Defining luxury travel in the modern era

So, what is luxury travel?

Luckily, what we do – as a luxury travel company – is spend a lot of time helping our clients to unravel these mysteries. To get to the heart of what luxury means to them. At its core, luxury travel is a structure of feeling – a moment that becomes a memory we will treasure forever. And that moment is constricted only by the horizon of the possible. Put another way: tell us what you want from the world. The rest is down to us.

Sometimes, that does indeed involve a lot of exquisite comfort – of places like wellness spas in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula or jungle lodges in the Costa Rican rainforest. But it’s not the place alone that’s important. It’s the mood – and feeling – that you’re chasing. This is the nuclear core of how our philosophy works.

So, let’s work that feeling through.

Imagine you’ve had an insanely busy winter. You arrive – dazed and confused – in the fresh light of spring. So, it’s only natural that you want to chill out surrounded by the world in all its transcendent beauty. And you don’t want to lift a finger.

Or maybe the reverse is true. You’ve hit a rough patch. You’ve worked yourself silly. And now you want to escape into a true wilderness and do something soul-shaking – like meeting the Rwandan mountain gorillas of Volcanoes National Park or exploring unnamed peaks in Norway’s Lofoten Islands, a stone’s throw from the arctic circle. You want your adrenaline – and your sense of wonder – to hit the ceiling.

This release becomes your luxury.

And unlike many so-called luxury travel packages, it’s only nominally a ‘package’. We bundle it together (the planning, the details), but it’s never off the shelf – it’s no cookie-cutter that we ship out on an assembly line. We work with you – our travelers – to ensure your trip is exactly how you want it. We tailor and we tweak. We make it yours. As a Virtuoso member, you can trust that we’ll always get it right.

Why use a luxury travel expert?

But if luxury travel is a vibe, then it’s also a kind of process. There’s something we like to call the ‘inconvenience of convenience’. In our most modern of eras, we spend our days positively irradiated by data and information. Listicles. Attention-grabbing Instagram posts. App notifications. The whole nine yards.

And each piece of data tries to shake us by the collar – ‘this is the most important thing you’ll ever read’. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

Case in point: Google ‘best place to visit in Italy’. There are over one billion results. All of them seem equally compelling. They’re all (effectively) shouting in our ear. But, who’s right?

When planning your luxury vacation, you have to wade through a sea of opinions and suggestions long before you’ve dusted off your suitcase. Pretty soon, your dreams of a luxury trip are foundering on the rocks of infinite possibility. It’s simply too much.

Here, ‘luxury travel’ is about finding somebody (in short, like us) who can do the heavy lifting on your behalf. Who can calm the seas of uncertainty – and who can offer you a refreshing cupful of actually useful ideas and suggestions (now we’ve started the water/ocean metaphor we’ll have to continue it, sorry).

Ultimately, our team – split between London and New York – are luxury travel experts. They’ve spent years getting to know their destinations. They specialize and get to the heart of matters. Really, they are like craftspeople – deft of hand, agile of mind. And it’s their job – in fact, it’s their passion – to craft your trip for you, right from the ground up. They’ll present you with ideas. They’ll build out your mood board. And – when you’ve found a trajectory you like – they’ll fill in all the details.

The luxury of time

In this formulation, ‘luxury’ is as much about time as anything else. Time and reassurance. The ‘luxury’ is having a travel planner who not only knows their stuff, but who knows you – what you love, what you don’t. For many of our longer-term travelers, we’re able to suggest ideas that we know they will immediately get excited about. We build their ‘bucket lists’ and we always work to tick those lists off. It’s a relationship.

And it means you’re not starting from square one each and every time you think about getting away. It means that when you do actually travel, you know that you’re getting the best possible experience in the world, every single time. There’s no FOMO (‘what if there’s a better island, a more sublime view, a cooler experience’). There’s no worry about dud hotels or underwhelming moments. Excellence is what we do.

You’ll also have access to our pool of knowledge – and the knowledge of our local partners and contacts on the ground. If you’re in search of the Northern Lights, then you know we’re going to send you at the right time of year to actually see them. And you know that we won’t send you to coastal India during the monsoon season.

This is also a form of luxury travel – the kind you’d expect from a Virtuoso member. And it’s centerd on care and trust.

Our most unique luxury vacations

We’ve spoken at length about our approach to luxury travel – about care, expertise, and time. These things are important. In fact, they’re essential.

But we’re also more than well-versed in the pyrotechnics of big-ticket glamor. Of unassailable flair. Only recently, we announced the first details of a huge new collaboration with 007 – crafting a no-holds-barred journey across the heart of James Bond’s Europe. We can’t reveal many more details now. But believe us when we say it is fully dialed up to eleven.

We’ve taken that same approach to other of our specialist services. For families, there’s Field Trip – where we’ve worked to bring more than sixty ‘bolt on’ educational activities to life. You can add these on to your wider Black Tomato trips, and they offer some truly unreal levels of learning and access. Visit behind-the-scenes at an observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Undertake a survivalist masterclass in Alaska’s Denali National Park. Get ultra-exclusive access to the ancient Egyptian dig-site of Saqqara.

Elsewhere, we’ve developed services like Get Lost – the ultimate in wilderness challenges. Ed Ceasar, who wrote about his Get Lost experience in Morocco – for the New Yorker – called it “both real and extremely theatrical”, remarking that “I was able to travel as I did only because a group of experts had prepared a route customized for my level of fitness, and had monitored my every move so that I could feel danger without actually being endangered”. Sometimes, luxury isn’t being pampered – it’s being given an experience unlike nothing else on earth.

But we’re good at pampering, too. We love comfort (who doesn’t?). But should you want to ‘rough’ it, we’ve got you covered.

Some final thoughts on luxury travel

This brings us back to where we started – a question, flipped on its head. For us, luxury travel isn’t about a defined, vacuum-packed set of criteria. It’s about the person who’s traveling and what we can do for them. Time. Care. Attention to detail. It’s about big ideas and the tiniest nuts and bolts.

It’s about helping people to relax – about helping families to forge new bonds or to celebrate their biggest milestones. It’s about unusual things and faraway places – going off radar and (sometimes) going entirely off grid.

Luxury travel begins with you. We’re just here – experts, travelers – to help you get where you want to go.

It’s really as simple as that.