The Branded Abyss: On Tourism’s Thin Line Between Ephemeron and Eternity
When I was young, during those interstitial years of university and master degree where one’s brain is a sponge for both Kant and the Kama Sutra, I worked as an Animatore at a Valtur resort. To call it “work” feels like calling Kafka’s The Trial a “job application.”
Valtur, for those uninitiated, was less a hotel chain than a cult of joy, a sunburned syndicate of Italian middle-class hedonists who flocked to its resorts not for the destinations—often lumped into the fraying edges of Calabria or Sicily, places where the “beach” was a postage stamp of imported sand and the “sea” a tepid puddle the color of over-steeped Lipton—but for the brand.
The brand was the thing. The brand was a covenant. Guests didn’t come for the rooms, which were Soviet-chic at best (air conditioning a fickle deity), nor for the vistas, which were often a diorama of scrubland and parking lots. They came for the Equipe—that crack squad of multilingual, over-caffeinated counselors whose job was to transmute the quotidian into carnival. Mornings began with calisthenics set to Europop; afternoons dissolved into water volleyball and archery; evenings climaxed with talent shows where accountants from Milan donned feather boas and lip-synced to Raffaella Carrà. I once saw a man weep openly at checkout, his face a rictus of grief, as if he were leaving behind not a resort but a lover. Another guest, a septuagenarian widow, told me through mascara-streaked tears that Valtur had given her “a reason to laugh again,” which is a hell of a thing to hear when you’re 22 and your job title translates to “Professional Smile Haver.”
This was the late ’80s, early ’90s, the zenith of what I’ll call Experiential Brandalism—the era when tourism conglomerates like Club Med, Sandals, and Valtur sold not places, but vibes. The destination was incidental, a mere coordinates placeholder. The brand was the locus of meaning. Club Med’s “Antidote to Civilization” slogan wasn’t just marketing; it was a metaphysical promise. You weren’t paying for white sand; you were paying for the idea of escape, for the temporary erasure of your IBM-drone self. The rooms were shabby? The food suspiciously auctionato? Irrelevant. The brand had colonized your limbic system. You weren’t in Sicily; you were in Club Med?, a sovereign nation of enforced merriment, where the currency was conga lines and the politics were pure serotonin.
But then something happened. A Great Rupture. The brands, perhaps infected by the same late-capitalist hubris that convinces hedge fund managers to buy yachts named Audacity, decided they needed to “elevate” their offerings. Valtur swapped its sticky-floored discos for marble lobbies. Club Med traded its raffish Gentils Organisateurs for sommeliers and infinity pools. Sandals, once a paean to couples’ schmaltz (think heart-shaped tubs and “love nests”), began marketing itself as “luxury inclusive,” a phrase that reeks of oxymoronic desperation, like “jumbo shrimp” or “Microsoft cool.” The brands abandoned their emotional USP—the communal delirium, the unapologetic cheesiness—to chase the dragon of luxury. And guess what? It backfired. Miserably.
Why? Because luxury is a derivative asset. It’s inert, interchangeable, a commodity. The Ritz-Carlton in Bali and the Ritz-Carlton in Cleveland are separated only by palm trees and room-service mango sticky rice. Luxury doesn’t mean anything; it just costs. The moment Club Med et al. pivoted to thread counts and truffle oil, they became redundant. They entered a market already glutted with Four Seasons and Aman Resorts, brands that had mastered the art of selling exclusivity as a numinous good. The experiential brands had traded their souls for a fistful of Sferra linens, and in doing so, they became ghosts.
Contrast this with the rise of destination-first entities like One&Only, a brand that (in theory) merges place and product. One&Only Resorts are hyper-specific: the Maldives property is all overwater villas and coral reefs; the Rwandan outpost leans into gorilla treks and misty volcanoes. The brand isn’t the draw; the place is. But here’s the rub: even One&Only can’t resist the siren song of brand hegemony. Their tagline—“One&Only creates exceptional, immersive experiences that evoke the unique spirit of each destination”—is a masterclass in corporate doublespeak. It’s a brand claiming to erase itself in service of the destination, which is like McDonald’s claiming to erase itself in service of the potato.
So where does this leave us?
The tourism industry now oscillates between two poles: Brands Without Places (the old Valtur model, now gasping for relevance) and Places Without Brands (the Instagrammable “hidden gems” overrun by influencers, their authenticity vacuum-sealed for content). Both feel inadequate, like choosing between a screensaver of a waterfall and standing under one that charges $30 for a photo op.
The future, I suspect, lies in a synthesis—a return to the primal scream of experiential branding, but with a twist. Imagine a resort that leverages the emotional engineering of Valtur’s Equipe (the forced joy, the curated camaraderie) but roots it in a destination’s actual culture. Not the Club Med model of parachuting in and building a bubble of generic “fun,” but a collaboration, where the brand amplifies the location’s idiosyncrasies instead of suffocating them. Picture a Valtur in Oaxaca where mezcal tastings double as storytelling sessions with local palenqueros, or a Club Med in Kyoto where sushi-making classes are taught by third-generation itamae. The brand becomes a curator, not a colonizer.
