Life as a honeymoon planner for billionaires: the big asks – and the strange tasks
Organising a luxury postnuptial vacation can be complicated, but planners are on hand to help with any request – from the practical to the absurd
Summer is here, which means it’s officially wedding season – and honeymoon season.
Lining up a dream postnuptial vacation can be as high-stakes as planning the big day itself. (Remember Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s indecision: would it be Africa or Canada?) It can be especially complicated 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 30 agents plans more than 200 honeymoons a year, at an average of US$50,000 per trip. That’s almost US$1 million in honeymoon bookings each month.
Ovation’s president, Jack Ezon, is like the Olivia Pope of travel, handling myriad client requests from the practical to the absurd. And as I learned during a consulting crash course with Ezon and his team, there are many odd asks from the world’s richest honeymooners. By the end of my second day, I had arranged a couple’s hard-to-get dinner reservation at Sukiyabashi Jiro (of Jiro Dreams of Sushi fame), booked a private meet-and-greet with the pope (for a Jewish man, no less), and helped organise a transatlantic charter flight for a sheik’s bird.
But wait, there’s more...
Someone has to carry the meat
After signing a non-disclosure agreement, your first rite of passage with Ovation is to travel with the meat. Literally. The agency’s clients include many kosher and halal travellers (along with plenty of otherwise picky eaters), and one of the most common requests Ovation fields is to have specific cuts of beef flown from a client’s butcher in the US to 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 filet 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, Amy, has received paint swatches in the mail from a traveller showing precisely how medium-rare he wanted his steak.
