Imagine booking Versailles to enjoy a private candlelit dinner.
This is the reality for the super rich, and people like Jaclyn Sienna India are making it happen.
India is the founder of a Sienna Charles, a members-only travel agency serving wealthy clients who take million-dollar trips around the world. India recently discussed her work and her billionaire clients in a Q&A with The Cut.
Her company’s services include a $75,000 annual level for unlimited travel and dining bookings and a $150,000 annual option to address a “lifestyle” item. That includes “setting up spa appointments, hiring in-home staff, helping clients build a home gym, whatever they need,” India told The Cut.
She shared some of the travel secrets of her incredibly wealthy clients:
1. Penthouse suites are out, yachts are in
Most of India’s customers are 55 to 75-year-old ex-finance workers in New York, but in recent years, it has seen more interest from people in Dallas and Los Angeles who work in finance or film. Its younger clientele are tech VIPs in their 40s and 50s.
The typical Indian customer is no stranger to booking hotel suites for $30,000 a night, but this is becoming increasingly so.
The mega-rich want their accommodations stocked with their favorite foods, delicious water and drinks, and other, more specific requests (a space with seven dog beds, for example), but training hotel staff on all of these within days is insufficient.
The trendiest thing to do is stay in a villa or yacht owned and rented by billionaires.
“[The owner] he has customized everything, selected his staff and trained them to expectations that are otherworldly,” India said. All this means that its customers can “relax deeply because the staff know how to deliver excellence every minute”.
2. They don’t deal with luggage
Unlike the rest of us, the rich don’t worry about airline baggage fees. Again, they don’t pack their bags at all.
Instead, they ship it, India said: “Just throw a FedEx label on it and it arrives at your destination the next day.”
3. They don’t eat out at fancy restaurants
Although the Sienna Charles staff knows all the best restaurants and how to make impossible reservations, India says many of her customers don’t eat out when they travel.
That’s what their private chefs are for, he says.
The chefs travel with customers and help maintain their diet and medical or health goals, India said. He gave an example of a customer who traveled to San Francisco for two weeks, brought his chef, and only ate once.
“He has all the money in the world, but he didn’t want to go to Michelin-starred restaurants,” India told The Cut. “A lot of our customers work really, really hard and it’s important for them to have consistency and routine wherever they go.”
4. They want unique experiences
If you’re looking to hook up with a billionaire this summer, India said it’s increasingly swapping the typical hotspots (think: Capri) for more “one-of-a-kind experiences.”
“They take the yacht around Sardinia or go to smaller islands in Sicily,” he said.
Sometimes her clients have specific travel requests, such as wanting to take a family trip to Rome in a specific time frame. More often than not, they are pretty general about their vision and want help with the specific details.
A recent tech billionaire “told me they want to go to Europe in August for nine days, just the couple, no kids,” India said. “And that’s all they said. That’s pretty common.”
As for those of more modest means, India’s best advice to “normal” people is to steer clear of places where celebrity and influence abound. Or, at the very least, recognize that you’re unlikely to have a similar A-lister experience if you go.
For example, he said, “The Hamptons is fine if you’re staying at someone’s house and you’re lying in their pool and you have access to the beach. But if you go to a spa and you’re staying in a hotel and the traffic is bad and you can’t get into a restaurant because nobody knows who you are, then it’s probably not the best destination.”
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