Two completely different stories caught my eye this week.

One was Starbucks turning a London store into a Devil Wears Prada pop-up – complete with fashion pieces, theatrical staging and live TikTok shopping. The other was an online review from a journalist reviewing Hilton’s McLaren Racing themed hotel suite at The Trafalgar St. James London, designed to immerse guests in the world of Formula 1.

Different sectors, different audiences and wildly different price points. And neither of them are really about coffee or hotel rooms. They’re both responding to exactly the same thing: people increasingly want to escape reality.

Not necessarily because hospitality is suddenly becoming more imaginative, but because the world has become much more exhausting. Between the cost-of-living crisis, ongoing tensions across the Middle East, and a constant stream of geopolitical noise, bad news and uncertainty playing out globally, everyday life now comes with a fairly relentless backdrop of stress.

Behavioural researchers have even started calling it the “permacrisis” – a permanently unsettled environment that people are learning to live inside. And when people feel they have less control over the real world, they start seeking out environments where they can control how they feel.

When that’s the context, people don’t just want nice experiences anymore. They want moments of psychological departure. Increasingly, they’re not just escaping occasionally – they’re trying to build repeatable, everyday forms of escape into their lives, whether that’s through fandom, nostalgia or fully immersive environments. And increasingly, hospitality is where they find it.

The Emotion: Stepping into another world

For years we’ve talked about hospitality in terms of “experience”, but what’s emerging now is something slightly different: world-building.

The Starbucks activation doesn’t just sell coffee – it temporarily drops people into the world of Runway. The McLaren suite isn’t just a themed room – it lets guests imagine themselves as part of the F1 universe.

And when you look around the industry, the same pattern appears everywhere. Immersive restaurants, fandom-driven pop-ups, concept hotels built around music, film or gaming. Even the rise of era-led bars like Bunga 90 concept in London, where (judging by my wife’s recent 40th celebrations with her friends) a group can disappear into a full-blown nostalgia trip for a night, complete with nods to Mr Blobby, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Blockbuster.

These environments do something powerful. They give people permission to be somewhere – and someone – else for a while. And that’s a surprisingly valuable service in 2026.

The Economics: Escape is serious business

Of course, escapism isn’t just emotionally powerful, it’s commercially powerful too. Experiences that transport people somewhere else – culturally, emotionally or imaginatively – consistently outperform more conventional formats.

Why? Because they do three things extremely well: they create talkability, they generate shareable moments, and they build stronger emotional attachment to the brand. Which, in simple terms, means higher dwell time, higher spend and significantly stronger recall.

In other words, they’re designed for the world we now live in, where the guest experience doesn’t end when someone leaves the building. It continues on Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp groups long afterwards. And that’s exactly how venues become destinations.

The Sweet Spot: Designing places people can escape into

For hospitality brands, this shift is worth paying attention to. Because the venues that will win the next decade won’t simply be the most beautiful, the most luxurious or even the most innovative. They’ll be the ones that understand something much more fundamental. People don’t just want places to go anymore. They want worlds to step into.

And the brands that can create those worlds – even if only for the length of a coffee, a drink or a night’s stay – will build the kind of emotional loyalty that spreadsheets alone can’t explain.

But the P&L will certainly feel it, because in a world like this, escape isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s a need