06.25.2025: Trends & Scoops Shaping Travel and Hospitality
High-design guesthouses above cult favorite restaurants, Airbnb playing dirty with smaller players, and the floating sauna craze hits the Bay.
🗞️ Your Bi-Weekly Trends + Scoops Briefing
Let’s get into what’s shaping taste, trust, and travel right now.
→ Fashion x Hospitality is in full bloom—a classic Americana label takes over a southern Italian estate, a designer soft-launches a boutique residency at a coastal eco-retreat, and a capsule collection inspired by 1930s Lake Como sets a new bar for summer sensuality.
→ Airbnb gets caught poaching guides from smaller rivals—what it means when a category leader plays dirty to fuel growth.
→ A cult-favorite London restaurant just opened a tiny hotel above its newest location—a two-bedroom guesthouse inspired by old Bombay, dripping with cinematic nostalgia and storybook charm.
→ Luxury’s center of gravity is shifting—younger consumers are rejecting inflated price tags and sameness, favoring experiences, niche brands and wellness as the new markers of taste. In China, personalized retreats and sleek home gyms are replacing logo bags as status symbols.
→ New ways to unplug: a floating sauna arrives in the Bay Area, chefs in Chicago tap AI to co-write menus, and—yes—the U.S. State Department is now publishing deep dives on Substack.
→ Plus: Why your travel credit card perks are vanishing, Albania’s tourism surge, Gen Z’s thirst for “Lectures on Tap,” and the latest job openings in experience-led travel that caught my attention.
This made my ears perk up: Scott Galloway recently said that using WhatsApp in the USA is becoming a status symbol. It signals international fluency, global circles, a life lived (and texted) across time zones.
Which brings me to voice notes—a divisive hill I’m now forced to die on. I hate listening to them in iMessage (thank god for transcripts). But WhatsApp? Love. Maybe it’s the design, maybe it’s the context, but it just works.
When you’re working across continents like I do, with teams and collaborators who speak several languages, not liking voice notes is not an option. You will receive them. You will send them. You will learn to love the sound of your own voice, playing back like a podcast you didn’t mean to make. Outside the U.S., this is the default mode of communication. Americans are the outliers here.
But if sending voice notes stateside still feels too intimate—or too chaotic—but you do like the ease of talking into a mic while multitasking, try Whispr. It’s miles better than the iPhone’s built-in dictation—cleaner transcripts, fewer mistakes. I just discovered it and have been using it obsessively with my American friends who are anti-voice notes.
I continue to use LinkedIn as a space to think out loud—processing everything from AI and brand trust to how we show up in a digital world drowning in sameness. If you're wrestling with similar questions, here’s a peek at what I’ve been exploring:
→ On why AI is making it a non-negotiable for travel brands to focus on brand marketing.
→ As HR teams get flooded with AI-optimized résumés, your personal brand—and how you show up online—is more important than ever.
→ In a world obsessed with seamlessness, friction is often where the interesting stuff happens—especially in travel, where discomfort can spark perspective, memory, and real growth.
→ I sat down with Mitch Bach on the Tourpreneur Podcast to unpack building community-first travel brands, reimagining the multi-day trip, and why millennials are ghosting your sales funnel.
→ I’m honored to join the Board of Champions at Global Glimpse, supporting their mission to empower underserved youth through immersive international education. At a time when cultural empathy feels in short supply, I feel lucky to channel some of my energy into helping shape the next generation of compassionate, globally-minded leaders.
