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How the Smartest Investors Design Hotels That Guests Can’t Resist
Investing in the hotel industry is one of the few occasions where you can bring your creativity to the forefront and actually enjoy the process more than in a typical investment.
Who doesn’t love holidays, and who hasn’t, at least once, imagined their own ideal hotel that would perfectly meet their personal needs? And that’s exactly the element you should never forget when entering this industry.
As a Hotel Concept & Strategy Consultant at Destsetters, one thing is always my priority: to help my clients find the balance between numbers and experience and unlock the human side of the investment.
In any case, the hotel becomes their temporary home — a place where they expect inspiration, comfort, and care.
France’s Art Tax Proposal Could Collapse The EU’s Largest Market
France represents over 50% of the EU’s art market value at roughly $4.2 billion in 2024, making it the dominant continental player and the world’s fourth-largest national art market overall. Now the country is seriously considering a wealth tax on art ownership, an unprecedented move among major art hubs that has sent shockwaves through the global collecting community.
The proposal would convert France’s existing real estate wealth tax, known as the IFI, into what’s being called an “unproductive wealth” tax that explicitly covers artworks.
Owners would be required to declare their collections and pay annual taxes based on market valuations, fundamentally changing the economics of holding art in France.
The industry response came swiftly and forcefully, with 127 major organizations including Art Basel, Drouot, and the CPGA signing a joint declaration condemning the proposal as “disastrous” for the investment market.
The measure passed its first reading on October 31st and is being headed to the French Senate for debate on November 24th, with potential enactment that could affect billions in privately held art collections.
If adopted, this tax would likely trigger mass relocation of collections to Switzerland, the UK, and the US, potentially collapsing France’s position as the world’s fourth-largest art market in ways that would reshape the European art investment landscape for decades.
US Buyers Still Dominate Fine Wine Markets But Their Strategy Has Changed
US buyers have become the fine wine market’s center of gravity in ways that weren’t true even five years ago, and their behavior now determines whether prices rise or fall across entire regions.
Liv-ex’s data from 2024 showed that US merchants accounted for 35.5% of all purchases on the exchange for the year, jumping to an even higher 42.6% in December alone. That marked the first year US buyers captured the “lion’s share” of activity, cementing their role as the market’s most influential constituency.
That dominance became painfully clear in 2025 when the Trump administration threatened tariffs of up to 200% on European wine, Champagne, and spirits. US buyers pulled back sharply from the secondary market in response, and the impact rippled globally.
Purchase share of top Piedmont wines by US buyers halved from 44% in Q1 2025 to just 22% in Q2, helping push prices lower across an already fragile market.
By mid-November 2025, Liv-ex stated bluntly that “US buyers’ departure following tariff threats resulted in accelerated declines” and raised questions about whether a market that had “quietly come to rely on them” could recover without their full participation.
Why Watch Investors Should Celebrate The New US-Switzerland Tariff Deal
In August 2025, U.S. tariffs on Swiss watch imports suddenly jumped to 39%, the steepest rate in the developed world, and the luxury watch industry moved into full crisis mode.
Collectors watched in dismay as major brands including Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Omega rushed shipments into America before the duties took effect, then raised U.S. prices by 5% to 15% to offset the shock.
The entire investment thesis for Swiss watches seemed threatened by policy decisions that had nothing to do with craftsmanship or demand.
The turning point came in mid-November 2025 when Switzerland and the U.S. announced an agreement slashing the tariff from 39% down to 15%, finally aligning Swiss treatment with Japan and EU watch-producing nations.
This matters enormously because the United States represents roughly 20% of Swiss watch exports globally, making it the largest single-country market for luxury timepieces. Tariff relief on that scale doesn’t just stabilize pricing but removes a major threat that was actively eroding watch investment values and pushing collectors toward panic selling or abandoning the category entirely.
The 5 Best Emerging Real Estate Markets Smart Money Is Targeting Now
Smart money doesn’t wait for everyone else to figure things out. Right now, institutional investors and wealthy individuals are quietly moving capital into five specific emerging real estate markets where the right factors are coming together in ways that won’t stay quiet much longer.
These aren’t the usual cities you see all over real estate headlines but rather places going through real changes that create the conditions for prices to keep climbing.
What makes a genuine opportunity goes beyond just recent price jumps. You need to see infrastructure spending that changes how a place works, population shifts that create new demand, rule changes that let in buyers who couldn’t invest there before, and economic transformation that makes a location matter in ways it didn’t five years ago.
Price gains without these underlying drivers tend to reverse fast. Real structural change tends to build on itself for years or even decades.
Our ranking cuts through the noise by focusing on what actually drives returns.
The UK Market Collapse Nobody Wants To Admit Is Happening
Domestic investors have withdrawn roughly £26 billion from London-listed equities so far this year, the largest calendar-year outflow on record according to fund-flow data.
They’ve done this while the FTSE 100 has climbed approximately 16.3%, putting it on track for its best year since the post-crisis rebound in 2009 and comfortably beating the S&P 500’s 12.6% and the Stoxx Europe 600’s 10.7% in local currency terms.
The stress peaked in October 2025 when UK investors pulled around £3.4 billion from London-listed stocks in a single month, the biggest monthly outflow of the year.
Broader fund-flow data showed an even more dramatic picture, with equity funds in total seeing record £3.6 billion of net outflows in October. All equity categories suffered redemptions, and cumulative equity outflows since June reached £7.4 billion.
So if UK savers are selling aggressively during a rally, who’s actually buying?
At The Luxury Playbook, we don’t follow the market—we analyze it, decode it, and stay ahead of it.”