Why Human Creativity Could Be Luxury Travel’s Next Big Category

The luxury travel industry has spent the past year diagnosing the same problem from different angles–wealthy travelers are becoming less interested in what they can buy and more interested in what they can feel, learn and become.

That change might be easy to describe, even quantify, but much harder to convert into business.

Reports from Marriott International, Hilton and American Express have all pointed toward a traveler who wants connection, cultural immersion, emotional return, personal growth and more meaningful use of their time.

A 2025 report by Preferred Hotels & Resorts takes it even further and describes “the travel industry’s biggest threat” as “dupe culture” created by social media and the resulting “beige-ification” of luxury.

It seems the industry’s approach to pushing the envelope has often been a better spa, a harder-to-reach safari camp (despite controversy), a chef-led market tour or another private-access moment, for example.

Those can certainly be valuable, fun, and even spiritual for the right traveler, but the question the data is unearthing and the industry seems to be dancing around is this:

What does “luxury” look like when consumption is not the point?

One answer to that might be Vacation With An Artist, or VAWAA, a New York-based platform founded by Geetika Agrawal that brings travelers into the studios of master artists for multi-day creative apprenticeships around the world.

Rather than just having an activity to fill an afternoon, the company is making a more specific bet that knowledge transfer itself will be a dominant form of luxury travel in the years to come.

“With AI adoption, screen fatigue, loneliness and all these crises, the world is going analog,” Agrawal posed in a video call. “Everything’s moving toward people wanting to go out into the real world, be more active versus passive behind the screen.”

One argument for this was made by The Economist in an article published in October 2025. To paraphrase, the split between goods and experiences is widening. Wealthy people haven’t stopped spending but are becoming more value-sensitive than they have in the past.

Personal luxury goods are particularly on the chopping block, but travel is still drawing money into high-end hotels, higher category flights and once-in-a-lifetime trips. On top of that, travel spending has increased in every socioeconomic demographic.

The article cites McKinsey, and reported that global spending on luxury hospitality was expected to rise from $239 billion in 2023 to more than $390 billion in 2028.

However, it also warned that luxury travel could repeat the mistakes of the fashion industry by chasing aspirational consumers, overbuilding or raising prices until guests start to feel they are being taken for a ride.

If luxury goods lost some of their luster because price increases outpaced creativity and perceived value, luxury travel cannot simply slap a higher rate on a room and call it “transformation.” Instead, it should heed the warning.

Travelers are asking for something more durable–especially if it’s more intangible.

Marriott International’s Luxury Group described this as a shift toward “High Life Worth” in December 2025, citing a report that “84% of high-net-worth individuals say travel has shaped who they are, 88% define status through knowledge and respect rather than possessions and that 94% seek travel which delivers deep cultural immersion and learning.”

American Express’s 2026 Global Travel Trends Report found that 79% of Millennials and Gen-Z travelers surveyed are likely to seek local workshops or destination-specific activities in 2026, while 76% of global respondents believe skills learned while traveling stay with them longer than material souvenirs.

That is the opening for companies like VAWAA, and it also explains Airbnb’s return to experiences.

Airbnb relaunched Experiences in May 2025 as part of a broader push beyond accommodation, adding services and a rebuilt app in a classic hub-and-spoke model.

“Today’s travel activities offer no real connection to the city you’re visiting,” wrote Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky in a press release. “The most authentic way to explore a city is with the locals who know it best.”

The company doubled down on this bet in May to include everyday services, and even FIFA World Cup experiences.

What Airbnb’s move indicates is that accommodation alone is not enough as different travel platforms and companies seek to own more of the trip.

By contrast, VAWAA is chasing a narrower and potentially more defensible position.

While Airbnb Experiences is largely built around local access, convenience and breadth, VAWAA’s approach is about depth.

Programs are typically four to six days, often one-on-one and centered on artists whose knowledge is difficult to find through ordinary travel channels.

The company’s Wefunder investor page describes VAWAA as having more than 210 artists across 42 countries (with more than 1,200 on a waitlist), 34,000+ hours of real-world creative exchange, a net promoter score (NPS) of 84, 98% artist retention and 50.4% year-over-year organic growth in 2026 to date–without marketing.

The hang-up is that 46% of interested guests could not book because there wasn’t enough of a specific art form available in the location or on the dates they wanted.

Those are company-reported figures and should be treated accordingly, but the bottleneck reveals that real demand is there, and that the trick for any company moving forward will be to match it with trusted supply in a highly fragmented market.

But beyond that, Agrawal argues that the art world has largely been built around commerce: galleries, fairs, marketplaces and platforms that help artists sell finished works. VAWAA’s ultimate goal is making their knowledge the value-add, not the product.

“The art world is really huge, and everything is focused around commerce,” Agrawal remarked. “It’s focused around selling artworks. You go to Etsy, Amazon, exhibitions, fairs, Artsy or Saatchi, and everything is around artists making things and selling their works. But there’s no infrastructure for artists to share knowledge. That’s what we’re building–a knowledge economy for artists.”

If culture and connection are indeed the driving forces of what wealthy travelers and younger generations are truly after, then it’s logical to treat artisanal and historical knowledge as the scarce and economically valuable foundation that supports it.

And what doesn’t say “luxury” if not “scarcity” and “high-value?”

The risk in creative travel is the same risk facing luxury travel and hospitality more broadly. Once a market discovers that people will pay for meaning, meaning can quickly become a label, or worse, a commodity with terrible consequences. Whether VAWAA can avoid that trap is a central question.

Moreover, the phrase “transformational travel” is easy to put in a brochure or a press release, and the term’s use has surged in the last year, becoming as commonplace as the words “experiential” or “emotional” in travel media.

Nevertheless, creativity is much harder to deliver without the people, places and practices that make the experience valuable in themselves, and Agrawal has vetted many of VAWAA’s artists personally.

While its advantage relies on the trust of its artists, scaling is a challenge that extends beyond just one company. If the data says anything it highlights that more meaningful travel is a generational concern.

The American Express report also found that 83% of Millennial and Gen-Z respondents prioritize unique, authentic experiences over popular tourist attractions and 82% would do something out of the ordinary if it made a good story.

Younger affluent travelers are coming into their own money with a different relationship to money, status and travel in general. They evidently still care about beauty, taste and access, but they also care about story, identity, personal development and what a trip gives them beyond the photographs, or “the ‘gram.”

That tendency alone may not make them purists, but it does make them consumers who are just as demanding of travel now as they are discerning its meaning.

The industry is already responding, in its own way at least.

Luxury brands are moving into “slow travel,” trains, branded beach clubs, hotels and yachts, and travel advisors are being asked to find not just the best rooms, but the best reasons. Hilton’s 2026 Trends Report has even labeled the “Whycation” travel’s new starting point.

Many 2026 luxury travel reports have identified connection, meaning and emotional return as priorities for affluent travelers, but the harder question is what those ideas actually look like in the real world.

VAWAA’s offer to make the intangible more concrete might just be the answer to that question since the product is not just simply “connection,” but a few days with a master who’s practiced their craft for decades, and the beginning of a skill, a memory, or a new perspective that could shape and possibly even define a young traveler’s more formative years.

Perhaps the next phase of luxury travel may be less about access and more about apprenticeship, and the scarce thing may not be a suite or a bag, but instead the pursuit and attainment of knowledge that cannot be mass-produced.

Some might call it cultural capital, or what travelers can learn, feel or become that cannot be bought off the shelf, and that’s where creative travel may have its biggest opening–by taking the “object” out of “objective.”