers. The same for larger properties. But most of all there is NO Wellness if the staff isn't taken care of.

I thought these comments reflect plain logic when it comes to implementing something people are excited about but have yet to fully adopt or understand. Some standout points:

• Most hotels miss on the gym. It’s worth it to have a gym that’s good enough to use daily. Casa Cipriani New York is one of the best hotel gyms I’ve seen in a while. A solid hotel gym is a very good and simple start.

• “There is no wellness if the staff isn’t taken care of.” Spot on.

• Feelings resulting from nervous system regulation and being taken care of are powerful ways to implement “wellness”

As per usual, my inbox is open for the ongoing discussion.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Why is patient capital making a £1B bet on Mayfair while everyone else waits for price discovery?

• Imagine you're building the next Aspen. Do you think it's more profitable to preserve a resort town's mythology or to overwrite it with a lifestyle brand?

• If 81% of young travelers are booking trips based on what they binge watch, should luxury hotels chase the spotlight or protect the scarcity that makes them desirable in the first place?

• When billionaire technocrats start occupying the front row at fashion week, is that the death of industry’s allure, or the kind of courtship with capital that could become the industry’s saving grace?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Purple’s Olivier Zahm captures exactly how I feel about Milan:

“It’s been more than thirty years that I come to Milan Fashion Week, and still — I am disarmed.

Season after season, show after show, I return for fashion, of course. But I’m in love with the city. I photograph Milan more than I photograph the collections. Courtyards hidden behind austere façades. A fragment of terrazzo. The way the light settles on soft colored walls at the end of the afternoon. It never exhausts itself. Neither do I.

Milan does not seduce easily. It withholds. It is arrogant in its discretion. Secret in its luxurious architecture. Warm in ways that are never demonstrative. Complex, layered, almost hermetic at first glance — and then suddenly generous if you know how to look. It is a city of interiors, of conversations behind heavy wood doors, of elegance that refuses to explain itself.

After more than three decades, I still feel like I am discovering it for the first time. The same streets, different moods. The same facades, different emotions. A permanent rediscovery.

Sometimes I wonder — should I make a book one day? A personal archive of these marble geometries, these quiet architectural luxuries, these Milanese stones and tiles? Or am I simply noticing the obvious — that Milan has always been this beautiful! And of course, a major book has already been devoted to these preserved entrances — their geometry, their rationalist purity, their Liberty ornement, their elegant staircases — a privilege reserved for residents vigilantly protected by a mean concierge.

I love Milan. I love its people — their intelligence, their irony, their restraint. I love its fashion — rigorous and decorative, commercial and emotional beneath the surface. And the food is a kind of madness.

Milan is not loud. It is not immediate. It reveals itself slowly. And that is why, after thirty years, I am still looking.”

Read more

I would like to take a temperature check. Please share your thoughts via the poll below:

If you’re in Milan for the Olympics / FW and want to know where to eat, I’ve compiled all my recommendations on AmiGo, which is free to use with my code THESTANZA.

Today I stopped by a new cafe opened by a fashion brand, and was shocked at how unappetizing the display of day-old sandwiches looked! And this place has only been open for a couple days! If you work in fashion and are thinking of doing anything in hospitality, the expectations for how good the space look are much higher. Feel free to write to me with your thoughts.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Are hotels designed for the “thousandaire” traveler considered “true luxury assets”?

• How does an operator approach longevity and avoiding trends while staying relevant with the desires of today’s guests?

• The global hotel pipeline has hit an all-time high. But where are hotel owners and developers placing their bets?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Read more

Thank you to everyone who wrote to me about this interview I published yesterday with Erina Pindar at SmartFlyer. In particular, it seems like people are interested in learning more about how AI will impact how high end travelers make trip decisions. I’m looking forwards to exploring more on how AI will impact high end hospitality as an industry this year, as I know it’s top of mind for many of you. Questions or topics for discussion? Reply directly to this email.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Why are there so many mediocre $1K+ ADR hotels these days?

• Why will there continue to be more mediocre $1K+ hotels in the near future?

• Hotel for sale: ~7% stabilized yield for a boutique design hotel in France

• Would you bet that Maggiore or Garda could become the next Lake Como?

• Prada’s revitalization of the Milan’s Bushwick equivalent is a study in placemaking

• Next hotel trend after farms as an amenity?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

For sale: Very chic & elegant 90-key boutique hotel in Nice

A recently completed hotel in Nice on track to stabilize at a ~7% yield is for sale. The hotel has an affiliation with a major distribution platform and was well received upon opening. It occupies a 1 hectare site that includes several gardens, a farm, extensive wellness program, indoor and outdoor F&B, and beautifully designed buildings that house a range of room types. For core+ hotel buyers, it’s absolutely worth taking a look.

