By Sherrie Wilkolask, Editor-in-Chief | Content Strategist | Publishing Architect™

Across the interviews I conduct with leaders from different corners of the luxury industry, I often close with the same question: How do you define luxury?

I ask it of hoteliers, architects, conservationists, and founders building entirely new categories of travel. I never coach the answer, and I never know what I’m going to get. After enough of these conversations, however, a pattern started to emerge that I did not expect, and that no single industry could have revealed on its own.

Luxury, almost universally, means time.

Kim Lalande, founder and CEO of KEY.co, the vacation rental platform behind a surge in multigenerational ski-season bookings, put it as plainly as anyone I’ve interviewed. “Luxury is time,” she told me. “It’s waking up on vacation and not having a list of things you need to organize… Increasingly, I think it’s the absence of friction. The best luxury is often the luxury you don’t have to think about.”

Dereck Joubert, co-founder of Great Plains Conservation and the mind behind Zamara Private, a six-suite safari residence in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, arrived at nearly the identical answer from an entirely different industry. “Luxury is all about time and space,” he said. “Time is the one thing none of us have quite enough of, and there is little we can do about it, except spend it wisely, joyously, in the way we choose.”

Michael Dayan, co-founder of HIGHSTAY, whose villa collection now spans Paris, Ibiza, and Saint-Tropez, framed it almost as an equation: freedom multiplied by invisibility. “For me, luxury is freedom,” he said. “Freedom of time, freedom of space and freedom to experience things on your own terms… The best luxury is often invisible. You arrive somewhere, and everything is exactly as it should be, without having to think about how it happened.”

A second theme sits right alongside the first: presence over polish.

Mary Quinn Ramer, President of VisitLEX and the architect behind Lexington’s tongue-in-cheek Bluegrass Bathing campaign, gave an answer with almost no reference to material luxury at all. “My definition of luxury is being fully present in the moment,” she said, “feeling the ground beneath your feet, breathing deeply, and simply enjoying the experience of being present.”

Frédéric Audevard, the architect behind the extension of M24, the new Museum of Motorsport in Le Mans, arrived at a strikingly similar idea through a completely different discipline. “Luxury is the feeling that something was made specifically, that everything is in its place, that harmony reigns, and everything becomes intuitive, fluid,” he said. “In architecture, luxury is the refusal of the approximate.”

And a third theme runs underneath both: luxury, in the end, is about people, not things.

Jeff Hanson, Director of Golf at the AAA Five Diamond Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, gave the most direct version of this. “Luxury to me is creating an authentic, lasting impression while making people feel important and taken care of from the moment they arrive until they depart,” he said.

What strikes me most, having now heard this answer from a golf director, a vacation-rental founder, a conservationist, a villa hospitality co-founder, a destination marketer, and an architect, is how rarely any of them mentioned a price point, a material, or a thread count. Not one described luxury as more. Nearly all of them described it as less: less friction, less to organize, less standing between a person and the moment they actually came for.

If there is a single throughline across the luxury industry right now, it may be this: the leaders building it no longer believe luxury is something you add to an experience. They believe it is something you remove, everything that gets in the way of time, presence, and genuine care, until what’s left is simply the thing itself.

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Editorial Note: The views, opinions, and analysis expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of the World Luxury Chamber of Commerce (WLCC).

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