We love the great hotels. Here is why the best trip of your year might still be somewhere without a points program.
I love great hotels. The butler service at a St. Regis, the design of an EDITION, the quiet confidence of a Four Seasons, the history of a Waldorf Astoria, the sheer scale of a Grand Hyatt. Many of them live inside historic buildings that are worth the trip on their own. Their top tier hospitality has inspired a great deal of what we do at Blossom Sanctuary, from the details in the bedrooms to the way we answer a text at night.
But luxury does not have to mean the same resort in a different city. It is easy to stay inside the Bonvoy, Hyatt or Hilton families for years because it feels safe, and miss the places that could only exist exactly where they are.
The trips most of us remember are the ones where we stepped outside: the family guesthouse, the little restaurant with no website, the spa run by people who knew our names by the second day. That is what luxury has come to mean to me. The polish of a great hotel, and something that could only happen in that place, with those people.
Stepping outside also changed what I pay attention to, because the polish has a balance sheet behind it. Most big-brand hotels are not owned by the brand on the sign. The brand manages them, and the buildings belong to real estate funds, private equity firms, publicly traded companies and, in many cases, sovereign wealth funds, some of them answering to governments whose choices many travelers would never knowingly support. Your points travel through all of it. None of that is the doing of the people who carry your bags or turn down your bed, and none of it is a secret. It is just very easy not to look.
I think the industry can do better. Tell guests who owns the building. Show where the profits go. Let travelers choose with open eyes. Until then, the most honest thing any of us can do is ask the question, and spend at least some of our travel money where the answer is simple.
Three places, one question
San Francisco. I love the St. Regis in downtown San Francisco, and they once comped me a night, which I still appreciate. A few years ago, across town in the Castro, I was punched in the face on the street, and I took a taxi home. I do not tell that story to blame anyone. I tell it because both things are true of the same city on the same night: some of the most beautiful hotel rooms in the world, and a short ride away, people living on the street with untreated mental illness and nowhere to go. That is what extreme income inequality looks like up close. Luxury that ends at the front door is not really luxury. It is a waiting room.
Phuket. In Thailand, I cleaned up trash on the beach, and the JW Marriott Phuket gave me an award for it. I was grateful, and it also felt a little like a joke. Marriott Bonvoy names are on resort after resort across the island, and every monsoon season the tide carries plastic back onto the sand. I did not want a plaque. I wanted someone to acknowledge, out loud, what all that tourism is doing to the coast, and to imagine what a company that size could do about it: pay local people a living wage to keep the beaches clean, invest in the waste systems the island needs, and make sure the most beautiful places on earth are still there for children to enjoy for generations to come.
Barcelona. The same question follows you around the world. In Barcelona, people whose families have lived in the same neighborhoods for generations have marched against overtourism, because short-term rentals and rising rents keep pushing them out of the city they grew up in. The city has announced plans to phase out its tourist apartment licenses by 2028. It should not take a protest. People who have lived in a place their entire lives should be able to afford a home there, and nobody in a wealthy nation should go without a high standard of living. Travel at its best lifts the places we visit. It should never price out the people who make them worth visiting.
Great palaces and hospitality experiences are better enjoyed when the entire kingdom is thriving. These are good companies, full of good people who work hard. That is exactly why they can do more. The monsoon is not an excuse; it is a reason. And every time we choose where to stay, so can we.
Closer to home, the same question applies. If you or someone you know in Siskiyou County needs a bed, a meal or someone to talk to, we keep a plain, current guide to shelters, food and help in Siskiyou County. It is also a good list of places to give.
A quiet heartbreak is moving through the creative and healing worlds right now, and most of the people carrying it have not said it out loud.
We came to hospitality, wellness and architecture because we love what those spaces can be at their best. A place to be restored. A long table. Light falling just right across a stone floor. A room that makes a tired person feel like a guest of the earth. These worlds draw the most empathetic among us: artists, bodyworkers, cooks, gardeners, land stewards, people who want ordinary life to feel a little more sacred.
