TTG asked last week whether ultra-high-net-worth travellers are really disengaged. 

From where I sit, what looks like disengagement is usually fatigue. These are people who have been asked the same questions by every hotel, every agent and every concierge, often in the same month. Which side of the bed. Still or sparkling. Any allergies. Eventually they stop answering, and we call it indifference.

The answer isn’t another questionnaire. It’s an adviser who remembers.

The brief should compound

Most of the industry treats each booking as a fresh start: a new enquiry, a new form, a new set of preferences, as if the last trip taught nothing. It should be the opposite. The first trip is a good trip and a set of answers. The second is what the answers were for.

By the second journey I should already know the pace a client likes, whether they want the first evening free, which kind of room they will be happy in and which they will quietly put up with. 

If I’m asking those questions again, I haven’t been listening. That’s the test I’d judge any adviser by, myself included. Anyone can get the first trip right with enough effort. The second should start ahead.’

The hotel should know before the client arrives

A trip is judged on its first day, and the first day is almost entirely logistics. The car, the check-in, whether the room is ready, whether anyone knows who is walking through the door.

Most of what goes wrong at check-in was knowable the Tuesday before. A late arrival with a child asleep on someone’s shoulder.

A dietary requirement that matters. A preference for a quiet room over a view. None of it is secret; it simply wasn’t passed on. Briefing every hotel in writing before arrival costs an adviser an hour. It saves the client from introducing themselves, again, at the front desk at the end of a long flight.

That’s what "personal" should mean in luxury travel: a property that already knows how to look after this particular person.

Editing is the service

The third source of fatigue is the trip itself. When money is no object, a trip rarely fails on quality. It fails on density. 

Five hotels in ten days, a guide every morning, a tasting menu every night. Each element is excellent; together they leave no room to enjoy any of them.

The adviser’s real job is to take things out. Three nights is the floor in most places; two is a stop. An afternoon with nothing in it is often the part people remember.

This is harder to sell than more. A full itinerary looks generous on paper. But clients who seem tired of travel are usually tired of being hurried through it.

What this asks of us

None of this needs new technology or a bigger budget. It needs advisers to keep proper notes, read them before every booking, and pass the right things on to the people who will meet the client first. 

It also needs us to be honest about what we can promise, because certainty offered up front is usually a promise somebody else has to keep.

Disengaged clients are waiting for someone to remember them.