Luxury goods sales will grow between 1% and 4% this year. Experiences will grow between 3% and 7%. This counts as a trend shift in the same way that eating a salad once counts as a lifestyle change.
The report calls it "inheritourism." That's when you take your dead grandfather's money and spend it on a safari instead of a watch. Progress looks different when you've never had to choose between groceries and rent.
Retail traders will read this headline and think they've discovered the next rotation. They'll buy Marriott calls and Airbnb shares because experiences are hot now. They'll ignore that luxury spending growth of any kind requires having money in the first place, which statistically speaking, they do not.
The real punchline hides in the percentages. Experiences growing at 3% to 7% sounds impressive until you remember that's measured against a base of people who were already buying experiences. These aren't new customers. They're the same people who bought the handbag last year, now buying a week in Tuscany instead. The total addressable market remains exactly as small as it's always been, which is to say, not you.
Some portfolio manager in Greenwich is already pitching a thematic ETF built around this. Luxury experience stocks bundled together with a 0.85% expense ratio. The marketing deck will say something about demographic shifts and changing consumer preferences. What it won't say is that the fund exists to extract fees from people who mistake a Bain report for an investment thesis.
Inheritourism works as a concept because the money was free and guilt needs somewhere to go. Turns out a hotel room in Positano photographs better than another leather good, and Instagram doesn't have a character limit. The Birkin bag stays home while the sunset gets 47 likes and three comments, all from other people who also inherited money and also feel weird about it.
By next year they'll call it something else and the growth rates will flip again, but the people spending the money will still be the same people, and you still won't be one of them.
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