The Return to IRL Is Real. It’s Also Mostly a Luxury Good.

Here is where the story becomes more commercial and less true.

Inside the hospitality industry, the return-to-IRL thesis has been translated into a specific consumer narrative: the affluent, discerning traveler rejecting the attention economy and seeking authentic, bounded, small-group, phone-free experience at properties designed to feel like somewhere specific. Skift’s State of Travel 2024 framed it as experiential travel projected to exceed $3.1 trillion globally. Earnest Analytics reported U.S. experience spending up 32 percent versus pre-pandemic levels. The U.S. boutique hotel market hit roughly $33 billion in 2023, projected to grow about 7 percent annually. The U.S. luxury travel market reached approximately $397 billion in 2024, growing at roughly 8 percent CAGR. RLA Global put wellness tourism on a path from $868 billion in 2023 to over $1 trillion by 2024, with a 16.6 percent compound growth rate.

Private members’ clubs have become the most visible commercial expression. Soho House grew from about 112,000 members in 2021 to 271,500 by the end of 2024, with a waitlist above 110,000 and 2024 revenue of $1.2 billion. Zero Bond in New York has a reported 10,000-person waitlist at roughly $5,000 initiation plus $4,400 annual dues. Aman NY’s initiation is around $200,000. Core Club sits at $100,000. Mordor Intelligence projects the global private social-club market to reach $25.8 billion by 2027, compounding at roughly 11 percent a year.

None of this is invented. The numbers are real. The problem is how they get used.

When a trend-forecasting firm, a travel-trade publication, or a hospitality investment deck describes “Americans returning to IRL,” what they are almost always describing is the behavior of the top 10 to 20 percent of U.S. households, rendered as a total-society phenomenon. W. David Marx’s Status and Culture framework is the clearest explanation for why this narrative gets constructed and why it will keep getting constructed. When information is free and the internet has flattened most information-based status signals, elites pivot to signals that require physical access, money, and scarcity. “You have to focus on money,” Marx has written, “then you start getting these things that normal people can’t do.” The current moment, with its $300 supper clubs, its six-figure club initiations, and its $12,000 curated trips, is a textbook case.

Kyle Chayka made the parallel argument in Filterworld: the same algorithmic forces that flattened online culture produced the homogenized, neon-sign, exposed-brick aesthetic of cafés, boutique hotels, and short-term rentals from Portland to Prague. The offline space being sold as an escape from the internet was designed for Instagram. Jia Tolentino wrote earlier, in Trick Mirror, about how the critique of commodified selfhood inevitably gets folded back into the brand strategy of the people selling commodified selfhood. By her own admission, her own work became an example.

“The more information becomes commoditized and intermediated, the more people value experiences that are specific, physical, and human. And the more elites will pay to keep those experiences scarce.”

This is not a conspiracy. It is how trend narratives work. A real human need, the desire for unmediated human encounter, gets identified by writers and academics, turned into a cover story by journalists, picked up by trend forecasters, translated into positioning language by brand strategists, and finally priced into the inventory of hospitality operators. Each layer compounds the other. By the time the insight reaches a boardroom, it has been stripped of its complications. The part of the story about who is actually affected, and who is actually buying, is usually the first thing removed.

It is worth saying directly: brands selling “connection,” “belonging,” and “intentional community” at high price points to the people most protected from the actual collapse of community infrastructure is a specific kind of commercial move. It is not illegitimate. A members’ club that charges $4,400 a year is offering a real product to a real customer. But the language around it often blurs the line between meeting an affluent consumer’s desire and solving an American social problem. Those are not the same thing.

This is the practical half of the piece. If you run a property, a portfolio, a hospitality brand, or a venture investing in this space, the combination of a real behavioral shift, a commercially amplified trend narrative, a class-sorted reality underneath, and an AI-mediated discovery layer on top produces a small number of concrete strategic calls. None of them is novel. All of them are consistently missed.

