Due to border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitality and tourism industry was given a chance to re-imagine and re-invent itself. New Zealand’s borders were shut to international tourists for 28 months, giving it a considerable amount of time to strategise about what the future of tourism would be. One of these strategies was to attract more desirable tourists. New Zealand was not alone in this pursuit: other countries wanted to move towards a more sustainable tourism model, attracting high-value tourists instead of the default of mass tourism that popular destinations had suffered from. This conceptual article discusses how Tourism New Zealand started to re-imagine luxury hospitality to encourage high-value tourists to come to New Zealand.