Every January we draw up an internal note — a short reading of the travel year that is beginning. We share a version of it, here, with our clients.
The year in private travel, as we see it, is moving in several directions at once. None of them are new, and all of them are intensifying.
Shorter, more careful journeys
The three-week summer tour is quietly in retreat. Our clients are travelling more often and for shorter stretches — a properly-designed ten days instead of a rushed twenty-five. The best luxury travel of the year ahead will be, we think, more seasonal and more surgical.
A return to the familiar, at a higher level of access
Paris again, Rome again, Kyoto again — but with the kind of access a first visit could not achieve. Private museum mornings, tables held for a single party, homes and studios rather than public sights. Our clients are not chasing new destinations; they are deepening the ones they already love.
Quiet destinations entering the circle
Places we have quietly favoured for years are seeing more interest. The Peloponnese. The Aeolian Islands. Western Scotland. The Bhutanese valleys. The high Atlas. These are not emerging destinations in the usual sense — they have been ready for a long time. What is emerging is the recognition that privacy, at scale, is easier in places that have not been written about.
Slower boats
Small-yacht charters, short-distance cruises, private sailings across a single archipelago. The appetite for large expedition ships is flat; the appetite for very small, very private boats is strong and growing.
Weeks, not itineraries
The single-destination private week — a villa, a chalet, a ryokan — is the commission we are asked about most often. The future, we suspect, will be more of it. A successful week can reset a year.
Our own year ahead looks busy. Planning books for 2026 are filling earlier than in 2025, and we recommend, as always, an early conversation for any summer journey. We will write again at midyear with a reading of where the year has gone.
