Today’s super-rich travelers want luxury. They want personalized attention. They want non-cookie-cutter hotels with impeccable service and private villas with personal butlers. They want to never, ever, have to wait, stand in line or be herded around with other people.
Most of all, said Carlo Nocella, head of global sales at Vavius Club, the loyalty program for a destination management company in Italy, they want “to feel that they have something that other people cannot achieve.”
What that looks like is the preoccupation of an ever expanding, ever more elaborate travel infrastructure — travel advisers, concierge services and members’ clubs — catering to the extravagant needs and money-is-no-object whims of ultra-high-net-worth clients.
Roughly defined as people who have investable assets of at least $30 million and are prepared to pay, say, thousands of dollars a night for a hotel room or tens of thousands of dollars for a villa, these clients are in turn fueling an arms race in the world of high-end leisure. The goal is to offer the most fabulous, the most opulent, the most individualized and the most singular properties, experiences and services imaginable.
For Mr. Nocella, whose company, Virtuous Travel & Concierge, works with travel advisers to plan and execute trips for high-end clients, that means that “we don’t just sell vacations,” he said. “We provide experiences that match with the client’s wildest demands and expectations.”
Interviewed in December as he sat in Vavius Club’s elegant booth at the International Luxury Travel Market’s annual expo in Cannes, Mr. Nocella gave some examples of clients for whom standard V.I.P. treatment was not enough.
The client who wanted the color red eradicated from his hotel room. The client who wanted his vacation to include a treat for his teenage son: a soccer game in which the son would play with big-name professional players in one of Italy’s national stadiums.
And the client who demanded a hotel room with a west-facing window wherein “the sun had to set on the horizon, not behind a tree or a mountain, but directly over the sea,” Mr. Nocella said. (He was able to locate such a room, in Portofino.)
Jack Ezon, the founder and managing director of Embark Beyond, a New York-based “luxury travel advisory,” said that to high-end clients, luxury is as much about emotions as it is about a specific tangible thing.
“You want to feel more special than anyone else,” he said.
Travel’s Booming High End
Roughly 2,500 exhibitors and 2,500 luxury travel advisers came to Cannes this year, a tenfold increase from the expo’s first year, in 2001, and a sign of the expanding importance of the luxury market. According to a report by the Dublin-based analytics firm Research and Markets, the luxury travel market — defined as appealing to “affluent travelers seeking exclusive, personalized and immersive experiences that blend comfort, culture and customization” — was valued at $1.77 trillion in 2025 and is projected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2033, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 3.4 percent.
The growth, the report says, can be attributed to “increasing disposable income among high-net-worth individuals, expansion of international tourism, growth of premium hospitality infrastructure, rising demand for experiential travel and increased availability of luxury travel services.”
The ILTM exhibitors’ booths — made to look like libraries, living rooms and fancy office-break areas; kitted out with wall-to-wall carpeting, palm trees, paintings, photographs and bookshelves; and offering espresso, pastries, regional treats, candy and Champagne even to expo-goers idly wandering by — were as luxurious as the products the companies were pitching.
Each offering seemed more over the top than the one before. Resort villas equipped with cinemas, swimming pools, private beaches, chefs and yoga instructors. Behind-the-scenes private trips to museums, fashion ateliers and sports events. Hotels where musicians come and play in your room. Resorts on private islands, like the exclusive Bulgari Resort and Residences Cave Cay, with its 64 suites and villas and 48 customer-owned “mansions and estates,” scheduled to open in 2027 on a 220-acre haven in the Bahamas.
Or the even more exclusive Rosewood Ranfaru, also opening in 2027 and featuring 120 one- to five-bedroom villas with individual swimming pools built for a reported $343 million along a chain of, yes, private islands in the Maldives, with some of the villas perched on islands all to themselves.
The luxury ecosystem also includes a new breed of travel adviser whose job is no longer simply booking flights and making hotel reservations. Often working in conjunction with specialists from so-called destination management companies, these people organize every moment of the trip — every airport transfer, every flight, every resort or villa or boutique hotel or yacht, every meal, every limo trip, every private tour of someplace no one else has access to, every sudden change of plan — relieving the clients from the burdens of even the smallest disappointment or logistical headache.
“For our members, it’s where can I go and what can I do, and often the price is secondary,” said Sylvain Langrand, chief executive of Velocity Black, a luxury concierge service, whose clients pay an annual $3,000 fee for soup-to-nuts attention on trips that can cost up to $20,000 a night.
(These companies have varied fee structures. Some advisers or concierges charge annual fees that can extend into the tens of thousands of dollars; others make the bulk of their money from commissions; others might charge an hourly or weekly fee on top of other fees.)
If anything goes awry — the clients don’t like the brand of sheets in their hotel room; their driver is not outside the restaurant the second they emerge; they spontaneously decide they want to ditch the next hotel and throw a party on a yacht — they can text the service 24/7 for an immediate solution. “A lot of luxury is not having to worry about anything,” Mr. Langrand said.
Sitting in his booth at the ILTM expo, André Oliveira of Zion Creative Artisans, a Portuguese company which bills itself as a “destination alchemist lab,” said that he and his colleagues were not merely agents, advisers or concierges.
“We are much more,” he said. “We are doing alchemy with your holiday.” (His title: chief alchemist officer.) Costs for the travelers, he said, range from about $21,000 a week for a couple to perhaps $140,000 a week for a family, excluding airfare.
‘Kill Them With Kindness’
If it’s no longer enough to be a normal travel adviser, so it’s no longer enough to be a normal hotel concierge. “You have to personalize every single detail,” said Alberto Selas, general manager of the five-star Nobu Hotel in Barcelona, whose guests fill in pre-visit questionnaires listing their requirements. They might say “‘OK, I want to have a bottle of a specific brand of tequila in my room with two shot glasses,’” Mr. Selas said. “Maybe they want to travel with their dog, and they want special vegetarian biscuits for the dog. They want the water to be a certain temperature.”
What of clients who are impossible to satisfy? Enver Arslan, general manager of the not-yet-opened Bulgari Resort Ranfushi in the Maldives, said that the trick is to distract, deflect and shower them with complimentary goodies.
One of his previous jobs was at a Maldives resort where rooms ranged from $4,000 to $15,000, depending on the season. Once, he said, a client summoned Mr. Arslan to his room in the middle of monsoon season, gestured out the window and said, accusingly, “It’s been raining for four days.”
Rather than “explaining why it rains,” Mr. Arslan said, he immediately invited the guest to join him for drinks and backgammon in the bar.
“Give them Champagne, give them a free spa treatment, upgrade to a suite,” he said. “Complimentary service is part of hospitality. Kill them with kindness.”
It’s a challenging endeavor, finding new ways to please people who glide through life unburdened by the notion that there are things they cannot do or items they cannot have. But it’s a challenge people in the industry are seemingly happy to take on.
Once, to placate a client panicking because a monsoon had washed away the beach around the $40,000-a-night villa he had booked in the Seychelles, Mr. Ezon arranged to have an emergency shipment of sand brought in. Another time, he said, he arranged to have wall-to-wall carpeting installed in a 225-foot yacht his clients had chartered for $750,000 a week because the wife “didn’t want to take her stilettos off,” he said — and the yacht owners did not want anything damaging the wooden decks.
“There are no boundaries,” he said. “Think of the craziest thing you can think of. We’ll do it.”
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Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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