On Location: What Hotels So Often Get Wrong About Luxury

Hotels may just have a luxury problem.

Not any individual hotel necessarily. The Queen Elizabeth in Montreal, the Hazelton in Toronto, the Hotel Vancouver, The Merchant in Belfast (to name four of a hundred) are all good luxury done well. 

But contrast this with, say, the Ritz in Montreal, or the Shangri-La in Toronto, or the Waterfront in Vancouver. These are all, lovely, lovely hotels, luxurious enough for any luxe-loving traveller. But do you see the difference?

Frequent luxury travellers do. And luxury travel advisors know it.

I asked a cross-section of nine luxury travel advisors in Opatija, six American and three Canadian, what they thought luxury meant in travel terms.

Natalie Kloss-Biagini of Travel Abundance in Austin, Texas, told me, “It boils down to having unique, authentic experiences.”

Rey Alton, part of the second generation behind Alameda Travel in Houston, said, “Luxury is new experiences.”

Annemarie Allen of St. Paul, Minnesota’s IKP Travel put it this way: “Luxury is not just about the spend…It’s about customization of the trip to the clients wishes, and making sure that what they want is met and tailored to their needs at a local, and a more immersive level.”

But maybe Devyn Perry, born and raised in Mission, B.C, who cut her teeth in the ad business and is now working in the big leagues in Toronto, put it best: “I think that luxury has evolved from being polished to authenticity. It’s getting something and feeling like this is an experience that isn’t accessible to everyone and they feel special getting to do it, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be real, they feel it more and more when something is contrived.”

Like the generic luxury of the Ritz, the Shangri-la, or the Waterfront, and in contrast to the site-specific reflections of the destination like the Queen Elizabeth, the Hazelton, and the Hotel Vancouver, the Milenij in Opatija, the forum’s host hotel, threw a number of these issues into high relief.

Luxury’s isolation can become so splendid that it removes itself from the destination itself, putting itself in danger of becoming generic, unmemorable, interchangeable.

Though named for the millennium when it rebranded, the hotel is housed in one of the 18th-century villas that established Opatija as one of the major centres of some of the earliest European tourism, drawing the glitterati from Vienna (500km to the northwest), Budapest (700km to the northeast), and Venice (about 80km north). It was built in 1836, probably by Benedikt Hasslinger of Vienna, and turned into a care in 1898 (Hasslinger seems to have died in 1842), then enlarged into a small hotel and cafe between 1908-1910, became part of the Hotel Kvarner complex during the Yugoslavian years, and re-opened after extensive renovations as the Milenij in 2000 (“milenij” being Croatian for “millennium”). 

There’s a new building added on the side, with conference facilities, but the whole charm of the place comes from the 18th-century look and feel that permeates the entire town of 10,000 (with another 10,000 tourist beds) that celebrated the 180 years of tourism in 2024.

But I had to research all that stuff myself, online and through interviews. There is nothing about any of this in the hotel. There are no plaques, no annotated photographic history like, for example, the Bristol in Vienna does so well. There are display cases, but they’re filled with nice but random pieces of china and glassware, neither vintage nor even inspired by the era (and oddly none of it’s for sale).

As you walk around the town, and up its mountainside steps, each staircase named for a different local historical figure as you climb higher and higher into the hills overlooking the calm Adriatic Bay on which Opatija’s holiday homes and tourism industry were built, you feel the very specific history and culture of this unique place few of us had heard of before arriving, a mature tourism capital just waiting to be rediscovered.

But though the town itself does a good job of it, with those stair signs, as well as sculptures of prominent visitors from its past and very specific and engaging signage in the gardens and along the lungomare, the hotels all but ignore the place. We visited three other lovely hotels - the Keight, a new build and part of the Hilton Curio collection, the Navis, another new build just north of town, and another Hilton, this one between Opatija and the nearby city of Rijeka (Croatia’s third biggest, with a population of 100,000) - and not one of them made even a nod to the one thing that makes Opatija a potential high-end tourist draw.

This is what those advisors were talking about. The fact that five-star in Croatia most often translates to what North Americans, Western Europeans, Asians, North Africans, and Australiasians and Pacific Islanders would call four-star is of secondary concern here. As we’ve heard, it’s not all about the glam or the polish, as long as its specific, novel, and special, a discovery people can tell their friends about.

So though luxury travellers would almost certainly enjoy a visit to Opatija, and probably get at least two or three days of activities and relaxation out of it, if not longer (the old Austro-Hungarians used to stay here for entire seasons), the local hotels’ approach to luxury is generic to the point of being uninteresting. And that, , coupled with the aforementioned four-star for five-star amenities and service, might just be the thing that makes their decision to visit someplace else.

The irony here is that this is a town filled with glorious old villas, many of them either abandoned or owned by families who are struggling to maintain them (according to the son of one such family I spoke with), any one (or dozen) of which could be transformed with a little careful restoration into a five-star boutique hotel that is not only a reflection but the very embodiment of this place’s charm and character.

Part Three: What’s going wrong, and one way to set it right

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