Classic Vacations Expands to 2,600 Hotels—and Plans to Build the Tech to Match
CEO Melissa Krueger says the luxury wholesaler is rolling out new booking tools to help advisors navigate a rapidly growing hotel portfolio.
The entrance to The Beverly Hills Hotel, one of more than 1,000 properties recently added to Classic Vacations’ preferred hotel portfolio, which now totals 2,600 hotels worldwide. Photo: Courtesy of Dorchester Collection
Adding more than 1,000 hotels to a booking platform sounds like growth. But it also creates a new problem: how to help advisors actually navigate all that inventory.
Classic Vacations is confronting exactly that challenge after expanding its preferred hotel portfolio from roughly 1,400 properties to 2,600 worldwide late last month. The luxury wholesaler’s response is a new booking platform, expected to launch later this year, designed to help advisors search, compare, and assemble increasingly complex luxury itineraries.
The expansion comes as demand for luxury travel experiences continues to surge.
“You can only buy so many things,” CEO Melissa Krueger said during an interview with Luxury Travel Report. “In the luxury market, it’s interesting to watch how goods are kind of stagnating or even down, but luxury experiences are up.”
For Krueger, who joined the company in 2022, Classic Vacations’ expansion and the technology push are two sides of the same strategy. “I want [advisors] to have more time to really be able to lean into their customer and forge that relationship or to lean into their knowledge about that destination, or that hotel or city,” Krueger said.
The portfolio expansion reflects how luxury travel itself is evolving. Trips are becoming more layered—more destinations, more hotels, more moving parts—and advisors are increasingly responsible for stitching those elements together.
Part of the shift, Krueger noted, is cultural. She believes luxury travelers are increasingly drawn to experiences that feel slower, more personal, and sometimes even nostalgic. “For the first time in generations, people are saying, ‘remember the good old days,’” said Krueger. “There’s a little bit of nostalgia happening.”
That sentiment shows up in hotel marketing and design, as well as in how travelers want to spend their time once they arrive. Instead of staying entirely inside a resort ecosystem, many luxury travelers want to spend more time exploring neighborhoods, restaurants, and local culture.
And those preferences are also shaping the types of hotels advisors recommend. A smaller boutique property without a full-service restaurant, Krueger posits, may still appeal to luxury travelers if it places them closer to a destination’s cultural life.
Classic’s expanded preferred portfolio reflects that broader shift. The new lineup spans North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, with additions including the Beverly Hills Hotel, The Peninsula New York, Cavo Tagoo Santorini, 1 Hotel Mayfair in London, Banyan Tree Dubai, The Sukhothai Bangkok Hotel, and Kapama River Lodge in South Africa. The expansion also marks Classic Vacations’ first partnership with Kempinski Hotels.
Krueger said the decision to grow the portfolio came largely from advisor feedback asking for more preferred options in destinations where their clients were already traveling.
“The product team did an excellent job just going through and determining where we had the opportunity to add more preferred product,” Krueger told LTR. “It is our reservation agents, our supervisors, our leadership in reservations, and our sales organization out in the marketplace that come to us and share, ‘We’ve got more demand in Switzerland. We’ve got a ton of demand in the United States.’”
The aim is not simply more supply but more completeness—allowing advisors to assemble entire itineraries without jumping across multiple booking systems.
Technology is the other half of that equation. According to Krueger, Classic’s upcoming booking platform will incorporate AI tools designed to help advisors sort through the growing inventory and surface relevant supplier information more quickly.
“The opportunity to utilize AI to make the travel advisor stronger, better, more integrated with what the supply knowledge is,” Krueger said, “I think that’s going to be a really interesting factor that we bring to it.”
Classic’s existing online booking engine already accounts for roughly half of its FIT transactions. The new system is expected to deepen those capabilities while continuing to work alongside the company’s reservations team and account development specialists.
For Krueger, the goal is not to replace human expertise but to give advisors the time to use it.
“If you love what you do, you’re playing your sport,” she said. “I want to solve for them having more time to do their craft and forge the relationships with their customers.”
