A short note on four confirmed developments across the destinations I work in most, filed after a week of following up the announcements rather than repeating them.
1. Saint-Tropez reopened itself in a single weekend.
Three of the gulf's defining addresses came back within forty-eight hours of each other this spring: Hotel Byblos on April 22, under owner Floirat Signatures, with eight new suites by Laura Gonzalez and four rooms by Wanda Jelmini, a Technogym-equipped fitness centre, and Byblos Beach relaunched under chef Allan Gonthier; and, on April 24, both Althoff Villa Belrose, with newly redesigned gastronomic spaces, and COMO Le Beauvallon — the 1914 Belle Époque property on the Beauvallon side of the gulf, relaunched under COMO Hotels & Resorts with 42 rooms and suites, a Yannick Alléno restaurant, and an eight-minute speedboat shuttle to the port. Three grande dames, one Provençal spring, no coordination between the owners beyond the fact that April is when the season starts. Worth noting for anyone who assumed the Beauvallon side of the gulf was a quieter alternative to Saint-Tropez proper — COMO's arrival, with a Yannick Alléno kitchen and a private-estate footprint, changes that comparison.
2. Monaco exported its own name for the first time.
The Société des Bains de Mer, which has run the Hôtel de Paris and the Monte-Carlo casino since 1863 and has never previously licensed the Monte-Carlo name outside the principality, bought the former Palace des Neiges in Courchevel 1850 in 2023 and confirmed, this year, that the project will open as "Monte-Carlo One — Courchevel," designed by Herzog & de Meuron, targeting the 2026/2027 winter season. It is the first hotel under a new international brand, Monte-Carlo One — Hotels & Residences, which SBM has said is intended to travel beyond this single address. An operator that has spent a century and a half not diluting a name is now testing whether it travels. Worth watching for where the second Monte-Carlo One lands.
3. The membership thesis got its receipts.
In May I wrote that the membership model had eaten the restaurant model. The clearest confirmation since is corporate, not culinary: Soho House completed its $2.7 billion take-private on January 29, led by Yucaipa Cos. founder Ron Burkle at $9 a share, with Ashton Kutcher joining the board as a new equity investor. The deal nearly collapsed in early January when MCR Hotels — whose chief executive Tyler Morse also joins the board — came up short on its committed capital, and was rescued by a restructured financing package in the final days. A members' club with restaurants and hotel rooms attached, not a restaurant group with a members' floor bolted on, just changed hands at a price that says the market has settled the argument about which one is the core business.
4. Two destinations are quietly rationing themselves.
Ibiza has cut its licensed tourist-apartment stock from roughly 7,300 beds at its 2017 peak to under 1,500 today — a reduction of nearly 80%, with about half of that adjustment landing in 2025 alone, the result of a moratorium on new tourism licences in place since 2022 and a ban on apartment-block short-term lets that leaves only detached villas and pre-1956 fincas eligible. Greece, meanwhile, restructured its golden-visa pricing by zone in September 2024, setting the qualifying investment at €800,000 for Athens, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Santorini and other islands over 3,100 residents — roughly double the rate elsewhere in the country. Neither move is framed publicly as scarcity marketing. Both function as exactly that: two destinations that could have chased volume choosing, instead, to price and licence their way toward staying finite. For clients asking whether a villa on Ibiza or a residency route through Mykonos still makes sense, the answer is that both are now harder to get into than they were three years ago — which, for the right buyer, is the argument in favour, not against.
— Camille