Then you look behind the curtain, and you find that the beauty you love is often owned by people whose choices you cannot square with it. You love the art of hospitality, and you wince at who holds the deed.
Old stone, honest eyes
Walk through any old European city and that tension meets you on every corner. Empires paid for the cathedrals, the courtyards and the plazas, and many of those empires were brutal. We can stand in those places with open eyes and study them as history: what people built, what it cost, what humanity survived and outgrew. Time has turned them into lessons, and I still love walking through them. Loving a place and seeing it clearly are not opposites.
It is something else entirely to watch living developers wrap their newest towers in the language of a "new renaissance" while the capital around them is tangled up in a war that Amnesty International and a United Nations commission of inquiry have called a genocide. It is unfolding in Gaza in real time, on our phones, in front of our eyes.
The old renaissance had the excuse of distance. This one is on the livestream.
The gilded cage
I know the seduction from the inside. In my twenties I believed the myth of meritocracy: that the people at the top had simply worked harder, and that living in a big city among shiny, ultramodern spaces meant I had arrived.
Nowhere was that promise packaged more beautifully than at Equinox. Sleek design. Eucalyptus steam. Campaigns about inclusivity and human potential. It felt like a temple of modern wellness.
The longer I stayed, the more it felt like a gilded cage, an ornate and beautifully lit distraction chamber. It took our money, our attention and our creative energy, and it kept a great many empathetic people calm with cold plunges and good lighting.
Then I followed the money. Equinox has long been tied to The Related Companies, the developer behind Hudson Yards, chaired by the billionaire Stephen Ross. When Equinox raised about $1.8 billion in new capital in 2024, the private equity firm Silver Lake co-led the round, and principals of Related were among the investors (Sixth Street). Related's commercial portfolio, which holds interests in Hudson Yards, has raised money by selling bonds on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (Commercial Observer). And a few miles from Hudson Yards, on Roosevelt Island, Cornell partners with the Technion, Israel's leading engineering university. Its labs have taken research grants from the drone maker Elbit Systems, and it built a degree program with the state arms company Rafael (Cornell Review).
None of this is hidden. That is the point. It is all in the open, and it is very easy not to look.
Once I looked, the gloss cracked. I walked away from Equinox. Later, when Blossom Sanctuary was offered life-changing capital by partners whose wealth was tied to war, I said no to that too. Every dollar carries a lineage, and a sanctuary inherits it. When you build a place of rest, the money is part of the architecture.
Betting on our amnesia
A theory is being tested on all of us right now. It goes like this: you can help bankroll mass destruction, rewrite the story while it is still happening, and wash the memory clean with enough marble, enough amenities and enough beautiful light.
They are betting on our amnesia.
But the bet skips the most basic human question. Who will want to live, rest or heal inside your monument once they know what paid for the foundation?
History tends to be kind to the builders who gave something back, and forgetful of the ones who only took. Gold leaf does not hold up a building, and neither does a press release about renewal.
The reverse Frankenstein
Here is what I find saddest. Great wealth offers one opportunity that nothing else can: the chance to be loved. You could be the patron whose name people speak with gratitude a hundred years from now, the one who built the library, the park, the commons that outlives you.
Instead, insulated in their towers and steered by dashboards and algorithms, too many of the very rich have become a kind of reverse Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's creature was a made thing that longed to be human. These are humans who seem to be turning into machinery, trading warmth for metrics and people for portfolios.
They do not need to be shamed. They need an honest question and an open seat at the table, before their delusion costs the rest of us the ecosystems we all share.
A sanctuary built with clean hands
So here is the calling for those of us who still believe a space can be sacred.
We do not have to hand beauty over to whoever holds the biggest checkbook. Nobody gets to own the word sanctuary. Wellness, craft and architectural magnificence belong to everyone.
