BETTER TO TRAVEL WELL THAN ARRIVE
It’s official. Vogue informs me that transformative travel will be the travel trend for 2017. A nice snappy marketing moniker for what I’ve been doing for decades. As dear old Keith Reinhard quipped “live in the current idiom and one day you will create it”. As a creative director and treatment writer that’s become a way of life.
I’ve spent my life surfing the edge. Travel has always been transformative for me. I’ve lived and worked in many many places staring in ’88 in Singapore (Leo B and Ogilvy) Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand for the mighty JWT the off to Australia in 2000 with Lowe‘s and an MBA then back to Malaysia in 2002 for BBDO before doing a grand tour of Indochina by way of Cambodia and Saigon for River Orchid Group. “Beat that for a geographic,” I told my psych. And here’s a visual jaunt through the last 12 months…
Now that “experiential travel” is so 2016, let’s see how the new and fabulous trend has evolved. There have always been rapacious vacationers looking for ways to tap into native cultures, meaningfully interact with locals and feel like far more than a tourist. So where does the intrepid traveler go from there? Luxury safaris? Apache sweat lodges? North Korea on £10 a day?
For me, the biggest evolution in my travel life, and I travel a lot, has been Airbnb. Currently I’m in Paulie HQ, my base for the Cannes Film Festival. I booked through Airbnb – now valued at $10 billion and with more than 500,000 hosts around the world for me to choose from. I love them because have access to neighborhoods where hotels often aren’t an option like in the vielle ville here in Cannes, 10 minutes from the action and yet away from the Euro trash festival riff raff. It’s such a game changer that hotels are beginning to recognize that customers value these uniquely local experiences. For instance fave boutique chain Hotel Indigo caught onto the demand for local experiences earlier this year by rolling out touchscreens that list the staff’s favorite neighborhood attractions and restaurants. Individual hotels also host local events where they invite neighbours to catch up at the hotel over a cocktail. But they’re booking system is not a match for Airbnb. I fucking LOVE their site and gorgeously immersive user experience. It’s super high on visual content, encouraging hosts to upload quality photos of their properties to listings. And if you’re a spastic with a camera – no worries – you can request that one of Airbnb’s 3,000 freelance photographers take pictures of their housing for free. Most cleverly it has social elements that add trust. And if ever I need a boost, I read the utterly charming things former hosts have said about me as a guest.
The cream is that Airbnb integrates Facebook data, meaning users can view a visitor or owner’s profile. The feature also lets me see if we share common friends. Finally for me the most important seductive feature is personalization. Airbnb lets me coordinate incredibly customised experiences. If my plane lands at 0600 I can ask the host to have the apartment available an hour later. While it’s up to the owner to respond, the capability shows that there doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits all approach for travel. All in all, that makes for a completely custom transformative travel experience for me.
Tailor made travel solutions are critical to the new transformational travel evolution. While it has similar elements of experiential travel, it’s travel motivated and defined by a shift in perspective, self-reflection and development and a deeper communion with nature and culture. A perfect example is Miracles Phuket – the treatment centre for tomorrow in God’s own personal paradise. The brainchild of two good friends Bill O’Leary and Mark Heather, who pooled their expertise in five star hospitality and luxury yachts, Miracles basks in the riviera of Asia. An outcrop of luxury villas, it specialises in the treatment for alcohol and substance addiction by offering tools to encourage personal and professional growth in a private sanctuary away from today’s is device and pace driven culture.
As we’re increasingly disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, nature, and culture, Miracles offers elements of luxury/adventure travel that lead to deeper transformations. It’s almost as if each stay becomes a three-phase process consisting of the departure, the initiation, and the return. A typical stay becomes a “hero’s journey” where travellers venture into the unknown to learn wisdom from recovery science, cultures and practices before returning home refreshed and rejuvinated by this new way of being. It’s this post-travel action that separates Miracles from other traditional rehabs. So if you want to kick the rock n’ roll lifestyle in style, email here for an excellent rate.
As a plutonium class traveller on Expedia, I spend at least 150+ nights away annually. Always looking for an immersive, perspective-shifting environment that challenges and inspires me on a deeply personal level, I look for places that act as a muses for my powerful medium of advertsing storytelling and to transform my life for the better. LA, Bali, Hong Kong and Bangkok do that for me big time. Transformational travel is what lies on the other side of authenticity and experiential travel, and it’s what happens when people are pushed out of their comfort zones and find the courage and strength to overcome challenges—physical, psychological, or emotional. I live to travel and plan my life accordingly. But not everyone’s so blessed. Perhaps instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
