Luxury and ultra-luxury: drawing the line

In its first issue, The Regenera Luxury Magazine argued that ultra-luxury is a market position rather than a hotel classification, and that price is the wrong place to draw the line between it and luxury. In the article’s words, “Price is the symptom, not the model” ¹. The argument was made about hotels. Its consequences fall on destinations: on the land, water, labour and public budgets of the places where those hotels stand. This analysis takes the Magazine’s distinction as a starting point and asks what each segment asks of a place, and what it gives back.

Where the line falls

The Magazine distinguishes the two segments by intent. Luxury is built on consistent, reliable standards; ultra-luxury organises the operation around the individual guest. Luxury service responds to requests, while ultra-luxury anticipates them, and what the guest is really buying is time, privacy and access ¹. Price follows from that. The article cites CoStar’s analysis of 2025, which found that the ten highest-rate hotels in a market often charged more than double the luxury-class rate: about US$2,600 a night in Paris against US$922 ¹. The same data show the most expensive hotels running lower occupancy than luxury-class hotels. They trade volume for availability ¹.

Scale and staffing do the rest. According to the article, luxury hotels average about 2.5 staff per room, while the Ritz Paris has about six and Amangiri about seven; Aman Kyoto has 26 keys on about 32 hectares ¹. Its Luxury Positioning Model maps properties on two axes, price position and individualisation, the second measured through keys, staff and space per key. Ultra-luxury sits where a luxury price meets service built around one guest. The Magazine notes that the staffing levels and the placements on its map are the author’s own estimates ¹. The broader point holds without them: exclusivity is a matter of how few people share a place, not only of what they pay.

A growing market, unevenly measured

The segment is growing while the wider luxury economy is not. Bain & Company estimated global luxury spending at €1.44 trillion in 2025, down 1–3% at current exchange rates, with luxury hospitality worth €251 billion and growing by about 3%; since 2023, it said, experiences have been the only part of luxury adding to growth ². Resonance Consultancy estimates that the top 10% and top 1% of US travellers will together spend some US$544 billion on travel in 2026, and that the top 1% spend an average of US$12,400 per trip, against US$3,700 for travellers in general ³. One market study quoted by the Magazine values ultra-luxury hotels at US$27.4 billion in 2025; the Magazine says it did not verify that commercial estimate, and neither have we ¹.

For a destination, those figures amount to a proposition: fewer visitors, each spending more. Whether that is a good bargain depends on two things that rate premiums do not show: what each guest consumes, and how much of what they spend stays.

The footprint per guest

The Magazine’s environmental argument is direct. Ultra-luxury concentrates more land, staff, conditioned space and energy on each guest, and lower occupancy spreads fixed loads over fewer stays, so its claim on a destination is greater, not smaller ¹. Independent data point the same way where they exist. The Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index 2025, built on 2023 data from 27,219 hotels, reports, from a smaller subset of hotels with validated waste data, average waste of 5.49 kg per occupied room in luxury hotels, against 1.20 kg in upscale and 1.04 kg in upper-midscale properties; food waste was 1.03 kg per occupied room in luxury hotels and 0.14 kg in upper-midscale ones ⁴. Luxury hotels also had the highest waste diversion rate, about 31%: more waste, managed somewhat better ⁴. The report itself presents carbon, energy and water by segment as year-on-year changes rather than levels, so on its own it does not support a per-guest comparison of emissions between classes ⁴.

At the scale of the whole trip, the evidence is older but clear in direction. A 2018 study in Nature Climate Change led by Manfred Lenzen of the University of Sydney estimated tourism’s carbon footprint at about 8% of global emissions and found that it “increases strongly with increased affluence” ⁵. A low-volume model is therefore not automatically a low-impact one. Fewer guests with larger footprints, many arriving on long-haul flights, can add up to a comparable load spread over far fewer beds.

Who keeps the money

The case for high-value tourism rests on revenue per visitor. The case against it rests on leakage: the share of spending that leaves a destination through imports, foreign ownership, overseas booking channels and repatriated profit. A 2025 study by Pritish Behuria of the University of Manchester, published in African Studies Review, examined Mauritius, Botswana and Rwanda. It found that the most profitable eco-lodges and conservation areas were often foreign-owned, that luxury sites hired few local workers, and that all-inclusive formats left little spending in local businesses ⁶. Leakage is also harder to see than it looks. Using firm-to-firm transaction data, Stjepan Srhoj and Josip Mikulić found that most tourism firms import little directly but depend heavily on imports that reach them through their suppliers, so that ignoring those indirect imports can overstate tourism’s economic contribution ⁷.

Neither study shows that luxury cannot benefit a place. Both suggest that the rate per night is a poor proxy for value captured locally, and that the gap is widest where land, ownership and supply chains sit outside the community.

When the destination sets the terms

Some destinations have tried to capture value at the point of entry rather than leave it to hotels. Bhutan is the best-known case. When it reopened in 2022 it raised its Sustainable Development Fee from US$65 to US$200 a night, as part of a revamp its tourism council presented as a return to “high value, low volume” tourism ⁸. From September 2023 the government halved the fee to US$100 for dollar-paying visitors, until 31 August 2027 ⁹. Arrivals reached 209,376 in 2025 and fee revenue US$43.31 million, according to the ministry ¹⁰. Our analysis of the fee found that the revenue is pooled in general government accounts, so the link between a visitor’s payment and a particular conservation or community outcome is not publicly traceable.

Rwanda took a narrower route. In May 2017 it doubled the price of a gorilla-trekking permit to US$1,500 and raised the share of permit revenue going to communities around the park from 5% to 10% ¹¹. Ecuador doubled the Galápagos National Park entry fee for international visitors to US$200 from 1 August 2024, the first increase since 1998; the Galápagos Conservation Trust linked the change to the pressure of land-based tourism on waste management, water and the risk of invasive species ¹². Each case puts a price on access to a place, and Rwanda’s adds a rule about who receives part of it. None, on its own, demonstrates the ecological or social outcome the money was meant to secure.

What the line means for a place

The Magazine concludes that no market position is regenerative in itself. Scarcity is “the means, not the product”: a high ratio of staff to guests is a workforce that can be trained, and a private estate is land that can be restored, but whether a property gives back has to be shown through independent audit and continuous measurement ¹.

From a destination’s side, the questions follow directly. How much land and water does each guest command, and for how long? Who owns the property and its supply chain? How many staff are local, and at what level? What share of the rate reaches public budgets or community funds, and is that share published? Ultra-luxury makes a larger claim on a place per guest than luxury does. It can also leave more per guest. Where that balance falls is not decided by the segment. It is decided by ownership, procurement and policy, and it should be judged by what can be measured.