Inquire here.

Other opportunities currently live:

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Read more

This edition of The Stanza’s “In The Room” column is a special one, as I’m introducing one of The Stanza’s 2026 partners: SmartFlyer. A few weeks ago, I shared my notes from their internal conference about the business of high-end travel and what it takes to sell those outrageously priced hotel rooms. A hotelier behind one of Italy’s objectively best hotels told me that SmartFlyer is consistently a top 3 source of business for peer hotels across Italy. Their numbers share some more insight into how big the luxury travel advisory business is: in 2025, SmartFlyer booked $1.02B in travel across its 250 agencies.

Erina Pindar is the COO and Managing Partner of SmartFlyer, a luxury travel advisory founded in 1990 by Michael Holtz. SmartFlyer originally started as an air travel agency business, but has since grown into a 360 luxury travel platform guided by the principle that travel has the power to positively transform the human experience.

As The Stanza evolves to explore the various facets of the hospitality business, I’m excited to introduce SmartFlyer as an aligned partner. As always, if you have any questions about the high-end travel advisory business, you’re welcome to directly reply to this email.

What aspects of hospitality shape how you approach the travel advisory business?

Travel is such a human endeavor. You’re working with people as clients, as partners, and of course, as advisors. Hospitality is this world where everyone is always rushing to open the doors for each other, and that’s what I’ve always loved about it. Learning how to understand and anticipate what people need — sometimes before they even ask for it — has been the biggest influence in how I choose to lead.

Of course there are concrete things about building a business, but the EQ side of leadership is really the most important, especially in hospitality.

In the past couple years, luxury hospitality has exploded. And with that, different segments of “luxury” have emerged: ultra-luxury, aspirational luxury, etc. Where do you see the line between luxury and value in today’s world? And has that definition changed since you started?

My definition of luxury has always been that luxury is what you value. And you said it: there are so many different tiers now, whether it’s ultra-luxury or modern luxury. We’re not really in a world anymore where the Ritz-Carlton chandelier is the one picture of luxury. That’s probably the biggest shift.

Luxury is so subjective. For one person it’s access, for someone else it’s thread count, and honestly, there’s nothing wrong with any of it. It’s just about what you personally deem valuable and what you’re willing to pay for.

Luxury travel can sometimes feel like it’s about access: upgrades, sold-out hotels, impossible reservations. What do you think actually creates the deepest client loyalty?

I think it goes back to the first question you asked me, which is that this is such a human business. What creates loyalty is really listening to people, making them feel seen and understood. And it’s not my favorite thing to say, but sometimes it’s the complicated situations — with a client or a hotel — that turn the tide.

It’s one thing to create a beautiful experience. It’s another when someone is in a bind, and you make sure they’re taken care of, and they know there’s someone to turn to. That sense of safety and knowing someone has your back while you travel is huge.

For example, over New Year’s, when Caribbean airspace shut down completely — or even back in 2020 with COVID — those are things we never thought would happen, and then they did. Reliability and follow-through is ultimately what creates loyalty.

I have an appreciation for people like yourself making the impossible possible behind the scenes. In recent years, what is the biggest shift you’ve seen in traveler expectations, particularly in the high-end segment? And what are some new skills that the best travel advisors need now that they didn’t before?

When a place becomes ultra-popular — like Capri, for example — the ultra-wealthy start to move away from it. Luxury is evolving because as certain places become more accessible and more crowded, luxury starts to shift into what isn’t accessible, what isn’t crowded. Then there’s also this pursuit of what’s undiscovered in the moment. What feels truly special now is the thing not everyone else is doing. So a big part of our job as travel advisors is staying ahead by scouting new destinations and building relationships in those places that unlock access to interesting experiences for our clients.

What are some example destinations?

You can take places like Antarctica — something like White Desert — as an extreme example of what’s not accessible to everyone. Parts of Africa, such as Botswana, are another good example. Or even in Italy: the Amalfi Coast and Capri, which I still love, but maybe now you’re looking for something a little more off the beaten path, like Pantelleria. Or take a property such as Amanpuri, for example. It’s been around for decades, but it’s still very hard to get into. They prioritize guests who have been coming for years, which is the right thing.

But that’s what luxury is shifting toward: gaining access to places that not everyone can.

So that’s what working with SmartFlyer as a guest or traveler gets me: access.

And it’s also that we have great, long-standing relationships with these properties and brands. At the end of the day, our collective buying power certainly helps in delivering for our clients.

