"That could mean an invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process ($7,500) or mastering fish butchery and handcrafted sushi ($750).... 'When you get to the top of the mountain, you’re talking to God,' said [one hotel] manager.... 'I’ll send you up there with a bottle of Champagne and say, "Just sit down and have a chat."'... Hotel experts say that the arms race for bigger, bolder, more creative experiences will continue. 'Guests are starved for something new because everything around them has been turned into an algorithm,' said [one concierge team supervisor], who is constantly digging deeper to come up with the novel...."
From
"Looking for ‘a Different Kind of Wow’: Next Level Hotel Experiences/From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests" (NYT).
The word "experience" appears 10 times in the article. You travel somewhere and the hotel has packaged what they call an "experience" that you can buy. Some of it is frankly bullshit — "talking to God" — and some of it is frankly off-putting — "fish butchery" — and some of it feels socially awful — intruding on an artist and "their process." Who is taken in by this sort of thing?
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36 comments:
Snippets from the Fall of Rome.
The Aristocracy always finds a way to descend into ridiculousness.
Expensive stupid shit for rich stupid people.
In my not-so-short life, and seeing friends and family drop around me, I will say that you're better off buying experiences than things.
When your parent passes away and you're going through the house, did your mom really need that third set of fancy glasses for entertaining that never came out of the box?
If you're butchering the fish, you're doing it wrong.
Does the hotel have a bar? Do they have decent wifi?
Apart from the basics of being a hotel, what more do you really need?
They can come and see my creative writing process for $750.
I'm a cheap artiste
John Henry
What a concept. I'd like a special session with the dishwasher, and then perhaps an hour or two with the maintenance man, just to round out my luxury vacation experience.
Who is taken in by this sort of thing?
How else will you continue generating envy in your Instagram followers?
A lot of people have more money then sense. They're the people who are taken in by this sort of thing.
If they didn't have money, they'd be the type of people joining Hare Krishna or other cults. Though there are people with money who do that sort of thing- Scientology actively recruits them.
Some of this sounds like plot points from the next White Locus series.
"Experience" appears to be the conjunction of virtue signalling, authenticity culture, and cultural appropriation (viewed negatively). You no longer get status points for merely wandering around in the human zoo.
We've been talking about how to structure the offerings our railway museum makes in terms of experience for several years.
Prepackaged for those who are unable to find their own adventure. The fact that there is a market for this says something about the culture that helicopter parents created for their now grown kids.
I will admit to going to a Club Med once (for the prepackaged 5day scuba). They had a trapeze class. Way cool. Didn't find God or anything though.
I've only had a hotel experience at John's Brook Lodge in the Adirondacks. They give you a bunkroom bed and meals including a trail lunch, and the experience is climbing one of the mountains around that the location gives you a several mile headstart on.
$750 would buy months of sushi at the restaurants I frequent, and I like sushi. I guess I'm not benefitting from lack of economic fairness.
'Expensive stupid shit for rich stupid people.'
I think a lot of it is keeping the riffraff out.
I visited Iceland once, and the Reykjavik city tour included a visit to a cannery to watch fish being butchered. There, though, it felt real, and not like a manufactured "experience." Also, there was no gift shop.
Who is taken in by this sort of thing?
Well.
As noted by everyone above, rich stupid people with no useful moral core, taste, or common sense.
The real tragedy of our country over the last 50 years has been the elevation of HR managers, College professors, Activist Lawyers, DEI consultants, and Government Bureaucrats in status and wealth. There are all sorts of worthless professions that require little intelligence or work ethic. But they do require right think and a college degree and guess who excels at that.
These fields all overwhelmingly employ women. Whiny bitchy single Karen women. And now they have money from their harem sinecure we need to give them something to spend it on.
I just saw an article of a Taco stand in Mexico getting a Michelin Star. Maybe one day you can spend $750 to learn how to make a quality taco.
Leland @12:46 -- lol. I saw this, too, and showed it to my husband. A 680 degree steel grill that cooks beef in less than a minute/side. That's great content in our house.
Sounds like a typical cruise ship to me. Excursions at every port. Tours of the ship innards and classes of all kinds at sea.
I'll be contrarian here.
The people who do this are probably rich, and BUSY, and maybe A type people.
so, you have a weekend off when you're doing business in Singapore...do you have time to wander around? Do you have time to plan fun stuff? Why not just have the hotel provide this for you.
Also, while the husband is busy doing business, the wife may be there, too, and she is bored and doesn't want to do things by herself, thus the chef companion idea.
Me wandering around a market? Ok, that's so so.
Imagine doing with a guide who can explain where this or that herb or fruit is used and for what reason, etc.
Yes, its super expensive, but if you're making $1.5 million per year, and you're already going to be in Singapore for 4 days...
From the article:
"Personalized experiences are something Annabel Rayer, a global communications director for IHG brands, which includes Six Senses, Regent, InterContinental and others, sees as nonnegotiable."
InterContinental Hotels in the news today...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/entertainment/sean-combs-cassie-ventura
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs seen physically assaulting Cassie Ventura in 2016 surveillance video obtained by CNN
The footage, compiled from multiple camera angles dated March 5, 2016, appears to show the rapper, producer and business mogul during an incident that, according to Ventura’s complaint, occurred at the now-closed InterContinental Hotel in Century City, Los Angeles. CNN verified the location based on publicly available photos of the former hotel’s interior.
The complaint alleges Combs paid the InterContinental Century City $50,000 for the hallway security footage
The coolest hotel experience I have been on was a Truffle Hunt in Italy. It was just my wife and I and we were taken to a private forest where we met the truffle hunter and his dog. The dog was so excited. It was a rainy cool day in October in Tuscany. The forest was really beautiful as we walked around it then all of a sudden the dog would get excited and start digging in the ground. He was pulled away and there in the ground were some truffles. Most of the truffles we found were white but right at the end we found some black truffles. Throughout the whole adventure the dog was so excited - dogs like to be useful. We were given all the truffles that were found and then taken to a restaurant for a truffle lunch where we handed over some but not all of the truffles - every dish had truffles in them. It was fantastic. The best was a pasta dish with truffles. As the finale, in comes an American women who in a loud voice says, "I smell truffles, I have to have some truffles". When the restauranteur told her the unfortunate news that there were no more truffles, she was so disappointed. We took the remaining truffles with us to Venice and gave them to the chef at our hotel who included them in several meals. We really got our money's worth on that outing.
There are some good outings at hotels but you have to be really selective.
There's no money like tech money
Like no money I know
Aaron said...
I'll be contrarian here.
The people who do this are probably rich, and BUSY, and maybe A type people.
You are right about this. They are rich and type A.
But the inanity of the "entertainment" is a reflecting of the lack of merit these people have and that is a downstream effect of the types of jobs that reward people with status and wealth. The type of person that makes 6 figures as a DEI counselor is a good example of meritless tribal spoils that give money to people that are mediocre and kinda worthless.
Also I missed this:
That could mean an invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process ($7,500)
This is 100% an escort service advertisement.
Who is taken in by this sort of thing?
New Yorkers who vote Democratic. They need something to talk about at the next cocktail party that isn't the poor Biden economy or the poor Biden Foreign Policy or the poor Biden war record.
But you knew that already.
Who is taken in? NYT readers with a lot of money to burn, aka the target audience for the article.
To each his own.
Whenever I go on vacation I spend money to buy an experience. So I can't fault people who buy their experiences in different ways.
Although... I can talk to God for free. Not totally certain there is Someone on the other end of the line, but I keep trying.
and some of it feels socially awful — intruding on an artist and "their process."
There are now so many artists who livestream their painting process on Youtube and Twitch etc. that I suspect it's not hard to find good artists who are happy to (a) earn a bit of cash and (b) get their name in front of rich people who can afford to pay $7,500 just to watch them work. People joke about cheapskate entrepreneurs paying artists with "exposure," but this is like narrowcast laser-focused exposure to your ideal target market if you want to make a living selling paintings (or sculptures or whatever). They're probably using artists who have had a degree of success already, but still . . .
There's a "ranch" in Colorado (actually a very luxurious spa hotel deep in the backwoods) that offers mushroom-hunting excursions with a famous mycologist that cost something like $2500 for a weekend. Mushroom hunting! Like anyone can do with nothing more than a pocket knife and an NPR tote bag! Crazy.
"When your parent passes away and you're going through the house, did your mom really need that third set of fancy glasses for entertaining that never came out of the box?"
I'll offer a contrary opinion. First off, I don't know why my mom had things like that, but I'm sure it made sense to her. Probably half of the stuff in my house was passed down to me- the lamp from the living room when I was a kid, my grandmother's chair, my grandfather's woodworking projects, my uncle's pocket watch and more miscellaneous trinkets than I could begin to describe. I love having all of this here with me today even though, when I die, most of it will probably end up in a landfill.
I know this is not everybody's cup of tea, but I find it comforting to have things around me that were previously part of the lives of others in my family.
I have done dude ranches that included horse riding and/or fly fishing, and have stayed at a hotel in Ireland that offered horse rides on the beach, fly fishing for salmon in a local river, shooting clays with a former British Special Forces trainer, etc. Nothing wrong with that. Might as well bitch about places offering a continental breakfast. Get a life, everybody.
I wouldn't be at one of those resorts because I don't have that kind of money.
Now - if I were, none of that interests me. A tour of a nearby historical site - fort, museum ship, etc. - would interest me. These experiences seem aimed at the distaff side and the men who got to follow their suggestions.
Balfegor: It has been a trope for some time, likely from the late 19th century, that all great artists are misanthropic assholes. That someone could be a great artist, and gregarious, and not hate all of humanity with a burning passion is so far outside of the popular culture stereotype that it seems even artists assume that.
Odd, eh?
" Who is taken in by this sort of thing?”
Girl trips for S V tech millionaire wife buddies who have to think of something to do together while the guys they love are in Ireland at the board meeting at Cullen castle shooting ducks because they can’t get the low eu tax rate unless they spend so many hours in the eu.
The girls are all tired of New Orleans and the high desert spas of New Mexico.
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