Our week of working remotely in the mountains of Utah has come to an end. Being on mountain time meant early mornings every day. But it also meant being able to enjoy the evenings, including sunsets like the one shown here at the top of Ensign Peak. This was my first time really experiencing the Salt Lake City area in the summer, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. It is a beautiful place, and one that still feels under the radar once you exclude its global draw as a ski and snowboard destination. I also had a great time capturing it on my camera. So I'm excited to share my latest NFT photography collection -- Utah. All of the photos were taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 (35mm) and can be viewed and purchased over here on Foundation.

Today's post is a question for all of you: What would you say are the coolest and most remarkable boutique hotels in the world right now?

What is clear to me is that travel (and flexible work) will continue to be a growing market and that there is demand for a variety of different hospitality offerings.

Sometimes people might want to stay in an Airbnb (which is usually a property owned by an individual or individuals).

Sometimes people might want to stay in a branded and/or membership-based rental such as a Sonder or a Wander (which, in the case of Wander, is a collection of properties owned by the same company).

And sometimes people might want to stay in a tried-and-true hotel.

I think that all of these offerings serve different needs. And at the end of the day, I don't believe that Airbnbs, or whatever permutation they take, will ever replace the best hotels. There are things you can get in a hotel that you can't get elsewhere.

So today I am hoping to crowdsource some of the best examples from all of you. Thanks in advance for any ideas you might send over.

I was reading about Wander last night before bed. For those of you who aren't familiar, they are a startup that is building a network of smart homes around the world so that people can live and work remotely. You rent these homes like you would a home on Airbnb, but the difference here is that Wander owns all of the homes and is working to create a very unique and consistent kind of experience. They also offer a membership that costs $200 per year and gives you benefits like discounts on bookings and early access to new properties. So far the company has raised $27 million to help build out this vision.

This is all very interesting to me because I think it's a great idea, and because 20 some years ago I wrote a business plan with a friend of mine that was almost identical to this. We were both still in undergrad and we had this hypothesis that a lot of people would love to find a way to live as citizens of the world. We obviously never did anything with that plan, but in looking back we were probably too early, even if we were right about people's latent desires. Today, things feel very different. I think there's little doubt that knowledge working has become more flexible. So I suspect we will see a lot more of these kinds of ideas going forward.