Do SmartFlyer agents also vet the clients they work with?

SmartFlyer has about 250 agencies attached to our platform, and they all work slightly differently. Our advisors are considered some of the most elite in the space. They’re well respected, they’re high producers, and they’re very thoughtful in how they structure trips. They can’t do that in huge volume. Therefore our advisors are selective about the clients they work with.

How do you handle when a client’s expectations are unrealistic, especially at the high-end level?

At the high end, a big part of the job is setting expectations early. Sometimes it’s saying that if there’s a budget constraint, we need to be realistic about what’s possible. We will always deliver the best experience we can, but it’s important that everyone is on the same page from the start.

And if someone is asking for something that feels impossible, the truth is: almost nothing is impossible if the budget is there. That’s usually the simplest way to explain it.

Our advisors also aren’t personal assistants who just say yes to everything. They work collaboratively with clients or their teams to facilitate experiences and access. So it’s always a yes, within the constraints of the client. There are limits to everything, and clarity around that is what creates trust.

What’s your perspective on the role of AI and technology in luxury travel planning? What should be automated? What should never be automated?

There are a lot of things that should be automated. Internally, there’s so much operational work within an agency that technology can really help with, like itinerary building or certain booking platforms.

What should not be automated is the relationship side of it. Our advisors start the process by having a conversation with their client and get to know them. One of the biggest things we’ve always said is that we’re not experts in destinations, we’re experts in our clients.

Any great advisor can learn a destination quickly. What’s harder is learning the human element. I want to know what’s important to you when you travel. I want to understand why you want to go to a place, what the motivation is. Those are the nuances and they can’t be automated by AI.

Where is human taste irreplaceable? Because in reality, someone could tell ChatGPT that they value history and good food and wine, and then it’ll spit out an itinerary.

I think it’s a fair question, because you could absolutely go into ChatGPT and say: “I love history, I’ve never been to Rome, I want four great restaurants, I want art experiences, build me an itinerary.”

And chances are, it will give you a really solid basic itinerary. It’ll pull the restaurants that are already listed online, the museums everyone knows, the things anyone has access to. But AI is pulling from existing information. So if a restaurant has changed, if the chef has left, if something is no longer as good, that’s not going to be reflected quickly.

The bigger difference is the human element. It’s a conversation in person or over the phone to figure out: What kind of history are you actually interested in and why? What part of art moves you? What do you want this trip to feel like?

I had a client once who was obsessed with churches. Truly obsessed. They wanted to walk into every church in Italy. It was a celebratory trip, but they only had two nights on the ground. They wanted it to be undeniably special.

So then the question becomes, how do you take something that’s accessible and make it extraordinary?

We thought: what about the Sistine Chapel? But instead of doing it like everyone else, what if we privatize it? What if we take you in the evening, when it’s closed, and then follow it with an incredible dinner cooked by a private chef in a special, undisclosed location?

ChatGPT can’t do that. That’s the difference: it’s not just the itinerary, it’s knowing what’s possible, and knowing how to make something feel once-in-a-lifetime.

Everything AI knows is information that’s available to everyone. What a great travel advisor brings is education, relationships, access. That’s earned over time and is irreplaceable.

Surely not just anyone can call and ask to privatize the Sistine Chapel!

One hundred percent. It’s also the education; you have to know what’s even possible in the first place. It’s one thing to have relationships, and those relationships help open doors. But it’s also about having the knowledge, not just the access.

How do you explain SmartFlyer to someone who thinks travel advisors are just “booking agents”? What do you wish more people understood?

SmartFlyer is really ideal for someone who wants a full experience from start to finish, and who wants to build a relationship with a professional over time. We’re not just booking agents because we’re genuinely invested in our clients.

For example, we worked with a couple when they first came to us just planning a simple little getaway. A few trips later, about a year into working together, he called us to help him plan a proposal. So we planned it with him, based on what we already knew about him, what we knew about her, and what would make it meaningful for them.

And then they got married, had babies, and now we’re planning family trips for them.

That’s really the point. We invest in clients for the long term, because the more we know about you, the better job we can do. The farther away we are from simply being a booking agent, the more personalized and thoughtful the travel becomes.

It’s about being experts in the person. What do you care about? What do you not like? What are your interests? I joke, but not really, that we want to know as much about you as possible. The more context we have, the better the trip is going to be.

At this level, travel is no longer a casual purchase — it’s a major financial transaction. Clients are spending $100,000+ on a single hotel stay or hundreds of thousands on yachts and private aviation. The reality is, advisors at the high end are managing enormous sums of money and complex logistics.

