There are trips that are difficult to imagine: traveling to the North Pole aboard an airship and landing in the High Arctic; spending the night in a bed transported by helicopter, with no one for hundreds of kilometers, in the Makgadikgadi salt pans, a nature reserve the size of Switzerland located in Botswana; visit the Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia) with a luxury Airstream caravan and a cook; rent a temple in Petra (Jordan), thanks to a special permit from UNESCO, and dine in the company of 14 family members while a string quartet enlivens the evening…
Obviously, these are trips only available to super-premium tourists, that is, successful businessmen, families with large assets or elite athletes, as recognized by Gonzalo Gimeno, general director of Elefant Travel and the organizer of the previous trips. “What does not previously exist, we create,” says this marketing professor (among many other things) who can boast of having won the Oscar for his sector, Traveler Made, a global reference in the field of tourism. deluxe.
In Spain, a few agencies (fewer, in any case, than the fingers on one hand) have specialized in serving clients for whom money is no problem. But what are these travelers looking for?
“They are looking for four things,” Gimeno responds. “They are looking for space, meaning flying in business class, staying in a suite or enjoying a private reserve of 40,000 hectares in Africa,” this travel designer begins to list. “They look for aesthetics, they look for service and they look for exclusivity,” he summarizes.
In general, we are talking about people with high incomes and large assets who demand a very high level of service and someone to take care of everything. When they hire a lawyer they hire the best, when they have a surgeon they go to the most qualified and when they travel more of the same: they want to live out of the ordinary experiences that are impossible to duplicate.
In practice, it is about putting the client at the heart of the business which means, among other things, visiting them at home and agreeing with them during the first hour of conversation not to name any country. “We sell trips, not destinations,” he clarifies. But the best comes when Gimeno cites some of the trips that Elefant Travel organizes for those who can afford his magic wand.
“Many of our clients still like to go to Paris, Venice, London or New York. Exclusivity does not just mean visiting places where no one has been,” she points out. The book example is a recent expedition to the British capital organized by Elefant Travel for a well-known businessman. The trip included privately attending the changing of the guard at the Tower of London; dine on one of the London Eye eggs; fly over the English countryside in a Spitfire, an English fighter used in World War II; witness a musical and go backstage to meet the artists, as well as tour the Thames aboard super-fast boats in James Bond style... And something else: for the children of the group, the company rented the Darwin wing of the History Museum Natural for them to learn things about the evolution of species in a fun gymkhana...
Another luxury boutique that designs custom trips is Bru
If it comes down to it, Ana Bru can consider herself a billionaire. “One of my favorite phrases is when someone asks me: why are you going there, if no one is going?” Well, that's why I respond."
And where is Ana Bru going? Almost everywhere: to live with nomads in the Sudanese desert; to tour the Antarctic Peninsula after traveling on a private jet from South Africa and, once there, connect with a Basler, a propeller plane, to the only fixed camp in Antarctica with the capacity to accommodate tourists willing to pay what It is not written for observing in situ the largest colony of emperor penguins at the South Pole, visiting ancient ice tunnels or doing via ferrata; to visit temples in Bhutan in the company of a member of the royal family and learn from them the characteristics of private art collections; to relax on private islands in the Pacific where there is only one resort or even “where there is only you, like in Fiji or Polynesia,” she continues. “They are trips designed to be the moment of your life, because they are trips that are priceless,” she points out.
But, in reality, these trips do have a price... For example, traveling on the Ocean Sky Cruises, the airship that is expected to cross the North Pole at the end of 2026 (when it is expected to have the permits) costs, according to reveals Bru, 200,000 euros per cabin or double room (in total, it has eight cabins that can accommodate a maximum of 16 people). “The trip lasts 72 hours, but we design experiences before and after,” explains Bru while showing some breathtaking photographs.
Bru
Another high-flying trip that this inveterate traveler proposes is to have a perspective of the Earth at 30.5 kilometers above sea level (some companies even offer to get married there...) in the Space Perspective. In this case, the price to pay is $125,000, “although if you reserve the entire capsule with capacity for eight people, the price can be negotiated depending on the season,” she clarifies. For information, this trip departs by boat from Cape Canaveral and, once at sea, the capsule, whose interior resembles the business class of a conventional airplane, rises for six hours. “But you don't have to be an astronaut or anything like that. You can even travel with the family and take the grandmother, the child and the dog,” reports the founder of Bru
Gonzalo Gimeno, who sometimes defines himself as a tailor (“we will meet with you to take measurements of your trip,” he says), acknowledges that some of his trips exceed 100,000 euros and that a client of his will pay five million euros for a trip to carry out over the next five years (at a rate of one million euros per year) to go around the world in the company of the family that educates the children.
To create the feeling that the money has been well spent (because clients, no matter how much money they have, are far from being stupid), personal treatment is key. This section includes picking them up at their home, organizing VIP rooms for them at the airport, avoiding waiting in lines, going through other types of controls, taking care of their personal safety and, ultimately, “softening the inconveniences,” summarizes Bru. The goal is to find the dream trip, even for those reluctant to share their leisure with strangers.
“Working with this type of client is complex,” Gimeno intervenes. "More than because of the type of people they are, since they are usually very educated people, they are clients to whom we assign specialized logistics operators, personal assistants, archaeologists or explorers if necessary, drivers...but, above all, because they also drag agent". In the case of super-elite footballers, for example, bodyguards arrive a day early. In addition, you must agree on the menus with your nutritionists.
Not so long ago, Gimeno received a call from the wife of a very famous soccer player. The young woman wanted to know if it was possible to see the northern lights two days later. Despite the time crunch, the trip was able to take place. “When I have a plane, I do magic,” jokes the founder of Elefant Travel. And yes, one of the footballers had a plane.
Gimeno also reveals how he privatized the Icelandic glacier where the two footballers were with their wives, one day after having reindeer meat for dinner. According to him, there are quotas that determine how many people can visit a glacier in each time slot. “If 100 visitors are allowed per hour, what we do is buy all 100 tickets. When I buy two slots I have two hours of glacier time just for my clients”, he reveals about the “takeover” that he launched on the aforementioned mass of ice.
Finally, at the destination, says Ana Bru (whose entrepreneurial spirit may have been inherited from her father, the founder of Lavadoras Bru), the objective is to humanize the trip. Bru
“Of course, these trips have to be paid for,” concedes this specialist in unique trips. In fact, Bru has the exclusive right in Spain and Andorra to market Virgin Galactic tickets, the space tourism company created by Richard Branson (on the flight that took place last August, each crew member paid 410,000 euros). It is, without a doubt, one of the specialties of exclusive agencies: traveling to other worlds, whether interior or exterior...
