Beyond the Suite Life. Total Hotel Buyouts Are Growing in Popularity.

Group travel has taken on new meaning for some wealthy consumers, who increasingly are taking over entire hotels.

In an experience-obsessed era, those who can are going beyond just a stay at a five-star hotel to having it all to themselves alongside family and friends. Luxury travel advisors report an uptick among their deep-pocketed clients who book accommodations in their entirety for both large and small groups.

Andrew Steinberg, an advisor with the Ovation Network in New York City, says that his buyout business is up 50% this year compared with 2023.

“From a dozen, I have more than double now. The prices for these weekend stays can start at US$500,000 and easily top US$1 million,” he says. “People love them because they can manage every aspect of the experience and extend their event.”

As an example, Steinberg planned a lavish 50th birthday last year in Versailles, France, for a client who took over Airelles Château de Versailles, Le Grande Controle, located on the grounds of Versailles, for a weekend. The extravaganza cost well into the seven figures, he says, and included elements such as a scavenger hunt on the palace grounds and a five-course dinner party prepared by the renowned chef Alain Ducasse, where guests donned 17th-century costumes provided by the host.

Entertainment included fire breathers and Cirque du Soleil-style dancers. Steinberg notes that guests also received a different gift each day such as silk scarves and pricey wines. “By having the property to ourselves, we were able to manage every touchpoint,” Steinberg says. “We had napkins for every meal with the host’s initial and amenities such as a personalised cookie station.”

Andrew Steinberg, an advisor with the Ovation Network in New York City, says that his buyout business is up 50% this year compared with 2023.
Andrew Steinberg

Stacy Fischer-Rosenthal, the president of the New York-based Fischer Travel, which charges a US$150,000 membership fee, is also planning more buyouts than ever before for occasions such as weddings, birthdays, and “just because” get-togethers.

“Takeovers offer complete privacy, safety, and flexibility. The client does not have to adhere to a set schedule and can make theirs up as they go along,” Fischer-Rosenthal says. “There is a dedicated team catering to all of their wants and needs.”

The membership-based travel company Andrew Harper is another brand that has seen a jump in buyouts. Colin Housley, vice president of member experience, says the increase in demand led the company to launch an initiative called Exclusive Experiences, which focus on immersive and private trips such as luxury hotel buyouts and private island stays.

“Our members who plan these trips receive access to unique activities and excursions that we have negotiated with our partners,” Housley says. “We also leverage our relationships to make buyouts happen for properties that normally wouldn’t offer it.”

Andrew Harper has seen a “flood of requests” for private stays since Exclusive Experiences launched, he says.

Steinberg planned a lavish 50th birthday last year in Versailles, France, for a client. The extravaganza cost well into the seven figures, he says,
Andrew Steinberg

Meanwhile, another New York-based travel company Black Tomato had a client who bought out Aman Venice to throw a US$1 million party for his wife’s 50th birthday.

“We arranged performances by opera singers, an orchestra, and a rock band, and the celebration ended with a treasure hunt on the rooftop of the Gritti Palace in the penthouse suite,” says Black Tomato travel expert Sunil Metcalfe , who also notes the uptick in such buyouts.

In addition to travel companies, representatives from several upscale hotels, including the Ranch at Rock Creek in Philipsburg, Mont., and Cal-a-Vie Health Spa in Vista, Calif., say that takeovers of their properties are on the rise. Many, particularly smaller hotels, offer buyout-specific packages.

Cali Mykonos, located on the namesake island’s Kalafati Beach, has created a package for a cost of between US$57,000 and US$75,000 that allows guests to book its 40 villas, each with a pool and large terrace, and enjoy amenities such as the large main pool, yoga classes, boat fleet, beach and restaurants exclusively with others in their group.

Sir Richard Branson ’s Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands has a buyout package starting at US$118,500 a night for 24 rooms that’s consistently booked throughout the year, according to a property representative. The rate includes meals and most activities, such as water skiing, snorkelling, and pickleball.

Weekapaug Inn, located in Westerly, R.I., introduced a buyout experience to commemorate its 125th anniversary this year. Called the Milestone Getaway, it encompasses the use of the hotel’s 33 rooms for two nights, meals and activities; the price is US$125,000.

Tom Parisi, an investment banker, and Adriana Destefanis, an asset manager, who live in Darien, Conn., bought out Weekapaug Inn for their wedding last October.

In addition to the wedding events, the couple’s more than 150 guests stayed busy by participating in diversions such as bike riding, birdwatching, stargazing, and s’mores by the fire pit.

“Having a private element is very unique in our view,” Parisi says. “We felt like we were in our own massive house and able to spend quality time with our family and friends. And we could be loud without worrying about other guests. We didn’t want to just have a wedding. We wanted an experience, and the buyout gave us that.”

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Beyond the Suite Life. Total Hotel Buyouts Are Growing in Popularity.

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.