In many ways, a great travel advisor is the equivalent of a financial advisor: someone you trust with high-value decisions, who needs deep expertise, strong relationships, and the ability to protect the client’s investment.

What does SmartFlyer do exceptionally well that is hard to replicate, even for other luxury agencies?

I always say we have a really deep bench of incredibly knowledgeable advisors. Our community is one of the most special parts of SmartFlyer. No one person can possibly know everything about the entire world down to the smallest details. So instead, we have this tight-knit network of experts who travel constantly, who are on the ground, and who have the most up-to-date knowledge of cities, hotels, and experiences everywhere.

For example, we have an outpost in Australia, so our advisors there know the Asia-Pacific landscape exceptionally well. That information sharing is critical for us, and it has always been one of our strongest pillars: this incredible collective knowledge that’s constantly evolving.

I think that’s a real point of differentiation.

And at the same time, it’s a small world. I’m a champion of the travel advisory industry as a whole. There are a lot of great agencies out there. It really comes down to what fits your preferences and what kind of relationship you’re looking for.

What’s a travel trend you think is overrated, and one you think is underrated?

Can we all stop traveling for Instagram? I would love to see that go away.

And what’s underrated is going deeper into a destination. Settling in, taking your time.

The trend used to be, “I’m going to do Australia and New Zealand in one week.” And it’s like, sure, you can, but you won’t actually see anything. I’d much rather see people immerse themselves in a place, stay longer, and return because you always rediscover new layers. Even for something like a safari trip, you can go over and over again and it’s never the same.

Life is short. Don’t save everything for someday.

When you’ve been to a place more than once, you also earn the ability to go off the beaten path. Of course there are places you should always see. If you’re in Rome, you should see the Colosseum.

Then the question becomes: what else is interesting beyond the obvious?

Thanks for reading this interview. For more of The Stanza, subscribe to the weekly digest and follow on Instagram.

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What does the phrase “luxury hospitality”, mean to you? Some people think the $600/night lifestyle city hotel with nice design and mediocre service is “luxury”. Others (like myself), would disagree and say that if you have to pay a fee to use the sauna or if there are any DIY elements, it doesn’t matter how chic the design is or how vibey the lobby is, it’s not luxury.

I had a funny email interaction this week with a PR person who was trying to pitch me a new dentistry practice in NY. For context, this dentistry looks akin to a VC-backed wellness club in the way that it approaches positioning and customer experience.

I wrote back with: “Thank you for your kind words. Unfortunately I don't accept inbound interview requests and I only focus on luxury hospitality.”

Her response: “Noted on inbounds. [REDACTED BUSINESS NAME] is a luxury, hospitality focused wellness destination. I thought it would be a fit.”

Since when is your dentist a “luxury hospitality focused wellness destination”? And since when does the phrase “luxury hospitality” pertain to anything outside of hotels and F&B? Is my gym or my skincare clinic a “luxury hospitality” business too? If the Chanel store serves me champagne while I shop and provides good assistance, does that mean that Chanel now a “luxury hospitality” business?

Is hospitality so hot that we have to position everything consumer facing as such for it to sound compelling? Sure, any business can integrate elements of good hospitality in their customer experience, but I’m afraid that describing any retail business as “hospitality” and anything design-led as “luxury” makes the original phrase lose its meaning.

To me, “luxury hospitality” describes specifically a hotel or F&B experience in which:

• the staff are really good at anticipating your needs and therefore reduce decision fatigue

• the materials are thoughtfully chosen to optimize for visual harmony, comfort, and patina over time

• there is consistency in the quality of the rooms and F&B experience

• a sense of abundance, whether that’s a free mini bar, indulgent spa experience included in the room rate, complimentary rides to the nearby town, etc

• “surprise & delight” and gifts that make you feel seen and taken care of

I’m sure I could add a few more things to this list, but at the heart of what merits a hospitality business to be labeled as luxury, besides its price, are mostly these key elements. For additional context, I’m clarifying here how I personally define “luxury hospitality” ahead of an exciting announcement towards the end of this month. My inbox is open to discussion; just reply directly to this email.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Is my gym or my skincare clinic a “luxury hospitality” business too?

• What other product (besides hotel rooms) do hotel operators need to build defensible moats around?

• Are lifestyle hotel operators overpaying for sites in Europe?

• Milan now has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the world. What does that mean for its hotel market?

• If 2024 was the year of members clubs, 2025 & 2026 the year of ultra luxury hotels, what product is next?

