I don’t envy the Sphere security team when The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens there next year. Rice. Toast. Toilet paper. Squirt bottles. Lighters. Playing cards. Rubber gloves. (I see you, fellow former midnight screening regulars.) Then it occurred to me: Rocky Horror comes with 50 years of audience rituals. Sphere knows fans will try…
I still don’t think I’m a cruise person. And yet we just booked our second cruise in five months. For context, our favorite hotel in the world has 20 (twenty!) rooms. So a year ago, I’d have told you without ever having taken one that cruising wasn’t for me. I had more than a few…
What a Michelin-level restaurant group and a Disney cruise ship reveal about hospitality and customer loyalty, Over the past month, I had two very different hospitality experiences: consecutive nights at Gracious Hospitality venues in New York, and my first Disney cruise. On paper, they have almost nothing in common. Gracious Hospitality Management operates high-end dining…
Confession: I can’t handle a seven-course tasting menu anymore. Not because I don’t want to. Because I physically can’t. Roughly 8% of U.S. adults are now on GLP-1s (I’m one of them). Many projections suggest this number will at least double before the end of the decade. Meanwhile, restaurants are leaning further into longer formats:…
Chief Hedonist invited me to contribute a guest column on Las Vegas’s food and drink landscape. While I’ve written about the Vegas restaurant scene before, I took a different spin this time: organizing three dozen of the city’s best spots by appetite, mood, and personality. Read the post here: Vegas Eats: Choose Your Own Adventure.
We’ve always been a city of splurges. Whether an exclusive wine dinner, a Michelin-worthy repast, or a one-night-only chef collab, there’s no shortage of high-impact, big-ticket prix fixe tasting menu experiences in Las Vegas for those seeking them. In the right context, they’re worth every dollar. But in a summer marked by slower tourism, shakier…
Spotify has “Wrapped.” We have Taste Track. Just as Wrapped rounds up a listener’s habits and highlights, Taste Track is our midyear restaurant recap, reflecting how we ate dinner out in the first half of 2025. As strategic, analytical types, we turned the lens on ourselves: when and where we dined, how often, which new places stood…
(Originally published on Allied Global Marketing’s Knowledge page.) From AI-powered personalization to AR-enhanced environments, guest expectations are rapidly evolving. In this post, I explore key takeaways from CES 2025 and how forward-thinking entertainment and hospitality brands can embrace emerging tech to create smarter, more seamless guest journeys. Read the full article on the AGM website