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How Much Further Can Luxury Travel Go? 11 Takeaways from Virtuoso Travel Week 2026
- Emily Goldfischer
- 12 minutes ago
- 9 min read
There is a particular rhythm to Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas. The media stay at ARIA, many of the big sessions are over at Bellagio, and the walk between the two invariably takes longer than expected because you keep running into people you know. And that's part of the fun, even in the 100+-degree heat.
This year, 4,800 luxury travel professionals from 105 countries descended on Las Vegas for the 38th annual Virtuoso Travel Week, with more than 110,000 one-to-one meetings scheduled between advisors and suppliers.
Yet despite its enormous scale, Virtuoso still feels like an industry reunion. Every escalator, corridor and coffee line brings another familiar face, a quick catch-up that turns into 20 minutes, or an introduction to someone you have somehow known on LinkedIn for years but never actually met.
This was only my second time at Virtuoso, and once again I was so happy to see so many women on the stages that mattered this year. Barbara Muckermann, CEO of Kempinski Hotels, as part of the opening session. Brené Brown returning as keynote. Helen McCabe-Young leading the conversation around Virtuoso Intelligence. Henley Vazquez of Fora and Cara Whitehill among the women talking technology at the Travel Tech Summit.
Not on a “women in travel” panel. Just running companies, building technology and talking about where the industry is going. Exactly as it should be.
And there was plenty to talk about.
After several years of extraordinary demand, soaring hotel rates and seemingly relentless growth, luxury travel has prompted an increasingly obvious question:
How much further can it go?
Here are the 11 things I’m still thinking about.
1. Luxury Travel Keeps Pushing the Limits
Virtuoso is projecting 2026 network sales up 20.8% year over year, based on first-half results and booking pace, with every global region growing. Hotels are leading by product type, up 24.5%, followed by cruise at 22.4%, on-site partners at 17.5% and tours at 11%.
For hoteliers, the rate story is even more striking. Virtuoso’s average preferred hotel rate reached $1,983 in June, versus $1,632 in January, and June ADR was 11.2% higher year over year. Bookings for hotel rooms commanding more than $1,500 a night are growing 37%, more than twice as fast as lower-priced hotel bookings.
But higher prices don’t tell the whole story.
When asked what was driving hotel sales growth, David Kolner, Virtuoso’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Communications, said it was roughly “a third, a third, a third”: higher rates, longer stays and more bookings.
Kolner also made an interesting point about all the geopolitical uncertainty we have been living through. It is affecting when clients book and sometimes where they go, but not necessarily whether they travel.
Matthew Upchurch, Virtuoso’s Chairman and CEO, offered another explanation for the resilience during our press conference. Some of it is still the post-pandemic carpe diem mentality. Travel was taken away, and people came back asking, “What am I holding back for?”
There is also a much more practical reason: there are simply many more wealthy people. Upchurch pointed to years of rising asset values, particularly in equities, which have expanded the high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth population and, in turn, the pool of people able to spend heavily on travel.
2. Fall Is the New Summer
David Kolner has been saying this for a while. The numbers are now making the case for him. Virtuoso says fall sales are up 69% and bookings 59%. September sales alone are up 77%.
Part of the shift is climate. Virtuoso’s 2026 Impact Report found 72% of members say climate is changing clients’ travel planning, while 82% of partners are concerned about its impact. Yet bookings at European hotels are still up 33% so far this year.
Travelers aren’t necessarily giving up on Europe. They are moving the calendar.
September and October are no longer consolation prizes for people who couldn’t travel in August.
3. Destination-Maxxing: One Stop Is No Longer Enough
Travelers are also packing more into each trip. Virtuoso is tracking what it calls destination-maxxing, where travelers link multiple destinations into one itinerary. Roughly half of these trips cross an international border, with France–Italy the most common pairing, followed by France–UK and Italy–Switzerland. Italy appears in roughly two out of every five multicity regional pairings.
