Page 24 - Bloomberg Businessweek - November 19, 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek The Year Ahead 2019 Luxury

hotel’s grand opening. “This is about creating unique to his company are fully custom-built,
serendipitous opportunities to have adventures.” such as the time he restyled a three-star inn in the
The focus on authenticity is hardly unique to soulful Indian town of Varanasi as a bohemian
Prior’s company. According to Skift Research, oasis fit for celebrities. On the same trip, Prior
the analytics arm of the travel industry news arranged for thousands of candles to be floated
site Skift, the value of the global tour and activ- down a river after a sunset tour of an abandoned $8k
ities market hovers at about $150 billion a year. fort in Maheshwar and sent guests shopping for
And every player from Marriott to Expedia custom saris before a dress-up dinner party in
to TripAdvisor is looking for its slice of that a maharajah’s palace. (This was his inaugural
very large pie. Matthew Upchurch, chief exec- journey, attended by such taste makers as chef
utive officer of Virtuoso Ltd., a luxury travel Alice Waters and photographer Andrea Gentl.)
agent consortium, says the focus on activities The company’s offerings—built from scratch—are
has transformed the role of the travel special- much more exclusive than the fare most travel ● Starting price to rent
the Louvre for lunch
ist. “They used to be human translators of an agents have on their laundry lists. and a scavenger hunt,
archaic language that was required to book air- But Prior’s talent is in making the mundane according to Virtuoso
travel agent Jack Ezon
fare, making them all about the transaction— mesmerizing; the most-talked-about item
like stockbrokers,” he says. “Now they’re more on the India itinerary was a visit to a mod-
like financial planners, looking at the experi- est second- floor luncheonette in Mumbai that
ences you want to collect in the near- to long- serves the city’s best thali platters, a sort of all-
term and helping you realize them.” you-can-eat sampler.
Prior separates himself from the pack—there “There’s a lot of skepticism about the tradi-
are 17,500 individual advisers associated with tional travel agent model,” Prior says. The land-
Virtuoso alone—through attention to detail. scape there can be full of people working on
Almost any luxury travel agent worth his or her commissions and aiming for freebies. “For us,
salt can close down the Louvre for a private view- it’s all about trust, collaboration, and a willing-
ing (at a steep cost, of course). The extravagances ness to dream.” <BW> �Nikki Ekstein
78

Solution
Graphene

▷ Once hyped as a miracle material, it’s finally finding its way into
everything from Prada jackets to Ford Mustangs

By now you’ve probably heard of the coming have salivated over graphene’s technical and
graphene revolution. Perhaps it was in 2004, commercial possibilities, but barriers includ-
when a team of scientists at the University ing scale, quality control, and cost have delayed
of Manchester announced they’d isolated a those promises until now.
carbon-based supermaterial just one atom thick A few startups—and Fortune 500 compa-
but more than 160 times stronger than steel. It nies—have realized the material offers super-
could pass electrical signals 250 times faster lative performance as an additive to existing
than silicon and conduct heat 10 times more consumer staples, rather than as a standalone
efficiently than copper. Or maybe you heard material that can cost hundreds of thousands
about it in 2010, when the same team won a of dollars per kilogram. Instead of a “miracle
Nobel Prize in physics “for groundbreaking material,” graphene is being sprinkled into
experiments regarding the two-dimensional products “like pixie dust,” says Julia Attwood,
material.” Since then, businesses worldwide an analyst for Bloomberg NEF.