Why Viral Luxury Rarely Feels Good in Real Life
Luxury travel, as it appears online today, is dominated by gaudy. It arrives fully formed in short clips and polished vlogs. These offer a familiar sequence of signals. Oversized suites drip in yellow gold and dreadfully mimic Versailles. Champagne is poured by a hotel worker you’re probably rude to. Touristic hot spots are framed to look serene. The imagery is repetitive, unoriginal, and instantly legible. You’re told what you’re meant to feel before you feel anything at all.
This version of travel is aspirational because it is designed to be. It promises proximity to success, effortlessness, and reward. It suggests that being seen in the right places will lead to satisfaction. Consuming the right things and documenting the experience correctly also contribute to this feeling. For a moment, it works. The visuals stimulate FOMO, curiosity, and even motivation. But the feeling misses the mark like a stinky one-night stand.
What often follows is a quiet sense of ‘now what’ rather than fulfillment. People scroll past these images with a vague awareness that something is missing, even if they cannot immediately name it. It no longer considers anything of the person experiencing it, like a lover who cares not if you climax. The result is an aesthetic that gestures toward unearned status while quietly abandoning the standards that once gave opulence its power. It creates a loop of comparison, performance, and fleeting validation.
This is not because people no longer appreciate beauty or indulgence. It is because what is being presented as luxury is increasingly disconnected from how luxury has traditionally been experienced. What reads well on a screen does not necessarily translate into pleasure, memory, or meaning in the body. When travel becomes optimized for optics, it stops asking how an experience feels and focuses instead on how it appears.
The distinction matters because travel, at its best, has never been purely visual. It has always been sensory, emotional, and contextual. When those dimensions are flattened, something essential is lost. When travel abandons this sensibility, it stops being transformative. It becomes consumable, repeatable, and ultimately forgettable. The locations change, but the feeling does not. The problem is not that people want beautiful experiences. It is that they have been trained to mistake visibility for value.
Excess, when handled with intention, has always had a place in culture. Historically, opulence was anchored in craftsmanship, proportion, and context. It demanded a working understanding of materials, space, sound, and ritual. Even when it was extravagant, it was rarely careless.
Older forms of opulence were not optimized for mass consumption or instant recognition. They were built to be inhabited with longevity. Rooms were designed to hold silence as much as conversation. Textiles were chosen for how they aged or even how they felt, not how well they could be puzzled into a social media feed. Grandeur was often quiet in its confidence, assuming the viewer would understand what they were looking at without being instructed. You were expected to meet it halfway by noticing the art of noticing.
Today’s version has abandoned that responsibility. Contemporary opulence is rarely concerned with coherence or restraint. It borrows the symbols of historical grandeur. However, it strips them of context. This results in spaces and experiences that feel theatrical rather than considerate.
Travel is one space where this confusion becomes most visible. People can arrive at the same destination and stay in the same hotel. They can spend the same amount of money. However, they leave with entirely different internal outcomes. One returns home overstimulated and oddly dissatisfied. The other feels rested, grounded, and quietly altered by the experience. The difference is rarely the location itself, but rather how the experience was shaped.
No shade, but lots of modern luxury travel is assembled rather than designed. Components are selected for their individual prestige, then placed side by side without much consideration for rhythm or coherence. The result might seem impressive in feed, but it didn’t tickle the loins one bit! Itinerary days are grotesquely overstuffed, transitions are rushed, and indulgence is maximized rather than modulated. The traveler is kept alert and constantly moving, even when the setting may suggest ‘sit tf down and rest.’
Without pacing, contrast loses meaning. Without recovery, pleasure can’t simmer like a delightfully fattening bourguignon. When every moment competes for attention, none of them leave a lasting impression. Travel becomes consumptive when it should be immersive.
Well-considered travel works differently. It understands that experience unfolds over time and that attention is finite. It accounts for fatigue, mood, environment, and the simple fact that the body does not respond to excess the way the camera does. Luxury, in this context, should be more precise.
When that finesse is not properly dripping, even exceptional places feel interchangeable. Hotels collapse into archetypes. Cities register as backdrops rather than environments. The traveler leaves with evidence of where they have been, and some souvenirs they may or may not even like after a month.
I use this way of seeing travel when I listen to a client describe what they think they want. Then, I pay closer attention to what they are actually responding to. Often, this means avoiding what is popular, visible, or loudly endorsed. It involves choosing what will sustain them once the novelty wears off. Not always, though, sometimes a bucket list moment is the memory, and that’s fine too.
It is why I might guide someone away from a hotel that dominates social media. I favor one with a unique space and a multi-generational team behind the front desk. Its rhythm matches how they move through a day. Viral properties aren’t bad, but sometimes they make the guest perform rather than settle. It is why, in a city full of polished institutions, I might suggest a 200-year-old tiny pastry shop. I choose it instead of the beloved Ladurée, even if I enjoy both. One exists to be consumed quickly and recognized immediately. The other asks for presence, patience, and a willingness to be shaped by something that has endured without the fame
The same discernment applies far beyond hotels and restaurants. For some travelers, luxury is not about Bali’s most photographed temples. It is more about a longer drive into the island’s interior, followed by a guided hike to a wildly serene waterfall.
This is the perspective I bring to my work as a travel advisor. I do not plan trips around what is socially legible. I like to consider how experience will unfold in the body, how it will be remembered, and whether it will still feel generous once the novelty wears off. Luxury, when approached with care, involves being held by the right places. It needs to be in the right order and for the right reasons. That is the standard I work from, and the only one I am interested in offering.
If this reflects how you want travel to feel, you’ll find my advisory work here. I don’t want you to spend your money on an advisor who lives like beige is a personality.