But the travel advisor panel, moderated by Misty Belles, Vice President, Global Public Relations, offered an important reality check.
Asked which travel trend she would most like to see disappear, Josie Turner of 360 Private Travel immediately answered: “City maxing. If you're not on a cruise ship or a yacht, the request of seeing six different cities in France for a 14-day period is actually painful,” she said. She added that travelers are often in such a rush to see everything that they forget they have their whole lives to travel.
That tension may be the more interesting trend: travelers want to fit more into each trip, while the advisors planning those trips are increasingly encouraging them to slow down.
4. The Booking Window Is Shifting…Again
At the same time, travelers are locking the trips that really matter in much earlier.
Virtuoso says forward bookings one to two years out are about 50% ahead of where they were at the same point last year. Big-ticket trips are moving early too: bookings of $50,000 and up are up 47%, while $50,000-plus cruise bookings are up 49%.
Stephanie Malakie of Empress Travel Club explained why from the advisor perspective, “Part of the luxury of ultra-high-net-worth travel is the ability to ask for things last minute,” she said. “So I would love to tell all of our clients to book things 6, 12, 18 months in advance, but that's not how it happens."
Her example was a request for 30 family members traveling to Africa for festive 2027. When you are trying to secure the best rooms in tiny 12-room lodges, waiting until the last minute makes the job considerably harder.
That doesn’t mean spontaneity is disappearing. Upchurch described sophisticated travelers as building a kind of travel portfolio: lock in the big milestone trips first, then leave room for shorter and more impulsive trips around them.
5. Solo Women Are a Market Luxury Travel Can’t Afford to Ignore
Cue Beyoncé: “All the single ladies, all the single ladies…”.
Matthew Upchurch made a comment during the press conference that made my ears perk up: over the next 15 years, single women over 65 will have the most buying power.
Virtuoso is already seeing the shift. Twenty-six percent of partners reported increased bookings from solo travelers over the past year.
This is much bigger than the way “solo female travel” is often discussed. We are talking about a growing group of women with time, money and no reason to wait for someone else to take the trip. Seems it's time to start paying a lot more attention to all the single ladies!
6. Safety and Insider Knowledge Are Becoming Core Luxury Services
For years, luxury travel advisors have talked about upgrades, amenities, VIP treatment and access. Those things still matter. But the definition of value is getting broader.
When Virtuoso asked advisors about new or growing client demands, safety and security came first at 41%, followed closely by insider intelligence at 40%. Achievement-oriented travel, including bucket-list and expedition experiences, came next at 38%.
Luxury isn’t only: Can you get me the better room? It is also: Do you know what is happening on the ground? And if something goes wrong, can you help me?
Arrival experience, transportation, room location, dining alone and simply feeling comfortable in a destination all matter. That sort of reassurance is difficult to put on an amenities list. It may also be considerably more valuable.
7. Wellness Is Splitting Into Three Different Markets
From “looksmaxxing” to extending your “hotspan,” Virtuoso EVP David Kolner pointed to a wellness market that is getting both bigger and more segmented. Bookings at wellness-focused hotels are up 28%, with ADR up 23%. He broke the market into three distinct types of luxury wellness traveler:
The performance optimizer, often younger and entrepreneurial, who treats wellness almost like a business and wants data, diagnostics and measurable improvement.
The restoration seeker, who is less interested in optimization and simply wants to recover from the demands of everyday life.
The meaning seeker, who is looking for something more spiritual and reflective.
For hotels, the interesting question is no longer simply whether to offer wellness, but which wellness traveler you are actually designing for.
8. HNW and UHNW Travelers Are Becoming Two Very Different Markets
We throw around “luxury traveler” as though it describes one customer.
Increasingly, it doesn’t. Virtuoso highlighted what it calls the bifurcation of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth travelers. Forty-five percent of advisors report an uptick in requests for UltraLuxe travel, while the number of people with more than $30 million in assets is expected to grow 34% by 2030.