Building this way costs more up front, and I will not pretend otherwise. Turning down compromised money takes patience. Paying people fairly, protecting the watershed, letting the oaks stand, crediting and paying the artists whose work makes a place worth visiting: all of it takes relentless integrity, and sometimes a slower calendar.
But a sanctuary built with clean hands is the only kind that lasts. When we step out of the gilded cages and build our own tables, our own retreats and our own communities on human dignity and ecological peace, we prove something the towers cannot. You do not have to erase anyone to build heaven on earth. Honoring every human life is the only way to build it at all.
What we are building instead
Blossom Sanctuary is an independent property. There is no parent company, no fund behind it and no portfolio to feed. It is one private house on 4.2 acres of oaks and gardens in Etna, a small town in Scott Valley, and it stands on its own as an experience: a completely different answer to the corporate, hedge fund way of doing hospitality.
What makes the valley around it special is its people: the small business owners and neighbors who make Scott Valley feel like nowhere else. When you stay with us, they are the ones you will remember. Teanna and her sister Tearra at Citrine Lounge Spa. Della of Circle Bar Co. behind the camera. Victoria of Gent's Rents & Events setting the table. The artists of Marble Rim Gallery, a cooperative that local artists have run together since 1991. Dinner at Denny Bar Co., sauna at Mountain Healing Spa, bread from Little Whisk Baking Co. Our journal links to them, our Members Portal books them, and the money stays in the valley.
This is the honest difference between a trip you remember and a tourist trap. The packaged destinations take a lot of money and give back a lobby and a line. The places worth the trip, here and anywhere in the world, are the ones where your money lands in a real person's hands: the family kitchen in Lisbon, the potter in Oaxaca, the spa run by two sisters in a small mountain town. Support them, and you get a better vacation and a better world in the same weekend.
Even our leisurewear, Vibes Valuta, is made the small way: seasonal batches we design ourselves, nothing printed until someone orders it. This is what a renaissance looks like when it grows from the ground up: a network of neighbors, not a hedge fund; a long table, not a tower. Every stay, every class, every loaf of bread is a vote for that kind of economy.
If that is the world you want to rest in, come meet the people who make this place what it is.
A word to carry: سراب (Sarāb)
Pronounced sa-RAAB, it is Arabic for a mirage. In classical writing it is the shimmer that looks like water to a thirsty traveler and holds nothing when you reach it. A renaissance financed by ruin is a sarāb. We would rather dig a well.
Come find the well
I love to travel. I still go to the old cities, stand in the plazas and look up. I just want us to travel with our eyes open, and to spend our money where it builds something we would be proud to come back to.
So here is my honest invitation. Skip the tower for a weekend and take the road north to Scott Valley, about an hour and a quarter south of Ashland, Oregon, in the far north of California. There is no lobby here and no brand standards manual. There is a valley ringed by mountains, creeks running cold off the mountains, and a small town where the person pouring your coffee probably owns the place.
Day one, Main Street. Walk Etna slowly. See what the valley's artists are making at Marble Rim Gallery, then settle in for dinner at Denny Bar Co. and walk home under more stars than you remember existed. Our one perfect day in Etna has the whole route.
Day two, the mountains. Drive up toward Etna Summit and the high country, or take one of our Scott Valley drives through ranch land and old oaks. In season, the short walk to Taylor Lake is worth the drive up.
Day three, the reset. Sauna rounds at Mountain Healing Spa, then a facial with Teanna at Citrine Lounge Spa. The Etna spa and wellness guide puts it all in order.
Every stop on that list is a neighbor, not a subsidiary. That is the adventure: not a rebirth sold to you in marble, but a real place, run by real people, that you get to be part of for a few days. See open dates and prices, or join the Sovereign Circle free through December 31, 2026 for the founding member rate.
Colt Riley is the founder and steward of Blossom Sanctuary, a private retreat house in Etna, in the Scott Valley of Northern California.
