How the Rich and Famous Travel

Wherever they go, they leave an impression. Sometimes on tour organisers’ minds, occasionally on hotel lawns

On that morning, after successfully negotiating dug-up roads and 9 am traffic in his Honda City, 40-year-old Rishi Kapoor had settled himself in his New Delhi office. He worked for Abercrombie & Kent (A&K), a travel agency for the world’s ultra-rich.

The phone rang. It was the personal secretary of His Majesty Paduka Seri Baginda Sultan Haji Hassanlal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam, popularly known as the Sultan of Brunei.

“His Majesty is on a world tour,” the caller said, “and immediately needs a private plane in the Maldives.” It was an unusual demand, but then, fulfilling it was Kapoor’s job. A&K had all sorts of wealthy clients, and they were used to having unusual demands met. Just two months ago, he received a similar request from a Saudi prince who wanted to travel incognito and needed A&K to arrange his honeymoon in India. Kapoor recalls the mental note he made of the details: “Private jet, two people, honeymoon, seven pieces of luggage, 11 nights with the ‘usual suspects’ [Delhi, Agra and Jaipur], a spa destination, and the Taj at sunset, sunrise or full-moon.” Plus, if needed, an airfield for the couple’s landing, pre-arranged immigration clearance and a limousine parked on the tarmac.

Another visit—if that’s the word—Kapoor remembers was that of the Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said Al-Said, who clogged Rajasthan’s tourism industry with bookings for nearly a month in February 2011. Except, he didn’t show up. North Africa inconveniently went into turmoil around then, cancelling his trip.

Arrangements for such trips, whether the ultra-rich guests arrive or not, begin months in advance, typically. Hotels and palace visits are pre-booked, walls are repainted, doorknobs are polished and carpets dusted. With so much money riding on the satisfaction of so few, no chances are taken. A&K is a specialised agency, but it has others vying for the luxury travel business too, among them Cox & Kings, Designer Holidays and International Ventures.

Satisfying the ultra-rich on vacation requires a mania for detail. The exercise starts with preparing a checklist with every requirement specified, from dietary musts/no-nos to people the guest would like to meet. Everything needs to be perfectly coordinated. For someone like the Sultan of Brunei, a tour advisor would have him stay at the Imperial Hotel, a luxury hotel in Delhi with some fine artworks along its corridors depicting lost moments in history (of the Afghan Wars, for example), with arrangements for a round of sightseeing in a flag-wielding S-Class 350 Mercedes weaving through specially cordoned Delhi traffic, and lunch at the Olive Bar in Diplomatic Enclave—with enough time left for a visit to the Qutab Minar.

“The Sultan of Brunei’s son visited us a few years ago for dinner,” says Sidharth Chadha, manager, sales and marketing, Olive Corporate, which runs the Olive chain of restaurants. “It’s not just high-end wining and dining, we have a super-exclusive rustic ambience,” he adds, referring to Olive’s Mehrauli outlet.

The culinary curiosity of American visitors, though, is slightly different. Kapoor gets request after request for the specific table at the ITC Maurya’s Bukhara restaurant where US President Bill Clinton dined during his 2000 visit. President Barack Obama reportedly feasted on the same ‘Clinton Platter’ at the same table during his 2010 visit, and has been pulling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s leg about it ever since.

What gets the adrenalin pumping in this business, says Kapoor, is surprise visits. Like David Rockefeller’s. In February this year, the 96-year-old American billionaire-philanthropist and his entourage of 19 suddenly rerouted their vacation to India because of the Egyptian revolution. A&K put them up at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel on Man Singh  Road, and chartered three planes for them to visit Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur. One of the legs of the itinerary included a private $3,000 dinner package, with the Maharaja of Mehrangarh personally playing host at his private quarters; bejewelled elephants, buggies and Kalbelia dancers, of course, were de rigueur. “The tour was arranged at very short notice,” says Kapoor, “But at the end of it, we were glad that Mr Rockefeller gave us a 9.7 out of 10 for all the services—the missing 0.3 was because one of the chartered aircraft had to be changed.”

