The world's wealthiest holiday-makers want the most exotic locations to look just like home
By B.R.
GULLIVER interviewed Kevin Johnson as research for a piece on luxury travel in the print edition this week. Mr Johnson worked as a chief-of-staff and a palace manager for various heads of state, Russian billionaires and royal families. Part of his job was to oversee the travel arrangements of his super-wealthy employers. There wasn’t space to include many of his anecdotes in the print article, but it was a fun chat.
What was fascinating was, for people for whom money really is no object, just how prosaic some of their needs were. It was not unusual for them to send an employee ahead to some remote island to install their own IT infrastructure, for example, at fantastic cost. Mr Johnson said that this was often done under the guise of cyber-security. Sometimes it was: even on beach holidays they would often bring in their own guy to work with hotel staff to make e-mail and the like completely secure. But often, he suspected, it was more to do with a fear of missing something on the box. “You could be on the most remote island possible and they would still want the same 200 television channels,” he explained. There would be hell to pay, it seems, were their favourite unavailable.
Of course, there were also many tales of the sort of flouncy requests that would make Spinal Tap blush. One of his employers apparently insisted on six pots of yoghurt from a particular convent waiting for her wherever she travelled. Another, having found that none of the shoes she had brought quite matched an outfit she intended to wear, arranged for a member of staff to fly in with three more suitable pairs. Mr Johnson himself was flown first class from London to Johannesburg to deliver a phone that his boss had left behind. On handing it over he turned around and boarded the same flight home—first class again of course.
For a holiday at a six-bedroom villa on a secluded Maldivian island, Mr Johson reckoned it would be typical for a family to bring between 12 and 24 staff. These might include a favourite chef and a fitness instructor. But his overriding impression, he says, was of the lengths to which the super-rich would go simply to recreate their own homes, even in the most exotic of destinations. Some would even travel with their favourite bed. It sounds almost poignant—until you remember that they were probably eating a Michelin-starred meal on their own private island.
