Not everyone can nor should do luxury hospitality
Saying what everyone is thinking but won't say out loud.
Hello everyone,
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. Paul Stanton at Fundamentals by Thesis Driven 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.
