Emerging Hotel Trend: Lifestyle Accommodation

At the New York Time’s style blog The Moment, guest blogger Mark Jolly, editor of luxury travel site globorati, reports on an emerging hotel trend: “Big-boutique” brands – such as aloft by Starwood or ANdAZ by Hyatt – are drawing guests in with their promise of a whole self-contained lifestyle, kind of like hipster total immersion. When you stay at ANdAZ, you can be a full-fledged environmentalist for the weekend, immersing yourself in its “eco-luxury” accommodation. At aloft, with its quirky, open-floor plan rooms, you can imagine you’re a successful Soho artist living in the loft of your dreams.

For the luxury traveler, the newest incarnation of the lifestyle hotel means discovering a defined personality — the sort of personality in which, perhaps, you’d like to see your own image: urbane, sophisticated, and a cut above the style of that poor sap in accounting who just spent the weekend at a cookie-cutter five-star in Newport Beach. Checking into a lifestyle hotel is the hospitality equivalent of sporting a limited-edition pair of Pumas instead of the window-front generics at Foot Locker. It’s a brand choice.

The Moment: Mark Jolly on Emerging Hotel Trends