There are two ways to be in this business, and for years I thought I was only in one of them.
I build the place. But before I built anything, I spent a long time inside other people’s hotels, studying them. Not as a guest. Taking notes, asking questions, working out what they were doing that no brochure would ever tell me. I’ve written about what I was looking for, and it was never the marble.
Those years left me with something I hadn’t planned on. People. Directors, concierges, general managers, a few owners. Relationships that outlived the trips that produced them.
So a while ago I did something that surprised me more than it surprised anybody else. I became an independent travel advisor as well.
Not for the commission. For the exact reason Emily describes below: hospitality travels through people, not through categories. And the only way I know to move it around the world is to know who is standing behind the door when my guest walks in.
Which is why, when somebody asks me to plan a trip, the first thing I check is never the property. It’s whether there’s a person inside it I trust. I’ve since written that test down as twenty-three questions. If I don’t have that, I’d rather lose the work. I have lost it.
So this is a strange conversation for me to be in. Emily chooses places for people who could go anywhere. I do that now too. I also run one, and eighteen years in this business, eight of them behind my own door, have shown me what it costs to keep a promise like that from the inside.
We’ve never worked together. So we did something simple. We each answered the same three questions, separately, without seeing what the other had written. Then we put the answers next to each other.
I expected agreement. I got it. What I didn’t expect was the one place we come apart.