When Premium Becomes Playground

These are personal reflections on service and standards, written as a guest and observer. They are not connected to any institution or company.

Luxury is supposed to mean distinction. A private health club, a grand hotel, a private members’ club: these are intended to be sanctuaries from the ordinary, spaces where standards hold and behaviour rises to the occasion. Without standards, even the most expensive membership or brand becomes indistinguishable from the mass market.

Yet more often, those standards are abandoned. Just this week, I have seen toddlers sleeping on weights benches while exercise balls were used as toys, parents staging photo shoots instead of supervising, and dirty underwear draped across sofas in the changing room. On Saturday, I was nearly knocked to the ground by a child racing a motorised suitcase across the lobby. This was not sanctuary; it was a playground.

The problem is not just unruly behaviour. It is the institution’s refusal to decide what it is, and for whom. Guests arrive with entirely different expectations. Some treat these places as sanctuaries of calm and formality. Others see them as extensions of the family living room. Both feel entitled. Both have paid the same fee. Yet no single space can simultaneously satisfy both codes.

There is a comforting idea in hospitality that everyone can be served under one roof: that the five-star hotel, the private club, or the flagship lounge can be all things to all people, so long as the décor is grand and the service smiling. But this is a dangerous illusion.

It persists for commercial reasons. A club that admits families without enforcing standards sells more memberships. A hotel that blurs formality with informality can market itself to every demographic at once. An airline that claims to be local, regional, and global hopes to capture every passenger. What looks clever on a spreadsheet corrodes the very distinction guests are paying for. The short-term drive for profit hollows out the long-term promise of luxury.

A health club that tolerates playground behaviour is not serving both types of guest; it is alienating both. Those seeking refinement find only disorder. Those seeking informality sense the rules are arbitrary, enforced sometimes but not always. A hotel that tries to reconcile contradictory expectations ends up serving neither well.

Luxury is not about exclusion in the sense of shutting people out. It is about clarity. To deliver excellence, institutions must decide what kind of experience they are offering and accept that not every guest will want it. Different people want different things, and that is legitimate. What is impossible is to deliver every version of luxury in the same space at once.

Some institutions do make their choice. They go all in on one market, and I applaud the clarity. If your strategy is to be a family playground or to cater above all to one demographic, then own it. The mistake is not the choice itself; it is pretending that no choice has been made. The illusion of being “all things to all people” lingers in the marketing, long after it has vanished from the reality.

This confusion is not confined to hotels and clubs. One of Hong Kong’s flagship brands now describes itself with a neat triad: deep roots in Hong Kong, proudly part of China, and connecting the world. It sounds polished. But it is also the perfect expression of the tripod fallacy. No institution can embody three identities at once without tearing itself in different directions.

The result, as always, is compromise. The promise of premium service dilutes into a muddle: never quite local, never fully global, never truly distinct. In trying to belong to everyone, brands risk belonging to no one. Luxury, whether in aviation or hospitality, cannot survive on a tripod. It requires a single frame: a clear statement of purpose, upheld consistently, even if it means not pleasing everyone.

We must decide what we want our luxury institutions to be. To deliver refinement, they must abandon the illusion that one model can serve all. They must be confident enough to say: this is our standard, this is the experience we offer. Not everyone will want it, and that is precisely the point.

Luxury without discipline is no luxury at all. It is just another space, another lobby, another pool, another room. And when every place feels like every other, there is no reason to pay a premium.

Luxury that tries to be all things to all people is nothing at all.