Over-the-top was the mandate. The client, a wealthy med-tech entrepreneur, was on his way to Las Vegas to close a $150 million business deal. A celebration was to be had.
“He wanted something crazy,” Olivia Ferney said.
Ferney, 25, is a luxury-travel specialist with a knack for fulfilling the implausible desires of her ultrarich clients. It’s hardly a job she could have imagined for herself when she was growing up in Dundas, Ontario.
A child of Canadian schoolteachers, Ferney knew nothing about the world of private jets and $25,000-a-day cabanas until she discovered her unusual line of work about three years ago.
“I was basically up there in my little log cabin,” she said.
Nowadays, more than two million social media followers watch the videos she posts of her interactions with her tough-to-please clients. She is also making an impression beyond her core audience. Time magazine included her in its list of the top 100 digital influencers of 2026. And Fifth Season, the production company behind “Severance” and “Killing Eve,” has signed a deal with Ferney and her business partner and fiancé, Troy Arnold, for a scripted series based on their agency, Top Tier Travel.
On a recent afternoon, Ferney found herself in a chilled room of the Encore Beach Club in Las Vegas, counting out 200 bottles of vintage Dom Pérignon. Outside, it was 114 degrees, and the club’s three nearby pools were mobbed with tourists wearing patterned swim trunks and neon thongs. Many were chugging $70 mojito Big Cups.
“It’s a bunch of people getting hammered in a pee-infested pool,” is how Ferney described the crowd.
The champagne bottles were part of a stunt she had arranged for the med-tech entrepreneur, who wanted to celebrate the closing of his business deal in high style.
“He’s a huge Dom drinker,” Ferney said.
Early in the party-planning phase, she had posed a question to the client’s spokesman and handler: Would six figures for the champagne alone be a stretch? “That would be just another Tuesday for him,” the handler said. To that, Ferney replied: “Let’s try to set a world record.” Then she got to work arranging a party that would be deemed worthy of an entry in the Guinness World Records.
“It’s a sickness of mine, that I think I can do anything,” she said.
To certify the record — in the obscure category of “largest champagne presentation” — Ferney roped in a Guinness World Records adjudicator, who would attend the gathering and survey the goings-on with a close eye.
“No one is really even going to drink the champagne,” Ferney said, noting that her plan called for scores of servers to blast the partygoers with bubbly.
After booking special access to the D.J. enclosure at the Encore Beach Club, part of the Wynn Las Vegas, she liaised with Diplo, the resident celebrity D.J. She also arranged with Adam Norotsky, the Wynn Resorts vice-president of nightlife, to hire nearly every server in the house.
On the day of the event, Michael Empric, the Guinness adjudicator, flew in from New York. For him, the Las Vegas stopover was just one point along a circuit that would take him to a Hy-Vee supermarket in Iowa the following day. “I’m going to adjudicate the most pineapples sold in an hour,” Empric said. “Don’t ask.”
As night fell, the furnace heat of the desert city was still stuck in the red zone. The gates opened to a crowd of 2,800 revelers, who had paid anywhere from $1,500 to $25,000 for a table at the outdoor club. Few, if any, had met or even heard of the entrepreneur masterminding the event. But that hardly mattered. What the glossy strangers provided was an appropriately uproarious backdrop when the inevitable reels of the blowout would stream on social media.
Near midnight, with the temperature at 98 degrees, partygoers formed a mosh pit near the stage, pumping their fists to Diplo’s bass-heavy set. At exactly 1:30 a.m. came the big reveal: 69 servers, clad in scraps of red jersey, paraded before the crowd, some of them aboard floats shaped like speedboats, fire trucks and a giant shark.
They hoisted bottles of Dom Pérignon above their heads. At a signal from Diplo, corks popped. Some servers began hosing down a dancer ensconced in a prop Martini glass, while others sprayed champagne at the crowd, thus achieving a Guinness-worthy feat that was the equivalent, in terms of pointless excess, to scaling Mt. Everest.
Undoubtedly the most anomalous element in this unlikely scene was the client. There he stood, away from the action, tucked at the rear of the stage behind Diplo, inconspicuous in black jeans and a black T-shirt. Declining to provide his name for publication, he had earlier explained through a spokesman that his brief for Ferney was to provide him with something “epic.”
“He’s been there, done that, seen it all,” Bryan Lee, his spokesman, said.
That is to say, he was jaded. Yet there is jaded, and then there is a man of means willing to empty his wallet for the momentary thrill of dousing hundreds of strangers with expensive wine. The final cost for the liquid alone (125 bottles of Perrier Jouet Grand Brut, 50 bottles of Dom Pérignon Brut Luminus and five bottles of Dos Hombres Blanco tequila) amounted to $226,000 and change.
“Honestly, he would have spent more,” Ferney said afterward. “But he got hit hard at the casino the night before.”
One of Ferney’s working mottos is, “Our job is to execute, not judge.” Given that she and her business partner are routinely tasked with fulfilling the whims of those who think nothing of laying out $2.25 million for a weeklong yacht rental on the Côte d’Azur (as recently happened), this makes a kind of cockeyed sense.
Each client of Top Tier Travel must fork over an annual fee of $100,000 and agree to book $1 million in yearly travel. John Block, the chief operating officer of Park West Gallery, which sells high-priced works of art on cruise ships, said the fees were worth it. Not long ago, he explained, Top Tier booked a private jet on short notice to collect his ailing sister for a family vacation. “You can’t just order up a jet like an Uber,” Block said.
Ferney’s videos of her work life have made her social media accounts (@travelswithlivii on TikTok and Instagram) addictive viewing. Her interactions with the moneyed few have become digital catnip, an escape from the realities of high gas prices, wars and the rise of artificial intelligence. And though she may not judge the people who pay her salary, her viewers are free to hate-watch.
She manages her clients’ requests with patience, good cheer and a dollop of irony. No task is too large or too small. She has flown to Paris to retrieve the largest croissant in that city to please the daughter of a Miami billionaire. For another client, she bought out a day’s supply of an Ontario bakery’s locally famous butter tarts for a holiday meal.
Backed by a team of 10, Ferney and Arnold, 38, routinely score V.I.P. perks, including reservations at hot spots like the Manhattan steakhouse the Eighty Six, close access to Formula One races and bookings on private Bombardier flights for clients so choosy they look askance at Gulfstream jets.
Before starting at Top Tier, Ferney had never encountered anyone like the client whose child experienced a meltdown when an equipment malfunction forced the family to fly commercial for the first time.
“I’m Canadian,” she said.
Ferney bumbled into this gilded world after meeting Arnold at a Miami club. She took a job with his agency partly to fulfill a visa requirement. By now, she has adapted to a life of unceasing luxury travel. The couple no longer have a fixed address and live mainly on the road, in lavish hotel rooms.
Before Ferney came aboard, Arnold said, Top Tier leaned on word of mouth and discretion. “We worked with billionaires and got our business through quiet,” he said. All that changed after Ferney suggested venturing into social media. “We did informational reels that didn’t land, and then decided to triple-down on client calls and re-enactments,” Arnold said. “People ate it up. Basically, we have normalized what’s insane.”
Over breakfast at the Tableau restaurant in Las Vegas, Ferney acknowledged that a lot of the clichés about wealthy people are true — but there was at least one misconception.
“People think the superrich are unhappy,” she said. “They’re not.”
The post She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients appeared first on New York Times.
