Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
There are aspects of luxury that aren't scalable due to scarcity. For example, if you have a hotel located in a historic building in the center of a small village or a castle hotel with some particularly special view, you just cannot duplicate this. Similarly, there are a limited number of truly great chefs in the world and some special ingredients are limited too. Of course one hotel could attempt to buy a top chef for itself by spending money on salary/staff/kitchen/dining room, some other place then would lose its top chef. In the longer run, industry groups could encourage and subsidize training, but I'm inclined to believe that the real cap is that talent of this caliber is truly limited.
These are all externalities that aren't implicit to the discussion at hand (e.g., scarcity obviously applies to non-luxury properties too), in the same way that lacking demand affecting profitability isn't relevant to the theoretical discussion of whether a property with over 200 rooms could be considered luxury. I'd also point out that the problem in hospitality isn't talent - it's about affordable labor. Hospitality is all about labor - and primarily, training and processes. It's possible to train most people to be good at hospitality; anyone who has worked in a hotel knows this. The problem at many properties is that the general wage level doesn't support the desired/necessary level of training and development of processes, and demand also isn't sufficient to support a higher wage level.
It's clear many in this thread have a
preference for tiny hotels with few guests (maybe what they mean is actually "no other guests") or would never stay in a hotel with over 200 rooms. That's fine. But it's a totally different question from whether luxury is attainable at properties with over 200 rooms.