Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
THE SUPER DEMANDS OF THE SUPER RICH
Most wishes can be granted
SUMMER is almost here, which means it’s officially wedding season – which means it’s also honeymoon season.
Lining up a dream post-nuptial vacation can be just as high-stakes as planning the big day itself. (Remember Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s widely publicised indecision: Was it Africa or Canada?) It can be especially complicated, it turns out, if you are a billionaire.
Nobody knows that better than the planning team at Ovation Vacations, a leisure travel consultancy for ultra high-net-worth individuals. (Think media moguls, real estate tycoons, financiers, movie stars, talk show hosts and pro athletes.) The company’s team of 30 agents plans more than 200 honeymoons a year, at an average of $50 000 (about R730 000) a trip.
Ovation’s president, Jack Ezon, handles myriad client requests from the practical to the absurd. And as I learnt during a consulting crash course with Ezon and his team, there are many odd asks from the world’s richest honeymooners.
After signing a non-disclosure agreement, your first rite of passage with Ovation is to travel with the meat. Literally. One of the most common requests is to have specific cuts of beef flown from a client’s butcher in the US to a location on the other side of the globe.
The title of T-bone chaperone always goes to the agency’s most junior planner.
It’s their unenviable task to lug the fillet mignons through airport security in chilled briefcases, then onto a commercial jet and eventually to their desired hotel kitchen.
Cooking the meat can be an exacting science, too: One planner has received paint swatches in the mail from a traveller showing precisely how medium-rare he wanted his steak.
Riders are compiled for every one. Often they’re so complex, they make J Lo seem easygoing for wanting the green M&Ms picked out of her candy bowl. Sometimes the requests are so massive in scope that construction crews are called in.
A husband recently spent $80 000 to have a 210-foot yacht carpeted, so his new wife could wear her stilettos on board instead of having to go barefoot.
Most wishes can be granted… except if they’ll land you in jail.
“We’ll do anything for our clients as long as it’s legal in the country they’re visiting,” says Ezon, who has fielded only one request for a prostitute in his 18 years of honeymoon planning.
Tickets to the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party are low-hanging fruit. More impressive, Ezon has organised an overnight at Versailles for honeymooners who wanted to sleep in King Louis XIV’s bed. He has arranged a meet-and-greet with Vladimir Putin (no Trumps involved). Within two hours of joining the agent team, I was on the phone with the Vatican, sorting out the logistics of having the pope marry an interfaith couple on their elopement-cumhoneymoon.
Two consultants are on call for every trip. But sometimes trips go awry, like when a couple in Paris got stuck behind a car accident on the way to the airport. Ezon arranged for four motorbikes to pick them up on the highway to make their flight.
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – JOHN STEINBECK
There have, perhaps predictably, been instances of the honeymooners getting woefully out of hand. Ezon explains: “At Ovation we adhere to the same credo as Ritz-Carlton: ‘We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,’ and there is a line that clients can’t cross when it comes to gentlemanly behaviour.” The wife who hurled dishes at her server when he forgot to bring her Tabasco for her eggs? Yeah, she’s been put on the agency’s very polite blacklist. Racist comments are another hard no-no, as is making a pass at a spa therapist.
To some high-profile travellers, it’s not privacy unless it’s shared with a security detail to keep the paparazzi at bay; others just like having their housekeepers, make-up artists, trainers and personal chefs around.
Honeymooners who can’t live without their dogs have been known to splurge on suites with extra bedrooms, massages, gourmet food and even custom-built hotel furniture. As for the second-most common companion creature? Falcons. They’re allowed on Emirates and Etihad without a handler, as long as you book them a first-class suite.
Among the most expensive trips the team has recently planned? A month-long private yacht adventure through Africa and the Maldives for a high-profile wife and her billionaire husband totalling more than
$1.8 million.
Ezon’s hard work doesn’t go unnoticed: tips have ranged from Bottega Veneta swag and Hermès cuffs to cases of Tuscan wine and checks for more than $100 000.