First, know which customer you actually have. The mass-market third-place collapse and the luxury IRL-experience market are two different businesses. They are both real, and they are connected by the same cultural current, but they have different economics, different competitive dynamics, and different margins. The operators who get into trouble are the ones who read the same affluent-coded trend reports as everyone else and then try to retrofit the language onto properties that are economically dependent on the mass or midscale market. An Embassy Suites is not competing with Aman. A Marriott Courtyard is not in the same business as Soho Farmhouse. Telling your mass-market customer that you are offering “authentic, curated, intentional community” when you are running a well-priced airport hotel with a loyalty program is a misread of your own product and, usually, of your own customer.

The corollary is that the operators most at risk of getting flattened in this cycle are the ones in the middle. If you are a four-star, aspirationally boutique property without the financial or design commitment to compete at the top, and without the cost structure to compete at the bottom, the language of “return to IRL” will not save you. The customer who is actually buying that language is comparing you to Amangiri. The customer who is not buying that language is comparing you to Hampton Inn.

Second, if you are targeting the affluent IRL-seeker, AI visibility is now how they find you. The irony does not resolve itself. The traveler who tells you they want to unplug will have typed “best phone-free hotels for couples in Mexico” or “small-group culinary tours Japan no crowds” into ChatGPT before they called your reservations line. The Phocuswright data is clear that AI-using travelers are a high-value segment, and the AI-platform discovery layer is compounding faster than any traditional channel.

This means that being the answer when an AI platform is asked about your category is not optional and is not a nice-to-have. It is table stakes for any property whose target customer sits in the affluent cohort described above. The specifics of how AI platforms build their answers, meaning which sources they cite, which signals they weight, how consistently they describe your property across platforms, and whether the description they produce is accurate, flattering, and differentiating, are now operating questions, not marketing questions. The hotel that is invisible in ChatGPT is increasingly invisible to its highest-value customer.

A related consequence: when AI platforms answer a query, they flatten. Typography, photography, voice, and atmosphere, the things a luxury property has spent decades building to convey its sense of itself, do not survive the summarization. A Belmond answer in ChatGPT reads like an Ace Hotel answer reads like a Four Seasons answer once the brand surface is stripped. The differentiation has to be carried in what the AI is actually willing to say about you, which in turn depends on what the rest of the web is saying about you. Earned media, third-party editorial presence, and citation authority now matter more for luxury hospitality discovery than they have in a generation, because the AI layer is built on top of them.

Third, the authenticity signals are getting gamed, fast. “Phone-free.” “Small-group.” “Curated.” “Intentional.” “No wifi in the rooms.” “Hand-knotted from local fibers.” “A sense of place.” These were meaningful descriptors three years ago. They are now SEO keywords, press-release filler, and property-page boilerplate. Within 18 months, AI platforms will have learned to discount them as strong signals the same way Google learned to discount “world-class” and “luxury” in hotel metadata. Operators who built their positioning entirely on authenticity language, without underlying substance, will be the most exposed.

What survives this flattening is specificity. The operator who can describe what their property actually is, in terms specific enough that they could not be plausibly swapped into any other brand’s positioning document, survives. The operator whose positioning could appear verbatim on three competitors’ About pages does not. The hospitality industry knows how to talk about this internally. It rarely applies the discipline to itself.

There is a fourth call, more philosophical than operational, and it is worth saying directly even though it is uncomfortable. Operators in the affluent IRL-experience market should be honest with themselves, and where possible with their customers, about what they are actually selling. It is not community in the civic sense, because civic community is defined by not being priced. It is not solving the loneliness epidemic, because the Americans most affected by the loneliness epidemic cannot afford the product. What it is, and this is not a small thing, is a high-quality, premium-priced, temporarily unmediated human experience for people whose rest of life is heavily mediated. Said plainly, it is a luxury good, in the classical sense of a scarce and desirable experience that costs what it costs because it costs what it costs.

The operators who are clearest about this tend to be the best at it. Aman does not pretend to be a community-building initiative. Belmond does not pretend its train journeys are solving social isolation. Nihi Sumba does not pretend to be democratizing access to wildness. The properties that struggle are the ones whose marketing language implies a social mission that the economics of their inventory cannot actually support. In a cultural moment where the word “community” is doing a lot of commercial work, the properties that will age best are the ones that let their product do the talking and let the category language stay honest.