Spreading The Wealth; High-end accommodations and services are cropping up in places they never did before.(Cover story)

Byline: Owen Matthews (With Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing, Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi and Anna Nemtsova in Moscow)

A decade ago, hotels in princely palaces in Rajasthan, India, were the preserve of wealthy Western tourists. "The only locals you'd see were either in the fields or serving you drinks," says London lawyer Rory White, a veteran India traveler. No longer. These days, you're less likely to see Europeans than wealthy Indians at the Lake Palace in Udaipur and well-to-do Chinese at the Red Capital Ranch boutique hotel near Beijing, with its gorgeous views of the Great Wall.

Across Eurasia, local middle-class travelers are increasingly choosing to vacation in their own countries. They've created a boom in domestic travel that has rapidly raised the level of accommodations and services. Many have traveled on package tours abroad, and are demanding the same amenities they found overseas, from spa treatments to high-thread-count sheets. And their demand for upscale travel is reaching even the most remote corners of the earth, from Tibet to Siberia, where posh hotels are opening in areas once hospitable only to backpackers. Richer tourists want "something more sophisticated than beaches and unlimited buffets," says Svetlana Gracheva of Moscow's exclusive "VIP Tours" agency--and that means trips far off the beaten path, from the once forbidden old city of Lhasa to the mountains of Tuva, on the Russian-Chinese border.

...