• The future of wellness hospitality: what will be the benchmark in 15 years?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

• For sale: 18th century Georgian building in London Mayfair, which could be a private residence or members club (25,000 SF)

• Investment opportunity: The “Chiltern Firehouse-meets-Chateau Marmont” of Sunset Harbor, Miami

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

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Happy final Friday of January.

Thank you for the feedback on last week’s letter, which was unexpectedly one of my most read letters of all time. I’m excited to share that I’ll be collaborating with SmartFlyer in 2026 to share more travel insights relevant to you. If you have any particular questions on the sales aspect of the hotel business, you’re welcome to direct reply to this email.

An update on the podcast: first episode will debut in February. I can’t wait for you to watch!

Thank you for sharing my story on ! Read here.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Private equity is coming for our beloved farm hotels

• What’s the secret to “accessible luxury” at scale?

• How do you know if a hotel brand will be relevant in 10+ years?

• The hotelization of multifamily could lead to everything, including your apartment, being “branded”.

• What’s happening with Rosewood?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

• For sale: 18th century Georgian building in London Mayfair, which could be a private residence or members club (25,000 SF)

• Investment opportunity: The “Chiltern Firehouse-meets-Chateau Marmont” of Sunset Harbor, Miami

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

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Enjoy!

I’ve just spent a few days in LA at the SmartFlyer CORE conference. If you don’t know about SmartFlyer and you invest in hotels, I’d be pleased to take credit for this discovery.

While having dinner at the equestrian restaurant at Castello di Reschio, an American couple sitting next to me and my husband offered us a bottle of nice wine that they couldn’t finish. The next morning, we got to talking at breakfast as one does at an intimate 36-key hotel. They’re from New York and are seasoned Italy travelers.

A couple weeks later, I happened to run into them again at Passalacqua! It turns out that the wife is a luxury travel advisor with SmartFlyer, a platform on which her agency is one of the top producers. I learned that she’s known to send a lot of business to some of the best hotels in Italy. If there’s someone who knows luxury hotels in Italy really well, it’s her.

Have you ever found yourself underwriting an ambitious ultra luxury hotel development and questioning: how are there so many people who willingly pay these outrageous ADR’s? From the perspective of someone more focused on building conviction on underwriting assumptions of a hotel project, I have to admit that I hadn’t taken the time to look deeper into the components of hotel revenue to get a solid answer to that question.

The answer is that hotel sales at this level are driven by high-touch relationships. These travelers are not the ones who have multiple booking.com tabs open, nor are they trying to game credit card points. They entrust travel advisors like the woman I met at Reschio to plan trips that oftentimes exceed well over six figures.

At the conference, I had the opportunity to learn about the other side of the business and what it takes to sell these expensive hotel rooms to people who don’t sneeze at a $100,000+ holiday, and why AI can’t replace relationships nor the human touch required to execute travel at this level. I’d boil it down to these four key points below:

Getting to know their clients

There is a level of intimacy and trust between clients and their travel advisors, so that they can exercise the appropriate discernment and curation in designing a highly satisfactory trip. A great travel advisor also knows how to incorporate elements of “surprise and delight” throughout your trip that make you feel seen.

Experience destinations and itineraries themselves

Seeing a property, boat, plane, or experience online often differs from experiencing it firsthand. The best travel advisors do the latter in order to sell them more effectively while developing their own taste.

Orchestrating frictionless logistics

Private plane or boat travel, transports in between, activities, private security, restaurant bookings, help for the kids, etc, usually require a bit of Jenga. It’s one aspect of high-end travel that when executed well, feels unnoticeable and smooth, but when executed poorly, can ruin a whole trip.

Relationships with GM’s and local operators

One of the most important functions of an excellent travel advisor is the ability to build solid relationships with GM’s and local operators to make the impossible happen. These relationships grant access to experiences that simply aren’t available to everyone. Back to the point of logistics: you might need to have four interconnecting suites at a fully-booked hotel during peak season for a family. Or back to the point of “surprise and delight": you might want a private viewing of a cultural monument at an unexpected moment. One could argue that these are things that money alone can’t buy (but rather, a combination of money + relationships).

It’s worth noting that beyond SmartFlyer’s advisors, there were several representatives from hotels also present at the conference: GM’s, sales teams, and owners, including Maurizio Orlacchio at Borgo Santandrea, who I previously interviewed for my “In The Room” column. Doing business is one thing, but let’s not forget that the essence of hospitality is welcoming guests and the passion for serving others. For this reason, hospitality is fundamentally a human business, and AI can’t replace those human aspects in a meaningful way at the high-end segment.

We often focus on design and guest experience when it comes to luxury hospitality, but I left the conference with the conclusion that relationships are the underrated competitive advantage in this business.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• It’s a busy start to 2026 for French hotel investors

• Will the bet on yacht cruises pay off?

• How will yacht cruise operators win younger travelers and retain them as they age?

• Why does it make strategic sense for hotels and restaurants to collaborate with each other? (It’s not only about “brand awareness”)

• How can boutique and independent hotel operators take better control over their distribution?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

No new listings this week.

Other opportunities currently live:

• Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

• For sale: 18th century Georgian building in London Mayfair, which could be a private residence or members club (25,000 SF)

• Investment opportunity: The “Chiltern Firehouse-meets-Chateau Marmont” of Sunset Harbor, Miami

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

• Some interesting transaction data points in Paris/Nice:

  • Family-owned hotel owner/operator Compagnie Hôtelière de Bagatelle acquired the Hotel La Pérouse, a 4* 53-key boutique hotel in Nice, for ~€60M (~€1.13M/key). The prior owner, a JV between PE fund Extendam and family office Cèdre Capital Familial, acquired the hotel in 2021 and completed a major renovation, which had not previously been done since the 90’s. According to Extendam MD Matthieu de Lauzon, the project achieved an IRR exceeding 20%. As they acquired the asset 5 years ago, that means they’ve more than doubled their all-in basis.

  • How much does it cost to buy a value-add hotel in central Paris (15th arrondissement)? A JV comprising owner/operator Alfred Hotels, Braxton IM, and Indosuez Wealth Management acquired the 3* 43-key Hôtel Lecourbe for ~€17.2M (or ~€400,000 per key). The group plans to spend €2M in capex, and presumably open under the Alfred brand, which looks like a solid city boutique hotel option: not fancy, but clean and reliable.

  • A private investor acquired the 43-key Hôtel Filigrane & Spa in Paris from French asset manager Osae Partners for €36.5 million, or ~€850,000 per key. It’s another 4* central Paris boutique hotel that was acquired in 2022, renovated for 2 years, and sold after 1 year of operations.

  • Another exit comp in central Paris: a private investor has acquired the Grand Coeur Latin Hotel, a 4* 75-key hotel in the 5th for €70 million, or ~€933,000 per key.

  • The fact that 4* independent/boutique hotels in Paris are now trading close to €1M per key reflects the new reality we’re living in (the “experiences over possessions” thesis). It also makes me question how they’re underwriting exit yields.

• L Catterton and Cedar Capital Partners are acquiring the Penha Longa Resort & Hotel in Sintra, Portugal for €140M, or €686,275 per key, from The Carlyle Group. Penha Longa is managed by Ritz Carlton, and the photos of the golf resort show that American boomer generation interpretation of luxury hotels (I don’t know how else to describe it). L Catterton is also partnering with Cedar Capital on the acquisition of the 170-key Garden Beach Hotel in Juan-les-Pins, which has been closed since 2020. Looking at Cedar Capital’s portfolio, it seems that their strategy is acquiring large format luxury hotels in prime resort markets. Some standouts: The Carlton Cannes, Monte Carlo Grand, The Savoy, Hotel Martinez, Auberge Collegio alla Querce, Villa Honegg and Sundance Mountain Resort.

• There’s an ongoing thread in this newsletter on the arms race to corner the “yacht cruise” segment. Yesterday Aman opened bookings for its Amangati yacht in 2027. The first Four Seasons Yacht launches in March of this year. Orient Express’ Corinthian launches in spring 2027. And you all probably remember the spectacle that was the launch of the Ritz Carlton Luminara last summer. Interestingly, cruise was its own theme discussed at the SmartFlyer conference as a growing travel trend, but it was segmented into three categories (the bullets below are from their keynote presentation):

  True luxury cruise leaders

  • Yacht-style cruising

  • Ultra-luxury ocean & expedition lines

  • High-touch, design, and service-led product

  Expedition & river cruising

  • Reinforce the “considered journey” theme

  • Growth is coming from educational, destination-immersive travel, not casual cruising

  Large scale brands

  • Solve for different needs (families, groups, accessibility, value-perceived luxury)

A hotel person asked me recently if I think that yacht cruising will actually become a “thing”. My answer was that I’m not sure if it will become popular in proportion to how much capital is being invested in yacht cruises by the major brands. To me, a “yacht cruise” is essentially an elevated form of the cruise, with a nice marketing spin to it with the usage of the word “yacht”. Although I haven’t experienced one myself, and while they look undoubtedly luxurious, there’s not much storytelling in the design of the boats themselves or in the way they’re being marketed online. Because the general consensus is that high-end travelers are not regulars on cruises yet, and because the word “cruise” still carries a bit of a negative connotation, these brands have work to do in creating and selling the experience in a way that converts skeptics into regulars.

