After years in the travel industry, I need to say something uncomfortable: luxury travel is destroying what makes travel meaningful.
I’m not talking about people enjoying nice hotels or treating themselves to special experiences. I’m talking about a systemic shift in how we sell, consume and think about travel. And it’s creating problems we can’t keep ignoring.
Let me be clear: When I say “luxury travel”, I mean what the industry defines as luxury – travel with a high price tag. That’s become the metric. Not thoughtfulness, not cultural immersion, not positive impact. Just cost.
Here’s what we’re not discussing enough.
The aspiration trap
We’ve created an industry that makes ordinary travellers feel inadequate. When every feed is filled with overwater bungalows and private jets, we’re not inspiring wanderlust – we’re manufacturing dissatisfaction. Travel became about experiences but, somewhere along the way, it became about price tags. The message has shifted from “explore the world” to “you’re not travelling right unless you’re spending like this”.
The sanitised bubble
Luxury travel increasingly means insulation from reality. When every interaction is transactional and everyone says “yes sir”, travellers aren’t experiencing culture – they’re experiencing performance. Real travel happens in moments of discomfort, miscommunication and authentic human connection. It’s in the conversation with a local shopkeeper, the wrong turn that leads somewhere unexpected, the meal at a family-run restaurant where no one speaks your language but everyone wants to help.
The gilded cage might be comfortable but it’s still a cage. And, when travel becomes about being served rather than discovering, we’ve lost the plot entirely.
The moral bankruptcy of resort paradise
Here’s something that should make us deeply uncomfortable: the sick illusion of luxury resorts built on exploitation.
Take Zanzibar as the most glaring example. Luxury resorts line pristine beaches while local people live in mud huts and shacks literally right behind the properties. These locals aren’t allowed to transact any business with foreign guests unless they pay hefty licensing fees they can’t afford. Meanwhile, their natural resources – their beaches, their land, their heritage – are being exploited with almost nothing flowing back to the community.
The resorts defend themselves by saying they “employ locals”. But let’s be honest about what that means. Locals are hired for low- to medium-level positions: housekeeping, groundskeeping, kitchen staff. Management positions? Those go to expatriates. How unjust is it that you hire from the local community but refuse to promote them to positions of actual power and decision-making?
This isn’t just Zanzibar. It’s a pattern repeated across the developing world. We call it “luxury”. I call it exploitation with better thread count.
The corporate takeover
The travel industry has become dominated by massive resort companies buying up properties everywhere – often at the direct expense of local life and nature.
The Ritz-Carlton just opened a lodge in Kenya, which Maasai and conservationists state is right on the migration route of wildebeest. Despite vocal protests from local Maasai groups who depend on these migration patterns and whose ancestral lands are affected, the project moved forward. Those Maasai communities are now suing Ritz-Carlton in Kenyan courts.
Let that sink in: a luxury brand thought it was acceptable to build a resort on a critical wildlife migration corridor, overriding indigenous concerns, so wealthy travellers could have “an authentic safari experience”.
This is what happens when we prioritise profit over people and planet. Big hospitality groups have the capital to acquire prime locations, the legal teams to navigate local regulations and the marketing budgets to sell these properties as “sustainable” or “community-focused” while the reality on the ground tells a very different story.
The broken commercial model
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the entire sales structure is rigged against good advice.
Travel companies assess advisors purely by sales numbers. Your value as an employee is determined by your sales figures, which means you’re incentivised to sell the most expensive products – not what’s best for the client. A US$30 000 luxury safari earns you recognition, bonuses and job security. A perfectly curated US$5 000 trip better fits the client’s actual needs and dreams? That gets you a performance review asking why your numbers are low.
And it’s no better when travellers go direct to OTA platforms like Booking or Expedia. These sites can charge properties up to 25% commission. That cost doesn’t disappear – it gets passed along through higher room rates, cut corners in service or reduced staff wages. The platforms win but everyone else loses.
When the entire commercial model rewards expense over appropriateness, we’re not serving travellers – we’re serving our commission structures.
The death of actual expertise
Here’s a flawed assumption that’s killing our profession: the client is always right about what they want.
No, they’re not. And that’s exactly why they need us.
A client comes to you wanting a specific resort because they saw it on Instagram, or their colleague stayed there or it was featured in some influencer’s post. They’ve already decided. They just want you to book it.
But here’s what we should be asking: Is this actually right for them? Does it match how they actually travel or just how they think they should travel? Have they considered that this US$2 000 per night resort will then nickel-and-dime them for every activity, every meal, every experience – turning their relaxing holiday into a constant transaction?
What is the point of having travel advisors if we’re literally just order-takers, booking everything clients tell us to book? That’s not advising. That’s being a human booking engine with expensive overhead.
Our job should be to understand what travellers actually want from their trip: connection, adventure, relaxation, transformation – and then design experiences that deliver that. Sometimes that means steering them away from the property they saw online and towards something more thoughtful, more responsible and often more aligned with what will actually make them happy.
We should be recommending accommodations where experiences are included, where the value is in the curation not the upselling, where guests interact with place and culture rather than just consuming amenities. But that requires us to actually advise, to push back, to use our expertise.
Instead, we’ve become glorified concierges afraid to challenge clients because we’re measured by sales rather than satisfaction. So we book what they ask for, collect our commission and wonder why they come back disappointed – or don’t come back at all.
The human cost
Behind every “flawless” luxury experience are exhausted hospitality workers. Staff turnover in many luxury properties hovers around 50% annually and in some markets it’s even higher. Think about that: half the workforce leaves every single year.
We’ve normalised an industry built on burning people out to maintain impossible standards. The “magic” has a cost and workers are paying it with their mental health, their personal relationships and their wellbeing. Meanwhile, we congratulate ourselves on delivering “seamless” experiences without acknowledging the human toll required to create that seamlessness.
The sustainability illusion
Private jets. Helicopter transfers. Exclusive resorts consuming disproportionate resources for a handful of guests. We can’t greenwash our way out of this. Luxury travel’s environmental footprint is catastrophic and no amount of tree planting offsets or “eco-luxury” branding changes the fundamental maths.
The resources consumed by one private jet journey could sustain dozens of responsible travellers. But we don’t talk about that because those private jet bookings pay the bills.
What travel should be
Travel should open minds, foster empathy and create genuine connections. Instead we’re building walls – economic, cultural and environmental.
What if we measured travel success not by thread count or Michelin stars but by moments of genuine discovery? By fair treatment of workers? By sustainable impact? By whether local communities actually benefit from tourism in their backyard? What if a “good” travel advisor was defined by client satisfaction and life-changing experiences rather than revenue generated?
The industry won’t change this unless we demand it – as travellers, as sellers and as humans who care about the world we’re exploring.
I know this won’t be popular with everyone. But if we can’t have honest conversations about where we’re heading, we’ll keep accelerating towards a version of travel that serves almost no one well – except shareholders.
