The nonstop parade of luxury that is La Première, Air France’s first-class trans-Atlantic service, begins when a Mercedes limousine collects you from your hotel and whisks you to an exclusive entrance at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. It ends at J.F.K., when an Air France employee personally escorts you from your seat through a special customs line.
Each new indulgence seems more lavish than the one before. The bespoke departure lounge, where you can order a three-course meal from a menu conceived by Alain Ducasse. The Porsche Cayenne in which you are driven across the airport apron to the plane.
Your compartment in the plane’s front section, spanning four windows (five, on newer planes), where the seat flattens into a 6-foot-6-inch-long bed and complete privacy is attained via a floor-to-ceiling curtain. The nonstop attention from a procession of people eager to ply you with amenities. Even the pilot, responsible for more than 300 passengers, emerges from the cockpit to speak only to the three in first class.
But luxury, as I learned when I traveled on La Première recently, is measured as much by what is missing as by what is present. Namely, other people. For the duration of the trip, I encountered virtually no other passengers, except for others in first class. None in the terminal. None in the lounge.
None in the security line. None in the passport line (there is no passport line; the passports are processed offstage while you wait in your Porsche). None during boarding. And, bien sûr, none on the plane, where the people in the front — me and two famous actors — were separated from the people in the back by a curtain as impenetrable as a velvet rope at a nightclub.
(This much rarefied luxury is eye-wateringly expensive. The Times does not accept free travel, and it paid for my $11,000 round-trip ticket — one leg in business class, the other in first. Flying La Première both ways would have cost about $16,000.)
“This sense of intimacy and confidentiality is a key aspect of the La Première travel experience,” Fabien Pelous, executive vice president of customer experience at Air France, said via email. “Air France enables its clients to enjoy a completely seamless and swift airport journey, in the utmost privacy.”
A growing gap
Exclusivity and its cousin, privacy, have always been important to high-end travelers. The pandemic added a new element to the widening gap between “us” and “them” when the ultrarich were able to achieve social distancing by isolating themselves in luxury enclaves far from the masses. That sense of separateness, fueled by an ever-growing disparity in wealth, has carried through to post-pandemic travel. More and more, the richest travelers are paying for the privilege of being apart from everyone else.
“In the past, I think people viewed privacy and exclusivity as simply going to a private island or renting a yacht for yourself,” said Chelsea Martin, head of the North America office at the concierge travel company Knightsbridge Travel Circle, where membership begins at $50,000 a year and customers are the kind who can afford to pay $5,000 a night for a hotel room, $800,000 a week for a yacht, or $1 million a week for a private island. “But now we’re seeing our members taking it to the next level.”
Take guests in a private villa at an island resort who have a private butler, a private chef and a private path leading to private lounge chairs on the beach, but who are booking treatments in a spa open to all the guests.
“In the past, they would have asked for a private suite within a spa, but now they want to privatize the spa,” Ms. Martin said. “They don’t want anyone else around.”
Being apart from the crowd is in part a natural function of the desire to circumvent what the travel industry calls “friction” — annoyances like being stuck in the maw of a T.S.A. line, fighting for a table in a restaurant or having to wait in a hotel lobby for attention from the check-in clerk. In these cases, isolation itself is not necessarily the primary objective, said Paul Tumpowksy, chief revenue officer of the travel adviser platform Fora Travel.
“Private entrances, in-room check-in, a chef dedicated to your villa — all of these are about privacy, but much more about reducing friction points and feeling more seamless,” Mr. Tumpowksy said via email.
When ultrarich travelers do mingle with other people, it’s often people of their own ilk, or at least their socioeconomic status. Luxury hotels and thousands-a-night resorts naturally weed out guests who cannot afford to pay for them. But like the character on the TV dramedy “The Good Place” who believes he deserves to be in “the best place,” travelers at the priciest hotels are finding ways to achieve even more exclusivity than the other exclusive guests.
Take the luxe Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea, where the cheapest, smallest rooms cost upward of about $1,615 a night at peak times. For about $1,000 more a night, you can get the cheapest room on the newly refurbished Club Floor, billed as “a hotel within a hotel” delivering “heightened levels of service, amenities and privacy,” including a special concierge team and eating and gathering spaces closed to regular Four Seasons visitors.
For those who want to stay at a hotel while dispensing with other guests altogether, there are private hotels. And private islands: Richard Branson’s Necker Island, for instance, which can accommodate up to 70 guests and can be booked in its entirety for about $160,000 a night.
For skiers, there are a proliferating number of private ski clubs that provide the amenities of a resort without the stress of mingling with outsiders.
One new addition to this category of resort is the Hoback Club, a ski-in, ski-out “ultraluxury private members’ club” in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Selling points include ski valets who pre-warm your equipment; a subterranean wellness center; an “elite Euro Spa team” able to administer treatments in the private residences; and a “bespoke wine program” administered by a “European-trained Maître Sommelier.”
Also, no pesky chitchat with other people upon arrival. According to its promotional materials, the setup “eliminates the bustle of a traditional resort and replaces it with finely tuned, individualized service at every turn, with no front desk, no drop-ins & no lobby chatter.”
Rich travelers can extend their bubble of privacy to luxury shopping, with one-on-one attention in elaborate, multiroom salons reserved for high-end clients, a step up from the classic private-shopping concept.
“The feeling now is that only regular people are shopping on the regular floor of the store,” said Jack Ezon, chief executive of the luxury lifestyle and bespoke travel company Embark Beyond, which has just opened something called the Man Suite at the Samaritaine department store in Paris. This special area provides men with lavish diversionary recreational activities — a putting green, a PlayStation, alcohol — while (presumably) their wives or girlfriends try on, and purchase, clothes.
The rich and the richer
It’s all relative, of course. Unless you’re, say, Lauren Santos, there’s always something fancier than whatever you can afford. And so there are more exclusive things even than flying on La Première and being treated like a queen-for-a-day in its lounge. Booking into an even-more-private lounge (sole occupant: you) with Extime, in an all-private terminal at Charles de Gaulle. Traveling by private jet, with your own staff. Or living on your yacht, surrounded by employees whose job is to protect you from the inconveniences of the world.
Never mind that. I loved the La Première lounge, where at times I was alone, just me and a dozen or so attendants devoted to me. I loved that I didn’t have to carry a single bag the whole day. I loved that there was a box of chocolates at my seat on the plane, and Champagne on demand. I loved that my bed was made up with high-thread-count linens and a cashmere blanket. I loved that there was too much rather than too little storage space.
The thing about being a normal person cosplaying as a superrich one is that eventually you have to return to earth. I had been warned about this painful jolt to the system, akin to taking a single, blissful hit of the best drug and being told you can never have it again.
But who would you rather be, someone who lives apart from the world or someone who lives in it? It’s one thing to enjoy luxury; it’s another thing to slip into the dangerous belief that the normal rules of human society should no longer apply to you.
It was a relief, to be honest, to find myself back in a regular airport taxi rank filled with regular, slightly annoyed New Yorkers, even if I had to wait my turn for a taxi that looked a bit like a pumpkin.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
The post No Lines, No ‘Regular’ People: Flying Ultra-Luxury From Paris appeared first on New York Times.