I recently read a review of ’ experience on board The Ritz Carlton Evrima (for context, Paula was formerly the Global Head of Membership at Casa Cipriani). She made an interesting observation on attracting younger guests and retaining them through various phases of life: “Win a guest at sixty-five and you may have them for ten or fifteen years. Win them at thirty-five and you may have them for forty or fifty. That difference matters.” She then went on to comment on the lack of engaging programming that is necessary to satisfy a younger crowd.

Another key aspect of the yacht cruise experience, which is typically limited to a tighter capacity, is the curation of guests. Who are these cruises for? If you’re essentially stuck on a boat for a week, you want to know that you’re not stuck with an incompatible crowd. At the moment, it’s not clear to me how these brands are approaching guest curation.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, this thread on the evolving yacht cruise business is ongoing, and if you’ve experienced one, I welcome your thoughts in my inbox. Also, paid subscribers of The Stanza are welcome to send question suggestions for my podcast guest line up, which include a CEO of a brand expanding into the yacht cruise space.

• There’s another ongoing thread re: hotels and restaurants collaborating more. I’d say that this is a far more effective way of marketing than “hospitality fashion merch”, which we’re all mostly tired of by now. Some interesting examples: Il Pellicano at Claridge’s, Sant Ambroeus and Harry’s London at The Alpina Gstaad. These activations tend to be short (1 - 2 weeks) and focus on the F&B component to give hotel guests a glimpse of the experience they would have at the visiting collaborator.

I reached out to The Stanza podcast alum Gaetano Guarducci at Sant Ambroeus to ask why they did the pop-up at The Alpina. His response: “It was a brand-building initiative designed to introduce Sant Ambroeus to a market that historically had limited direct engagement with us. The activation helped drive incremental foot traffic through the property, increased on-site energy, and created a sense of momentum that benefited both brands. It also generated inbound interest and conversations that extend beyond the market itself, particularly as we evaluate future opportunities in regions such as the Middle East and London.” That last point is what made the most strategic sense to me. If you’ve listened to my interview with Gaetano, you’ll know that his family business raised money from Three Hills to expand to new markets. The Middle East is a particularly compelling region for several hospitality groups right now given its pro-business regulatory environment and high disposable income. It’s a good example of how a collaboration such as this can be more than a brand exercise without quantifiable results and a means of attracting the right interest that can open doors to new markets.

• This morning, Air Mail published this very relevant article written by Sheila Yasmin Marakar, who coincidentally moderated the keynote presentation with Selma Blair at the SmartFlyer conference. How timely! She wrote about how seemingly independent boutique hotels are increasingly distributed by the Marriott’s and Hyatt’s of the world, which undoubtedly have the most powerful aggregated distribution systems. However, one major theme in hospitality is shifting distribution mechanics. At the ultra luxury segment, I discussed the relationship aspect in the intro of this email. But at every other level, a big driver of hotel bookings are from these unavoidable platforms. Design Hotels, which is owned by Marriott, represents 300+ boutique design-led hotels. Marriott also has The Luxury Collection, which counts crowd-favorite Hotel du Couvent as part of its distribution program (Hotel du Couvent is not managed by Marriott; it’s independently operated). In exchange for visibility on booking platforms and validation for being selected as part of a curation (eg: Leading Hotels of the World), these hotels pay a commission on booked rooms, and guests receive nice incentives such as a cocktail upon arrival, free upgrade, late check out, etc.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from Sheila’s article:

But “feeling” is the new front line in a corporate land grab. For decades, giant hotel chains built their empires on consistency—the promise that a room in Des Moines would look exactly like a room in Dubai. Now they are pivoting to the opposite.

“There is a big demand for unique, high-end properties,” Scott Mayerowitz, a travel-industry consultant, says. McKinsey & Company predicts that global spending on luxury hospitality will exceed $391 billion by 2028, up from $239 billion in 2023. But to access that money you need visibility. “The biggest challenge for a truly independent hotel,” Mayerowitz adds, “is getting people to know about them.”

The irony is that to remain a “hidden gem,” an independent hotel must now be plugged into a global switchboard, or benefit from big money. In recent years, private-equity firms and hotel conglomerates have developed a quiet but unmistakable crush on luxury boutique hotels—drawn to their high profit margins, flexible branding, and the rare opportunity to make real estate feel editorial. In 2018 alone, private equity was behind 37 percent of all U.S. hotel acquisitions, totaling more than $11 billion. Today, when taste is seen as a kind of currency, a stylish hotel with a strong point of view offers something even safer than a bond: cultural relevance, with room service.