It was an SUV rather than a plane that put A&K in a spot, though, when Julia Roberts—along with her Eat, Pray and Love crew—demanded 10 fully tinted Toyota Fortuners at the last minute. It had to be Fortuners and nothing else, and since this vehicle had just been launched in India, with customers on a year-long waiting list, it was nothing short of a logistical nightmare. To stay within Indian law, A&K policy and the client’s insurance cover, the SUVs had to be taxis. Eventually, Kapoor had to hire them from three different rental firms, but not without a frantic moment too many.

Success lies in keeping calm. Given the money, more or less everything can be organised. On that April day back in 2010, when the Sultan of Brunei’s secretary called asking for a plane in the Maldives, Kapoor knew exactly what to do. As soon as A&K’s London office opened for work, he sent them the request—which would be forwarded to Dubai, the world’s largest hub of chartered planes.

If the Sultan so wished, Kapoor knew, he could buy up the whole Dubai hub. After all, the Sultan of Brunei was famous in the 1980s for habitually topping global lists of the world’s richest individuals. His wealth was placed at some $40 billion back then. Having inherited Brunei’s throne from his father in 1967, he gave the very word ‘extravagance’ its extra vagrancy, so luxuriously did he travel. While the father had delighted himself in an imported London taxi that he drove around the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei’s capital, the Sultan loved Rolls-Royces and Range Rovers. In the 1980s, The Guinness Book of World Records rated his personal collection of 500 Rolls-Royces as the world’s largest. Besides which, he had about 5,000 other cars. Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Mercedes Benz, Bentley, you name it, he had it—cars worth an estimated $4 billion. And then there were the aircraft. He had two jumbo jets, one of them a Boeing 747-400 with gold-plated furniture (including an all-gold toilet sink and bidet) that cost $230 million (the gold fixtures, $3 million), which he often piloted himself. He also had six smaller planes and two helicopters.

Monarchs of oil-rich states rarely feature on rich lists nowadays, given the blurry lines between State and personal assets, but Kapoor knew that this was not a client A&K could afford to let down. The Sultan’s jumbo jets, the secretary informed him, had gone for repairs to the Boeing workshop, and the plane they were using had also been grounded on account of a technical snag.

“What kind of plane does the Sultan need?” Kapoor enquired. The Sultan needed at least a 50-seater jet for his party of six—the queen, two butlers, a bodyguard, the secretary and His Majesty himself. Under normal circumstances, Kapoor would have suggested a regular 60-seater ATR jet, the kind airlines use. But then he recollected a story about one of the Sultan’s touchdowns in New Delhi as part of an earlier world tour.

It was the story of a butler in the entourage whose job was to rustle up exactly what the Sultan wanted, be it a watch, evening suit, or even a pair of shoes for a spontaneous game of polo. Not a very demanding job, one would think, till you saw the size of the temporary luggage storehouse the hotel had put up on the lawn behind the building. The Sultan and his team had checked into The Imperial with sixty pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage—“each worth a crore” as Kapoor remembers it.

A 60-seater ATR, Kapoor realised, would be utterly inadequate. The least that could accommodate his guests and their luggage was a Gulfstream aircraft. It could get them from the Maldives, but would only be allowed to park in Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore. That would mean a few extra lakh spent on trips to places other than these three. But this was the Sultan of Brunei’s world tour. Kapoor didn’t bother doing the maths. The priority was arranging the plane.

The Sultan’s aide was desperate. And Kapoor just happened to be the one taking the order. He got lucky. “In the travel business,” he says, sipping tea, “you can’t imagine the high when you say ‘The Sultan is travelling with us’.”

Except that the Sultan didn’t visit India at all on that world tour. And the Imperial was spared the use of its lawn as a cloak room. Not that the hotel would have minded, of course.

About The Author

Arindam Mukherjee