Sometimes Luxury Can Also Mean Value
by Richard D’Ambrosio /
For most travelers booking luxury itineraries, price is no object, and the only question is, “How many nights do you want to stay, and which brand of champagne should we have waiting for you?”
But high-end customers also want to feel like they are getting strong value for their money. Savvy agents look for off-season options and destinations where prices for five-star hotels hover in less airy realms.
“My very, very high-net-worth clients, and I have a few of them, they do not care about value,” said Lila Ermel Fox, a SmartFlyer travel agent in New Orleans. “They want to be treated fairly, at a fair price. They’re more concerned with getting the room type they want, their placement in the hotel, the right seats on the plane. But I do have clients with healthy budgets who still appreciate exploring less expensive options.”
Hotels.com’s most recent Hotel Price Index shows a range of popular European and Asian cities with average prices between $150 and $200 per night. Ermel Fox noted cities like Bangkok, Thailand, as a destination that offers five-star service at a price that represents better value. “I do have clients who go there off-season, even though it is hotter, it might be the rainy season, to get into a nicer hotel they couldn’t get into during high season.”
The 39-suite, five-plus-star Anantara Angkor Resort, for example, recently reopened and is offering suite prices starting at $192 per night. Only a seven-minute drive from the city center, in Siem Reap, it is close to the Angkor Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of ancient Khmer ruins, including the Eighth Wonder of the World, Angkor Wat.
Each suite has recently undergone a complete upgrade including all of the Premier Suites and the Terrace and Premier Terrace Suites with their private plunge pools.
Berlin, Las Vegas and Phuket in Thailand also appear on Hotels.com’s lists of destinations with luxury hotels selling for less than $150 a night. Five U.S. cities, including Albuquerque, Oklahoma City and Jacksonville, were also part of this group.
Even high-end properties offer lower rates offseason. In the United States, for example, the Sea Island resort in Sea Island, GA is the only resort in the world that has four five-star ratings from Forbes for nine consecutive years. The rooms there run in the $500s in high season, but in January and February, when occupancies are low, they may be available for half that amount to help the property fill its book of business and keep its staff busy, said director of national sales Reint Venker (for more on Sea Island, click here).
In Austin, Texas, new hotels have created price competition that has lowered five-star hotel prices 48% from 2015, to an average of $278 a night, Hotels.com said. In Milan and Paris, five-star hotels have seen a 16% average decline from 2015, and in London, five-star luxury can be had for about $367 a night.