What luxury travelers dislike — and what brands must fix by 2026

A few years ago, I wrote that great hotels do not sell rooms. They sell memories. That insight feels even more urgent today. Throughout 2025, I traveled extensively, advising luxury brands and auditing hospitality experiences. The same pattern appeared everywhere: guests pay more, expect more, and too often encounter inconsistency. Many luxury brands promise personalization, yet the reality often feels quite the opposite. Five stars, zero feeling In social media threads and travel forums, the criticism repeats like an echo: inconsistent service, indifferent staff, and poor follow-up when things go wrong. Luxury travelers do not forgive broken promises. They share them, and then they break up with the brand. The most common frustrations are simple. Check-in and check-out inefficiency. Underwhelming food options and service. Slow issue resolution. When these moments fail, the entire perception of the brand collapses. One poor experience can override all previous good ones. And remember, to build loyalty in luxury, experiences need to exceed expectations, not just match them. Beyond the operational missteps lies a deeper problem. Many luxury brands have lost emotional precision. They confuse tasks with feelings. They chase aesthetic uniformity and algorithmic popularity instead of meaning. As a result, they dilute their distinctiveness and erode trust. A blueprint for rebuilding relevance Luxury clients buy transformation, how a brand makes them feel. This is where my 4E of Luxury framework becomes critical. It is a strategic blueprint that helps brands rebuild value and relevance. Emotion, engagement, experience, and exclusivity are not abstract concepts; together, they form a powerful client-centric system through which desire is created, perceived, and remembered. Emotion Emotion is the foundation of the framework. Every luxury brand must define the one target emotion it wants clients to feel consistently, and this needs to reflect the brand story. The dilemma? Most brands just optimize their client experience based on what others in the category do. This leads to incremental steps that others can easily copy. Even worse, without emotional clarity, even perfect operations feel hollow. True emotion transforms a stay into a story. In at least 95% of my hotel stays, there is no clear and consistent delivery of a specific brand emotion. Hence, most brands operate with zero foundation. Engagement Engagement is the second pillar. This is where luxury differentiates itself from premium. In my academic research on the hidden factors of luxury psychology, I show that the value of a luxury experience lies in the transformation it creates for a person. The product or service serves as a gateway to the anticipated positive shift in perception. Most experiences provide a beautiful canvas but lack engagement. Engagement means presence. It means listening deeply, noticing details before they become complaints, and responding with empathy and precision. The best concierges and sales associates share this trait: they make clients feel that everything revolves around them. That feeling defines true luxury. Experience Experience follows naturally. Every touchpoint must align with the brand’s promise and price point. A $120 breakfast cannot look or taste like an afterthought or be delivered in a paper bag that looks like Uber Eats (this happened to me recently in a “luxury” hotel). The result is what I often call “luxury in ambition only.” It is frustration disguised as beautiful design. When the experience is done right, it feels effortless. When the experience is inconsistent, the perceived value drops immediately. Exclusivity The final element, exclusivity, goes far beyond scarcity. It is about distinction and empathy. Too many hotels and luxury brands follow the same design cues, the same playlists, the same social media aesthetics. It is photogenic uniformity. True exclusivity is rooted in a brand’s unique point of view. It is the courage to be unlike anyone else. Distinctiveness creates memories. And if all eyes are on the customer, then true magic unfolds. If brands apply the 4E framework systematically, they won’t fall into the sea of sameness. Emotion will define purpose. Engagement will humanize processes. Experience will eliminate friction. Exclusivity will reignite desire. Together, they will restore the meaning of luxury in an era dominated by uniformity. The digital chill in modern luxury Technology adds another layer of complexity. Travelers want digital convenience without losing human warmth. The most common online complaint about “luxury” today is that digital touchpoints feel cold while the human touchpoints feel indifferent. That creates the perfect storm. Luxury brands, whether in hospitality, fashion, automotive, or fine spirits, must recognize that excellence today means emotional consistency, not just operational perfection. The gap between promise and delivery defines success or decline. True luxury transformation starts with radical self-awareness. Making every touchpoint count Every luxury brand should conduct a systematic audit rooted in the 4E framework to identify gaps. A critical task is dissecting the target emotion with precision, understanding how clients should feel at every touchpoint, and ensuring that every detail contributes to that outcome. This requires going beyond checklists and mystery shopping to measure emotional coherence. It is not a cosmetic exercise but a form of strategic surgery. The audit must expose inconsistencies, redefine emotional intent, and rebuild the experience architecture from the inside out. Once that clarity is established, the next step is the creation of a brand-specific experience playbook, one that translates the brand’s emotional DNA into actionable rituals, words, gestures, and moments. When done right, this playbook becomes the operating system of the brand, ensuring that every team member knows how to make clients feel the intended emotion. But no framework will succeed without people who understand it deeply. That is why transformational training is critical. Teams must not only learn new behaviors; they must internalize a new mindset. When every person from front-line staff to leadership embodies the 4Es, consistency turns into differentiation, and the brand becomes unforgettable. Are you ready? This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

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What luxury travelers dislike — and what brands must fix by 2026