Luxury Hotels Are Opening New Members-Only Clubs to Cater to an Overlooked Group: The Locals

Gleneagles is about to spread its wings. This spring, the golfing resort in the Scottish Highlands will add a second site, its 33-room Townhouse, in a conversion of the Bank of Scotland (formerly the British Linen Company) in Edinburgh’s city center. This will be more than just a luxury hotel, though: 1,000 locals will also be invited to join its members club, paying annual dues of around $2,900 for the privilege.

And while one restaurant on the property will remain general access, all other onsite offerings, including the rooftop bar and extensive gym and wellness facilities, will be available only to current guests and those select in-towners; members will also receive priority in-room booking and discounted rates. Gleneagles managing director Conor O’Leary tells Robb Report it’s a natural model for a hotel that started out as a golf club. There’s also a gap in the market in the Scottish capital, he adds, since there’s no standalone members club or Soho House outpost there. “We know a lot of members that come to Gleneagles live and work in Edinburgh,” he explains. “So we think the 33 rooms will be taken up by people we know already, one way or another.”

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Courtesy of Gleneagles

Gleneagles Townhouse isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, high-end hotels worldwide are creating similar programs aiming to appeal as much to nearby residents as to visitors. The soon-to-debut 35-room Aster Hotel in Hollywood will follow the Gleneagles model of selling memberships as well as rooms; stay at one of the 700-square-foot suites at this adults-only hotel and you become a temporary passholder to its amenities alongside 3,000 handpicked locals, each paying $3,600 per year. Aster’s operator is Salt Hotels, a boutique firm co-founded by David Bowd, an alum of André Balazs’s empire, which includes Chateau Marmont in LA. (Some may remember that Balazs had announced plans to reconfigure that de facto celebrity clubhouse into a formal, members-driven program by the end of 2020, though it hasn’t happened yet and there’s no word on when the transformation will take place.)