This isn’t just nostalgia talking. Studies show Millennials and Gen Z travelers crave “authenticity,” a word so overused it’s practically a Simpson’s meme. But what they’re really craving is meaning—the sense that their vacation isn’t just a tax on their Instagram grid, but a thread in their life’s narrative. The brands that thrive will be those that can weave the experience of place into their DNA, transforming destinations into stages for human connection.
Will it work? Dunno. The tourism industry is a Hydra of perverse incentives, and the allure of luxury’s fat margins is hard to resist. But I’ll never forget the Valtur guests who wept at departure, their grief a testament to the brand’s power to create something real—something that, for a week or two, felt like belonging. The future of tourism isn’t destination or brand. It’s the alchemy of both: a place where the sand is real, the laughter is loud, and the air conditioning works just enough to make you appreciate the sweat.
The tourism-industrial complex, in its current iteration, is a necropolis of half-baked paradoxes. We’re told to “live like a local” while paying premium rates for artisanal localness? dispensed by a concierge named Klaus. We’re sold “transformative journeys” that too often transform only our Instagram feeds. And yet, beneath the rubble of influencer itineraries and algorithmic travel guides, there’s a tremor—a faint, persistent pulse that suggests the pendulum is swinging back. Not toward destinations, exactly, but toward brands resurrected as emotional ecosystems. The future of tourism isn’t luxury. It isn’t “authenticity.” It’s the return of the brand as a vessel—a vessel for the kind of joy that leaves sunburned streaks on your cheeks from laughing, or crying, or both.
Think of it this way: humans are not wired for raw geography. We’re wired for story. A beach is just a beach until a brand drapes it in mythos, until it becomes the stage for your kid’s first snorkel, your college reunion hangover, your post-divorce rebirth. The Valtur resorts of yore understood this. They didn’t sell Sicily; they sold Sicily-as-theater, with you as both audience and protagonist. The destination was inert until the brand electrified it, until the Equipe turned buffet dinners into raucous feasts and strangers into confidants. The rooms were grim? The wine tasted like battery acid? No matter. The brand had hacked your dopamine receptors. You weren’t buying a vacation; you were buying plot points for your life.
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But here’s the critical shift: the brands of tomorrow can’t just be nostalgia acts. They can’t peddle the same forced jollity of the ’90s, not when today’s travelers have a Spidey-sense for insincerity. The new experiential brand must be a chameleon—part anthropologist, part circus ringmaster. It must thread the needle between curation and chaos, between the raw grit of place and the manicured euphoria of brand. Imagine a Club Med that doesn’t plop a generic “village” onto a Thai beach, but instead trains its Gentils Organisateurs in Muay Thai and street-food lore, turning the resort into a launchpad for midnight motorbike raids on Bangkok’s flower markets. Or a Sandals that swaps its clichéd couples’ kitsch for partnerships with Jamaican poets and Maroon elders, where sunset happy hours double as oral-history jams. The brand isn’t the antagonist of the destination; it’s the amplifier, the hype-man for the locale’s soul.
This isn’t just speculative fluff. Look at the data: Gen Z’s travel habits skew toward “experiential spending” (a term that would’ve made my Valtur guests snort their Negronis). They’re not collecting passport stamps; they’re collecting emotional heirlooms. A 2023 study found that 68% of travelers under 30 would rather spend on a “meaningful group tour” than a five-star hotel. Translation: they want the Equipe back. They want to cry at checkout. But they also want the story to feel unscripted, rooted in the soil of the destination. The brands that thrive will be those that can bottle lightning—pairing Valtur’s dopamine loops with the spontaneity of a Kyoto ryokan or a Oaxacan fiesta.
Crucially, this demands a new breed of brand. Not the corporate monoliths of the ’90s, bloated on shareholder reports, but agile, almost shamanic entities that orchestrate human connection. Picture a startup that partners with Sardinian shepherds to offer “Pecorino & Psytrance” retreats, where guests make cheese by day and dance to DJ sets in Neolithic ruins by night. Or a revived Valtur, rebranded as Valtur Volta, that plants its resorts in post-industrial towns (think Detroit, Naples, Belgrade), training locals as Animatori to turn abandoned factories into immersive theaters of urban rediscovery. The destination matters, but only because the brand makes it matter—by fusing it with collective memory, mischief, and the faintly embarrassing thrill of karaoke.
And what of luxury? It’ll linger, of course, as it always does—a lobotomized aristocrat sipping Dom Pérignon in the corner. But the real innovation will happen downstream, where the brands embrace friction. Because emotion isn’t born from infinity pools; it’s born from the blisters of a poorly planned hike, the panic of a language barrier, the euphoria of a dance floor where the music’s too loud and the drinks are too sweet. The future of tourism belongs to brands that weaponize these moments, that curate controlled collapses of comfort, knowing that joy is a byproduct of surrender.
In 2040, when the last TikTok influencer has fossilized into a pose of faux-candid serenity, the tourists who remain will flock to brands that hurt a little. Brands that leave sand in their shoes and strangers’ numbers in their phones. Brands that don’t shy from tears—tears of departure, of exhaustion, of joy so acute it borders on grief. The destination will be the canvas, but the brand will be the brushstroke, the hand that daubs the world in colors we didn’t know we needed.
So yes, the future of tourism is the return of the brand. Not as a logo, but as a secular religion. Not as a product, but as a proxy for human hunger—for connection, for story, for the fleeting sense that we’re all, briefly, in this together.
FOOTNOTES