Why do luxury hotels smell so good?

A year after staying in a nice hotel, you’ll have forgotten almost everything except the smell. That fragrance, designed to make you feel, for a while, slightly superior to the rest of humanity, will have been stored somewhere in your hippocampus with 65% accuracy, according to some studies. The day you return, you’ll immediately recognize the feeling: you’ve arrived at a place that smells expensive.

The creation of this fragrance, which is usually made to order, can take between six months and a year, and follows the hotel’s instructions to the letter. I have in my email the briefing that the Mandarin Oriental Ritz Madrid sent to a perfumer in 2020 to create its fragrance. Six pages with all sorts of historical and architectural details about the building, illustrious guests, garden vegetation, emblematic aromas of the capital, and the requirement that it be “a unique perfume, exclusively designed” for the hotel. The document explains that the goal is for the visitor to perceive, upon arrival, “a unique, clear yet subtle aroma that accompanies them throughout their stay.” The resulting fragrance for this legendary Madrid hotel is a musky floral with top notes of mandarin, lemon, and freesia, and a base of musk, cashmere, amber, and patchouli. But if you don’t have a trained nose, you won’t recognize that olfactory pyramid.

Meanwhile, at the five-star hotel La Mamounia, the fragrance is a balm for the senses, especially if you enter after wandering through the narrow streets of Marrakech’s Medina, filled with the scents of spices and incense. Its fragrance, created by perfumer Olivia Giacobetti, is a true classic: a blend of date and cedarwood. You can take it home in a candle, diffuser, or perfume bottle sold at the hotel itself (also online).

George Orwell said in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) that smell is the deepest cause of classism: “For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.” And Karl Schlögel, in his book The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, recounts “the olfactory class struggle” that broke out in the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg after the Russian Revolution.

“Theatre performances are no longer reserved for an exclusive and educated audience which has internalized the rules of such events, with their intervals, applause and moments of silence,” he writes. “The odour of the front lines and the bivouac, the sweat of factory work, the stench of overcrowded train carriages – it all forces its way into the perfumed and deodorized realm of high culture, bringing new sounds and new smells perceived by the usual bourgeois and aristocratic audiences as being unpleasant, uncultivated, repellent, repugnant – indeed, barbaric."

There is nothing innocent about a designed scent, and its impact on memory — through the amygdala and the hippocampus — will last far longer than visual or auditory stimuli.

Sumptuous fragrances not only give shape and coherence to the experience of luxury; they cast a certain spell over the guest who, according to figures cited by companies and hotel chains, will likely spend 20% more time in a hotel with the right scent — and spend more money. At global luxury fairs, insiders insist that aromas “are not decoration but hotel infrastructure,” and high‑end hospitality groups take them very seriously. Just look at the value of the global ambient‑fragrance industry: in 2025, it stood at $1.5 billion, and it is expected to grow by 30% by 2028.

In reality, the hotel industry hasn’t discovered anything new. According to Clara Buedo, perfume researcher and author of El perfume en España (Perfume in Spain), Disney began dispersing specific scents throughout its theme parks in the mid‑20th century to create immersive experiences.

“They used the smell of popcorn and freshly baked cookies to make the visit to the park more enticing and to draw people into the shops to buy food,” says Buedo. “To do this, they used a device called the Smelltizer, a kind of cannon that released bursts of aroma at specific moments and locations, creating a sort of olfactory soundtrack (instead of a musical one) that, in some way, would remain imprinted in visitors’ memories.”

Buedo says this was the precursor to the strategy later perfected by airlines, clothing stores, and hotel chains. “Using scent as an additional layer of the experience to influence consumer behavior,” she summarizes, citing olfactory‑neuroscience expert Laura López‑Mascaraque.

If you walk through Madrid’s Plaza de las Descalzas and approach the former Monte de Piedad building — now the Edition Madrid hotel — you’ll smell it: the signature fragrance used in every Edition around the world, created by Le Labo with the personal involvement of Ian Schrager, the hotel’s founder and the mind behind the legendary Studio 54. The scent, built on notes of black tea, Sicilian bergamot, cedar, and musk, leaves a strong impression on guests. Legend has it that the formula was designed specifically to be a nightmare for anyone trying to copy it. The Black Tea, as it’s called, is as recognizable an element as the iconic white staircase that leads into the hotel.

“It was created to encapsulate the Edition style worldwide,” says Beatriz Medina, the marketing director. Anyone who wants to bring the sophisticated fragrance home can do so without even setting foot in the hotel: the brand’s website sells the home diffuser for €136 ($160) and the candle for €56 ($66).

“The wisdom of perfumers and the use of noble materials create an olfactory narrative that accompanies the space without trying to become the protagonist,” Medina explains.

One of the key challenges for the noses who craft the scent of luxury is finding an aroma that is culturally neutral — neither masculine nor feminine, unobtrusive, and unlikely to interfere with the creation of a positive memory. Experts note that negative associations form more quickly with unpleasant smells, which makes this a high‑risk practice.

“How we perceive scents depends on the baggage carried by our olfactory memory,” Buedo says, adding that for her, the smell of luxury is that of leather or fine suede, the notes that often perfume Hermès or Loewe boutiques. “But for others, the smell of leather can be overwhelming,” she acknowledges.

The perfumers behind the great temples of luxury avoid creating fragrances with notes that might clash with a specific culture, and they tend to work with fresh citrus essences and floral notes they consider universal. They know, for instance, that vanilla resonates strongly with U.S. customers, while sandalwood appeals to Indian consumers, or that people born before the 1940s prefer natural aromas such as grass, whereas younger generations are more attuned to synthetic notes. With all that information, they must build a fragrance that everyone will perceive as expensive.

“A scent that makes a guest feel it’s worth paying $800 or $1,000 to spend the night there,” says Marcelo Díaz, a nose who has created several hotel fragrances.

“Rare and high‑priced aromatic materials — such as iris pallida rhizomes, damask rose, or natural ambergris — also trigger that perception of luxury, perhaps even more so for experienced users who understand how difficult they are to obtain,” Buedo adds.

Experts describe a recurring olfactory pattern in these kinds of fragrances, where white tea is almost always present — a molecule researchers associate with sensations of calm, cleanliness, and refinement. The intuition of money, elegance, and grandeur — that unmistakable “rich” smell — is built with notes of oud, amber, leather, or patchouli. Then comes the challenge of distributing it effectively across large, high‑ceilinged spaces. Typically, a diffuser is connected to the ventilation system to ensure that the scent quite literally follows the guest everywhere.

Smell is the most primal of the senses, and you will never know whether you’re fixated on that scent because it reminds you of a hotel, or because you want to relive that fleeting feeling of being the VIP of the universe that the hotel made you feel. And in that ambiguity lies the power of the smell of luxury.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition