Emerging Paradigms in Luxury: Understanding Luxury as an Embodied Experience in a Yoga Retreat Holiday

This chapter sets out to explore consumer-centred experiential luxury from the perspective of a human body. We focus on the various practices related to a yoga retreat holiday experience in luxury hotel premises, such as encounters with hotel facilities, employees, nature and atmosphere besides yoga practice. Attention to bodily practices and affectivities on a yoga retreat holiday experience enables discussing intangible luxury beyond the traditional debate of luxury as related to product or brand features or experiential luxury focused only on the cognitive multisensory perceptions. The autoethnographic approach supports unwrapping the subtle affectual sensations building individual luxury in the experience setting. The data are gathered along with the first author's fieldwork during her three yoga retreat holidays in Thailand. The embodied investigation of tourist practices inducing luxury in the premises of a luxury hotel enriches the discussion of the co-creation between human bodies and the experience setting. It draws attention to the dynamic, situational and sensitive nature of luxury in the contemporary touristic experience of a yoga retreat holiday. It also advances the existing research on the body, practice and knowing by featuring the way luxury is emerging within the practice of yoga retreat holiday. By challenging the paradigm of luxury sensed only through our five external senses, our findings on the being, doing and moving body deepen the understanding of the co-creation and sensitiveness, affecting the subjective, transparent and embodied understanding of luxury experience.