Champagne, Concierges and Emergency Sand: How the Ultra-Rich Travel [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/travel/luxury-travel-agency-advisers-wealth.html

https://archive.ph/X5XFK

Champagne, Concierges and Emergency Sand: How the Ultra-Rich Travel
Inside the arms race to satisfy travelers for whom exclusivity is everything and money is no object.
By Sarah Lyall
Feb. 11, 2026

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One of his previous jobs was at a Maldives resort where rooms ranged from $4,000 to $15,000, depending on the season. Once, he said, a client summoned Mr. Arslan to his room in the middle of monsoon season, gestured out the window and said, accusingly, “It’s been raining for four days.”

Rather than “explaining why it rains,” Mr. Arslan said, he immediately invited the guest to join him for drinks and backgammon in the bar.

“Give them Champagne, give them a free spa treatment, upgrade to a suite,” he said. “Complimentary service is part of hospitality. Kill them with kindness.”

It’s a challenging endeavor, finding new ways to please people who glide through life unburdened by the notion that there are things they cannot do or items they cannot have. But it’s a challenge people in the industry are seemingly happy to take on.

Once, to placate a client panicking because a monsoon had washed away the beach around the $40,000-a-night villa he had booked in the Seychelles, Mr. Ezon arranged to have an emergency shipment of sand brought in. Another time, he said, he arranged to have wall-to-wall carpeting installed in a 225-foot yacht his clients had chartered for $750,000 a week because the wife “didn’t want to take her stilettos off,” he said — and the yacht owners did not want anything damaging the wooden decks.

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There is something they can have - for free