When we stayed at the Corinthia in Lisbon, the small touches in the room that stayed with me.
“Welcome back, Morton,” on the TV screen when we entered our room; the accessories, the waiter as he talked through our meal when he delivered room service.
None of these things was the reason we booked the hotel. But they became part of the reason we remembered it.
Now compare that with the service you can receive from some in professional services. The accountant or financial adviser who says they’ll call at 2 p.m. and calls at 3 with no explanation.
The report containing avoidable errors. The obvious AI-generated wording nobody bothered to check. Oftentimes, the expertise may be excellent, but the experience isn’t.
That gap matters, because your clients aren’t only comparing you with your competitors. They’re unfortunately comparing you with the best experience they’ve had anywhere. And right now the way people choose to spend their money is changing.
Where the money is moving
The annual Bain-Altagamma luxury study put global luxury spending at about €1.44 trillion in 2025. Beneath that headline, Bain described a “tectonic shift” away from luxury goods and towards experiences such as hospitality, cruises and fine dining.
The previous year showed the same pattern. In 2024, the segments Bain reported as growing were hospitality, cruises, yachts and gourmet dining, while personal luxury goods declined by around 2%. Luxury hospitality grew about 4%, to roughly €242 billion, and luxury cruises grew about 30%.
That said, Bain estimates the industry lost about 20 million consumers in 2025, as people bought less often, traded down, or moved their spending to experiences and pre-owned goods.
None of this is new, however; Pine and Gilmore described the shift from services to experiences in The Experience Economy in 1999.
What is striking now is how decisively the world’s most demanding customers are moving towards experiences, while at the same time, AI is creating a challenge for professional services by making information, analysis and production widely accessible. Read my earlier piece on what happens to the value of expertise.
A thought experiment
So I started to wonder: what would happen if firms professional services firms modelled how luxury does things? Not the marble reception desks or the champagne, but the service proposition behind them. The small things could make a big difference for clients?
Six things luxury does that firms could borrow
1. Sell the feeling, not the facilities
1. Sell the feeling, not the facilities
In luxury: A five-star hotel doesn’t advertise its 47 facilities, or explain why someone pays £1,500 for a room when a comfortable one costs £150. Guests are buying how the stay makes them feel: recognised, at ease, looked after.
In your company: Workshops, strategy sessions, audits, reports and tax reviews are your services. They’re necessary, but they aren’t why they pay more. A strategy workshop” is the service.
What the client notices: Clarity on what to focus on for the next three years ( which they may have been stuck on for ages) and what to stop doing is the value.
2. Know the guest before they arrive
In luxury: Systems quietly remember preferences, past visits and special occasions, so the person at the desk can greet you by name and get it right. The technology is the enabler and serves the human moment. It never becomes the moment.
In your company: Arrive already knowing the client’s market, their recent news, what you discussed last time, and what you promised. This doesn’t need to be an elaborate dossier. A one-page brief before every meeting is enough to change the conversation and make an impression.
What the client notices: The first meeting much more understood as you have taken the time to prepare.
3. Dedicated attention, not a queue
In luxury: Guests at the best resorts never have to compete for attention.
In your company: Most clients experience a cycle of meeting, report, invoice, silence. Instead, give them a named adviser they can bring a difficult decision, a pricing question, a competitor’s move or a leadership dilemma to, without having to book another session.
A client once needed to guidance on their IT system; coming from an IT background, I could review the proposal and talk to the project manager.
What the client notices: Relief, they did not have to manage it themself. When something important happens, they have someone to think it through with.
4. Access that’s interpreted, not just delivered
In luxury: Membership buys access to what ordinary customers can’t reach: priority, private spaces, early entry.
In your company: Access might mean small peer roundtables, introductions to specialist partners, or priority response when something goes wrong.
And when market, regulatory or competitor news breaks, don’t just forward it. Interpret it: here’s what happened, here’s why it matters to your business, and here’s what I’d be considering.
What the client notices: The value isn’t the information. It’s the interpretation.
5. Make complexity disappear
In luxury: The guest never sees the machinery.
In your company: Clients usually see all of it: complete this form, send that document again, speak to accounts, that’s another department.
A premium company says: we’ll take care of it. With every efficiency you find, you can pass it on as a lower price, or reinvest some of it in the client experience.
What the client notices: Fewer forms, fewer chasers, fewer surprises. Peace of mind
6. Create rituals worth retelling
In luxury: A great restaurant doesn’t just serve food. It tells the story of the ingredients, the chef and the place. The welcome, the turndown and the farewell become rituals guests remember.
In your firm: Give every engagement a signature moment. Instead of emailing a strategy report, create a presentation just focused on them: “This is where you were, the business you have today and where you will be in the future. Clients buy the future.
What the client notices: An engagement they remember and can describe to others.
What doesn’t transfer
This has limits, however. Luxury guests buy with emotion. Business clients have budgets, procurement processes and boards to answer to.
The experience has to be backed by results, and not every client wants high-touch service either.
And it doesn’t need to be expensive: most of the six ideas above take a little time, and commitment, which costs, more than money.
The Premium Gap
The Premium Gap is the difference between delivering competent work and creating an experience a client considers worth paying a premium for. I would posit that, before many AI tools took over, expertise filled most of that gap for a long time.
A different way to charge
This also changes how you charge. Nobody chooses a luxury hotel by working out the hourly cost of housekeeping.
When experiences are designed, packaged and evidenced, as luxury does, it’s all a very different proposition and you no longer have to justify an hourly fee or any fee for that matter with your expertise.
You’re charging for the experience and the value it creates. That takes a mindset shift as much as a price list change. Sometimes that is the hardest challenge.
How I’m applying this to my own work
When I applied this thinking to my own strategic advisory work, I realised I was already doing some of it.
One small thing I’ve done for years is send handwritten notes to clients (I also do this with friends and family). It costs almost nothing, takes a few minutes, and the value is immense, because the client knows I sat down, thought about them and wrote it myself.
Premium doesn’t always mean expensive. Sometimes it simply means considered.
More deliberately, this is the client experience I am setting out to create:
Intelligence. I know your world before I enter it.
Intimacy. Your strategy is built around your business, not around my framework.
Access. You can reach me when an important decision arises.
Architecture. Together, we redesign your future and the parts of the business that create and capture value.
Immersion. I intend to create a safe space for difficult conversations- this is a tremendous value add, and one thing AI cannot usurp.
Continuity. I implement with you as the strategy becomes reality.
What would your version of this list look like?
Where the real conversation begins
Luxury has shown that when the basic product is widely available, value moves to your ‘experience’ of it. My feeling is that professional services need to go the same way, whether you run an IT company, an accountancy firm, a law firm, or a property-management business. Experience will be the differentiator.
The company that thrive will be the ones that stop selling only what they know and start deliberately designing what it’s like to work with them. I’m not sure anyone has the full answer yet, including me. That’s why I’d like to hear yours.
If your competitors have similar expertise and your clients can access much of the same information through AI what makes your firm worth paying more for?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and I’ll write back with my view.
Until we meet.
