Goss for globetrotters
From flying in a Second World War fighter plane over the English Channel to trekking with billy goats in the Alps, hotels these days are desperate to get you to do something
YOU MUST HAVE heard of “experiential travel”. To the cynic it’s a concept that’s absurdly tautologous, for any travel – and, indeed, any and every aspect of sentient life itself – by definition entails experiences. Indeed, it smacks of the marketing nonsense that we’re continually bombarded with these days, fatuous stuff such as “Delivering Distribution”, which we saw emblazoned on the side of a truck the other week.
No matter, experiential, er, experiences are apparently what we now all crave from a vacation, and hotels around the world are bending over backwards to provide them. Want to hurl yourself down the St Moritz Cresta
Run in an inflatable rubber dinghy, or perhaps learn the art of underwater tennis in the Maldives? Fret not, because almost certainly there’s someone already hard at work to ensure you can do just that.
So you can forget about being cocooned in that fabulously luxurious suite for days on end, bathing in champagne (though, come to think of it, that’s doubtless available somewhere as an “experience”) and pigging out on room-service caviar and blinis, as that very same hotel will be doing its level best to keep you frantically, productively busy, whether that involves learning, cooking, hiking, biking, bird-watching, fishing or simply just doing.
In the Swiss mountain resort of Andermatt,
The Chedi hotel has gone completely over the top with a year-round calendar of experiences. From this month onward, this cool, Asianinspired and modernist mega-chalet offers the opportunity to (deep breath): make your own Alpine cheese, strike out into the mountains on a herbal hike, ride in tiny cable cars with your family, go goat trekking (which is a new one on us), drive a retro-style Morgan or a highperformance Audi through the Alps, join a “reenergising” five-day boot camp; indulge in a Gault&Millau wine-and-dine extravaganza (now that’s more like it) and be the first on the slopes in an early bird ski package.
In last month’s issue we mentioned rides in the ultra-exclusive private Laucala Island resort’s two-person submarine, but Dubai’s Atlantis,
The Palm has gone one better, for there you can sleep under water – in suites that look out on to a huge tropical-fish-filled aquarium. Even more incredibly, The Manta Resort Pemba Island, off Zanzibar in East Africa, has a floating, threestorey Underwater Room that’s moored offshore, with a bedroom on the lowest level at whose windows octopus and other reef life nudge.
On London’s Marylebone Road, the fivestar Landmark offers guided walks around neighbourhood bars and restaurants, an expertled exploration of the nearby indoor Alfies Antique Market or a black-cab tour of the city in the company of award-winning photographer Antonio Busiello, who’ll help you snap that perfect visual vacation memento. But our absolute favourite experience of all is available if you’re staying across town in the wonderful
Lanesborough hotel.
It’s not cheap – in fact, if you need to know how much it costs you can’t afford it anyway – but for a sum we won’t lower the tone by revealing,
The Lanesborough will whisk you and a very special friend out of the capital and down to the South Coast of England aboard a Mercedes S-Class. After lunch at the famed Goodwood Estate, a pair of historic Spitfire fighter planes stand ready to fly you both out above the English Channel for 30 minutes of exhilarating loops and rolls, Battle of Britain-style, at the end of which you’re presented with a video of the flight.
Experiential travel? We may have started out as cynics, but suddenly we’re loving it.