Independent on Saturday

How the ultra-rich are travelling during Covid

NATALIE B COMPTON

PANDEMIC travel has looked a little different for the rich. While the everyman debated whether it was safe enough to visit family for the holidays, there was the Kardashian who used a loophole to go to Paris when the border was closed or the other Kardashian who rented out a private island in Tahiti for her birthday.

But brief backlash hasn’t stopped the wealthy from returning to travel. After a year of being confined to their one, two or three homes, they are spending more than ever on holidays to make up for lost time. So what does a dream pandemic holiday look like when you've already been everywhere and bought everything?.

Erica Jackowitz, co-founder of Roman & Erica, a travel company for ultra-wealthy clients, said her clients are spending double to triple more.

“They’re open to spending way more than they would have considered two or three years ago,” said Jackowitz, whose retainer for clients starts at $100 000 (about R1.5 million) a year. “People aren’t holding back.

“I’ve had a client spending half a million dollars a month since last

June,” Jackowitz said. “And on a private island and they’ve been travelling since then.”

At luxury travel company Brown and Hudson, founder Philippe Brown calls on the “art and science of luxury travel” to design vacations for the elite.

“We apply scientific principles to the travel that we plan – principles

like hedonic adaptation,” Brown said.

For example, to combat hedonic adaptation, the concept of getting used to or bored with something (even a really, really good thing), Brown plans ahead to keep his clients impressed day after day. That may be as simple as changing a client’s accommodation after a few days so they don’t become blasé about the view.

Brown said he is getting more clients who come to him with a desired feeling vs a specific destination, which hasn’t been the norm in past years.

“Initial conversations are more interesting and a bit more fuzzy because people are talking about ‘I want to feel energised’ or ‘I want to be vital again’,” Brown said. “People of a certain age want to do stuff that makes them feel like they’ve achieved something beyond paying off the mortgage, having a jet, a car, whatever it is.”

For a client to feel a sense of adventure, Brown has planned a “luxepedition” across Madagascar. For a dad to feel closer to his son, Brown planned a US road trip that included pop-up drive-in movies in unexpected locations, and he arranged for them to meet celebrities in Hollywood.

For Jaclyn Sienna India, founder of ultra-luxury travel company Sienna Charles, the pandemic has made the ultra-rich embrace different holiday ideas. (Clients include Mariah Carey and former president George W Bush. She once rented out an entire private island for Bush.)

India said her clients are no longer following the “billionaire calendar”.

Instead of having to go to Aspen or Switzerland’s St Moritz in winter, they feel free to go heli-skiing in Iceland instead. The same goes for summer hot spots such as Martha’s Vineyard.

The pandemic has changed the way her clients see social media. Holidays aren’t for bragging rights, at least not online.

“A lot of our clients are chief executives, and a lot of their staff is either laid off or on unemployment or struggling to make ends meet,” India said. “So we’ve found that every single one of our clients, even with a private profile, do not share when they travel.

“They’re not going to be letting people know exactly what their moves are and how they’re spending their money,” she said.

With the ultra-rich spending more money on travel than ever, there is a growing shortage of high-end travel goods and services.

“Those presidential suites and those top villas and the yachts and the planes – they're sold out,” said Jackowitz.

For many clients, instead of fighting over luxury rentals, they are buying the assets instead. |

TRAVEL

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2021-10-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

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