The product is bifurcating with them: hotels within hotels, private clubs, exclusive floors, residences, villas and ever more private experiences.
And at the very top end, even impeccable service is increasingly table stakes. Stephanie Malakie, founder of Empress Travel Club, said the room, the staffing, unpacking, laundry and anticipatory service are simply expected.
“What makes a trip memorable is how you elicit emotion,” she said.
A traveler worth $5 million and one worth $100 million may both be wealthy. That doesn’t mean they want the same thing.
9. FrictionMaxxing: When Inefficiency Becomes Luxury
Of all the trends presented during the week, this might be my favorite. FrictionMaxxing is the Gen Z idea of intentionally doing something in a way that isn’t the quickest or most efficient.
Calling a friend instead of asking AI. Taking the scenic route. Doing something in person because the process itself has emotional value.
As Matthew Upchurch put it: “Maybe true luxury is what is purposely inefficient.”
There is something in that. We spend so much time in hospitality talking about seamlessness that we forget the moments people remember are rarely the most efficient ones.
10. The AI Gap Is Already Here
More than 700 people attended this year’s Virtuoso Travel Tech Summit, and 74% of member advisors and 70% of preferred partners now use AI.
But “use” covers a huge spectrum.
At lunch, I sat with Michele Schwartz, founder of Jet Setting with Me, who told me she uses Claude throughout the day and has rebuilt much of her business around newer technology. At the same table were advisors who had barely experimented with AI and didn’t know where to begin.
That crystallized my biggest takeaway from the Tech Summit: the divide isn’t between believers and skeptics anymore. It is between businesses putting AI to work every day and those still figuring out the first steps.
The big news from Virtuoso was the launch of its own AI capability, Virtuoso Intelligence, which promises to give member agencies and partners incredible access to insights from data stored across the network.
The bigger challenge, as Virtuoso’s Paul Kearney pointed out to me, is that all of this is being built on top of decades-old GDS technology, fragmented supplier systems and plenty of manual processes. “It’s still a bit of a mess,” he admitted.
That may be the real opportunity. Before travel gets to autonomous AI agents, there is still a lot of underlying infrastructure to fix.
11. Sustainability Is Becoming Global Stewardship
Virtuoso is deliberately moving away from the word sustainability and toward global stewardship.
Jessica Hall Upchurch put the distinction simply: “Stewardship is really a responsibility, and even more so, it’s an opportunity.” She said Virtuoso increasingly sees global stewardship as something the network collectively is, rather than a separate sustainability initiative.
The framework centers around three pillars: planet, cultures and economies, with the emphasis shifting away from labels and toward concrete actions.
Virtuoso put some of that thinking into practice during Travel Week too. Its new Virtuoso Gives Back program included hands-on volunteer activities supporting the local Las Vegas community.
And the scale of the work is growing. Three years ago, Virtuoso had identified about 3,000 stewardship actions across its network. Today, that number is 11,000, ranging from recycling and solar panels to projects supporting local economies and cultures. That is much more than semantics.
So, What Stuck?
Virtuoso Travel Week is almost impossible to summarize. There are too many meetings, too many conversations, too many new hotels I suddenly need to visit and far too many people to catch up with somewhere between ARIA and Bellagio.
But this year, the contradictions were what stayed with me.
Luxury travel is getting more expensive, yet people keep booking it. Travelers are thinking more about climate, but not necessarily traveling less. The market is becoming more technology-driven just as human judgment seems to be becoming more valuable. AI promises to remove friction, while FrictionMaxxing suggests people may actually want some of it back. And even the definition of the “luxury traveler” is beginning to split.
Which brings me back to that walk between ARIA and Bellagio. On paper, it should be quick. In reality, you get interrupted by someone you haven’t seen for a year, introduced to someone new, pulled into a conversation and arrive much later than planned.
Not particularly efficient. Maybe that’s the point.
