My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew