Episode Details
Back to EpisodesWhy Luxury Hospitality Is Optimizing Itself Into Irrelevance — And What To Do About It (with Colin Nagy)
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Connect with Colin: linkedin.com/in/colinjamesnagy/
Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/
Apply to join the Journey Alliance: http://journey.com/alliance/
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The luxury hotel boom of the last decade produced more five-star rooms, more high-end brands, and more capital chasing premium travelers than any period in modern hospitality history.
It also produced a lot of hotels that feel exactly the same.
Colin Nagy has spent nearly a decade covering the business of luxury travel for Skift while leading global brand strategy for Instagram and Threads at Meta. He sits at a rare intersection — deeply inside the world of brand, culture, and consumer behavior, and deeply inside an industry he genuinely loves. That combination makes him one of the most clear-eyed observers working in hospitality today.
In this episode, Colin and I dig into why luxury has optimized itself into sameness — and more importantly, what the brands getting it right are actually doing differently. We get into the role hospitality plays in a world where AI is accelerating isolation and people are hungry for real human connection. We talk members' clubs — the ones worth betting on and the ones burning through capital without a clue. We get into the macro disruption question most operators aren't asking loudly enough. And we talk about what world building actually requires — and why so few brands are willing to do the work.
Colin isn't cynical about any of this. He's demanding. There's a difference. And if you care about where this industry is headed, this conversation will sharpen how you see it.