Virtuoso put its 2026 numbers on a Las Vegas stage last week. The top of the travel market is booming, and it is leaving the rest of the industry behind.
The state of the network presentation is organized into three buckets: by the numbers, on the mind of Virtuoso’s leadership team, and trends Virtuoso is watching. Rather than focus on a couple of key statistics, the team’s observations were more about the collective understanding of a wide range of data points together. The key takeaway was that the luxury tier has decoupled from the rest of the travel business in what many have agreed is a K-shaped economy. Some of the broader hospitality industry spent the summer explaining soft demand and missing forecasts (especially in the Med), the top of the market was posting growth numbers that mirror what we saw coming out of COVID, a generational growth period in travel.
However, this is also where my own data diverges. We have also seen close-in bookings up in a way that has become a trend over the last two years but the window is closing shorter and shorter. We have clients looking for hotels in the Hamptons ten days out, Greek yachts inside of a week, and Antarctica bookings (our specialty) are picking up for travel yet this year. Most travelers taking an expedition from the United States to the southern-most continent plan well in advance, especially considering the distance to Buenos Aires, Argentina or Punta Arenas, Chile. We are pacing well ahead of prior years for these last minute once-in-a-lifetime trips to my dismay and at last in part disagreeing with Virtuoso’s broader conclusions.
A great solo travel tip spotted this week on Live and Let's Fly.
