Elegant Stay Away Vacays

Luxury villas offer amenity-laden features, cultural immersion and as much COVID-proofing as you ever want

- By Lark Gould

Some call them “isolation vacations.” Others call them corona breaks – safe travels to beautiful spots where you can cut away from your crowded daily life and try out a new normal in holiday-making without getting tripped up by COVID-19 wor ries of gloom and doom.

The key is in the choice of dwelling. Say “villa” and your world opens up on a selection of magnificent manses where the only outsiders you see will be the ones you choose to see. Should you say the word “contactless,” and even those coveted hospitality services will obligingly disappear.

Vacation villas have been a long standing standard in the world of hospitality. But these are usually leftto celebrities, CEOs and heads of state who prefer to forego the grand lobbies and vibrant porte-cochères for the personal garage and labyrinth of bedrooms, dining areas, recreation studios and impenetrable pool grounds to be found in lone dwelling places far afield where mountains rule and lake waters hold the sky.

Largely a best-kept secret of the rich and famous, villa vacations are having their day in COVID times. Prior to the pandemic, hotels historically dominated in performance compared to their short-term rental counterparts. In 2019, for example, average hotel occupancy rates skewed 11.4 percentage points higher than vacation rental occupancies and nearly 20 percentage points higher when compared to multi-bedroom estates.