In Luxury Travel, It's Emotions Over Elegance

Rather than first-class seats, hotels with no-expense-spared interiors, or even exclusive experiences, for the top one per cent, luxury is about the takeaways and intangibles.

- MAVIS TEO

As a freelance travel writer, I travel twice a month and stay in at least 32 hotels a year for work 97 per cent of those are luxury ones. And when not city-hopping, I am at exotic locales or having exclusive experiences that are inaccessible to a tourist of average means.

But the travels that have left the deepest impressions on me and make me smile are not the ones made up of finery like Frette sheets or de Gournay wallpaper. In fact, sometimes there is neither bed linen nor a bidet to be found. For me, my top travel experiences include an annual 10-day horseback riding camp in Mongolia. The fabled Kumano Kodo in Japan in the fall, where I had to walk-climb uphill for up to nine hours a day, is also on the list.

Pricewise, these experiences are far from luxury. The horse riding camp with Stone Horse Expeditions & Travel costs USD$4,000 (S$5,388); the six-day selfguided Kumano Kodo trek with Oku Japan starts at USD$1,720. Still, they form some of my most cherished travel experiences for the emotions they evoke and the connections they create, whether through encounters with people, reflections on simpler joys, or serendipitous moments of discovery.

For many luxury travellers, it is also these kinds of experiences rather than the accoutrements of a hotel or fine dining that make up their travel highlights.

"Luxury travel should not be defined by dollars and cents", points out John Tan, who retired from a career in corporate development 10 years ago. Tan knows luxury travel, having visited 160 countries to date. To add, he has been a Singapore Airlines (SIA) Priority Passenger Service (PPS) member for 23 years, a Hyatt Lifetime Globalist, and an IHG loyalty club member with over a million points.

SEEKING CONNECTIONS