As consumers are increasingly spending on hotels, I don’t doubt that there are better ways to drive direct business in the near future. On one side, it requires more effort from hotel operators to become better storytellers on social media, which is ultimately the most powerful distribution engine of any product. This makes me think of my conversation with Frederic Biousse and Linda Hazi, who raised money from LVMH to start a boutique chain of hotels called Fontenille Collection. In the interview they mentioned that they get a lot of direct business through their social media channels, which stuck out to me given it looks like they don’t engineer their content for virality.

On the other side of this, however, is that no amount of distribution can float a hotel where the experience falls short of price-driven expectations. One bad review on social media can be influence others to avoid a hotel or cancel a booking. So I’m ending this newsletter with this thought: how can hotels manage online perception and subsequent guest expectations through social media?

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Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

Today’s newsletter is a longer one, so I’ll let you get into it.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• In NYC: a real estate developer with a 25-year track record is fundraising for an ultra luxury hotel & branded resi project

• In Milan: what would you do if you could buy a historic and chic pastry shop?

• How do you scale exclusivity in hospitality?

• To what extent should restaurants be funded by institutional capital?

• Are we headed towards a luxury hotel bubble?

• Who will build the case study business for boutique saunas?

• How do you justify high ADR’s relative to your market comps?

• Hotel groups should not do another Wes Anderson-inspired film campaign.

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Investment opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & branded residential development in downtown NYC

An experienced real estate developer with a 25-year track record in executing successful luxury hospitality projects is seeking to raise the remaining $50M in equity required to develop a 350,000 SF hotel, branded residential, and members club project in downtown Manhattan. The project comprises ~150 keys and ~60 residences, both of which will be flagged by one of the world’s best high-end hospitality brands. Of the total project cost, 65% LTC debt is being secured, and 80% of the equity has already been circled.

Inquire here.

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

• For sale: 18th century Georgian building in London Mayfair, which could be a private residence or members club (25,000 SF)

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Annibale Carracci was a painter in the Baroque era. “The Choice of Hercules” depicts a timeless theme: the choice between virtue and the harder path, or vice and human temptation.

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I’d like to take this fresh start to share a brief introduction / reminder of what The Stanza is, by first sharing what The Stanza is not:

• The Stanza is not traditional journalism nor reporting. You won’t find copy/pastes of press releases in this newsletter. This is not about breaking news nor industry gossip (although occasionally I may discreetly share information on an anonymous basis to give context to my analysis).

• The Stanza does not accept inbound requests for interviews unless it’s from a guest that’s already on my target list (very rare!). There is a maximum of one podcast guest and one written interview guest per month. What this means for you (my audience): a tight curation of guests that I believe are authentically aligned with The Stanza’s values and can give you the insights that you come to The Stanza for.

On the contrary, The Stanza is a newsletter & podcast that marries the consumer psychology and investing dynamics behind the best in hospitality in a fresh and digestible way.

An update on the podcast: I’ve spent the holiday break preparing for what will be the best hospitality business show. I’m particularly excited about the incredible line-up I’ve secured, which comprises some of Europe’s best independent hoteliers, hotel group CEO’s, and real estate developers.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Thank you for being part of The Stanza! I’m very excited to deliver an incredible year of content.

In today’s newsletter:

• How much is a central London hotel worth in today’s market?

• Would you bet 9 figures on a lesser known destination in Sicily?

• Please, no more “tech-enabled members club” pitch decks in my inbox in 2026

• The Stanza’s 2026 “in’s and out’s”

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Investment opportunity: The “Chiltern Firehouse-meets-Chateau Marmont” of Sunset Harbor, Miami

BeyBey is an experiential F&B concept that has proven early demand: sales performance during the opening phase in 2024 reached 30% of future stabilized SF capacity. The founding team comprises a team of seasoned hospitality & entertainment entrepreneurs, as well as world-renowned DJ Chloe Caillet as music director. They’ve secured an 8,000SF space with multiple rooms on attractive lease terms, which allows for a variety of experiences throughout the evening and for several buyout opportunities for special events.

Total fundraise: $4M for phase 2 of the renovation program, $1M of which has already been raised to date.

For access to the pitch deck, reply directly to this email or write to classifieds@thestanzamedia.com

Other opportunities currently live:

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood (~45,000 SF)

• Investment Opportunity: Ultra-luxury hotel & residential development in Hudson Valley New York

• For sale: 18th century Georgian building in London Mayfair, which could be a private residence or members club (25,000 SF)

For all live listings (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Read more