You Are Invited

Want a one-on-one meeting with the Pope? Or book an entire atoll in the Seychelles for your wedding anniversary? Try this Airbnb for billionnaires. Just make sure you have very good taste, and your bank balance in dollars exceeds ten figures. Meet the London-based realtor who’s the bespoke luxury travel consultant of the rich and famous

- Bijoy Venugopal

NOT EVERY ultra-high net worth individual takes after Phileas Fogg. While the 19th-century fictional hero of Jules Verne’s Around The World In Eighty Days staked his fortune on a whistlestop world tour, super-rich travellers of the present millennium are both savvier and pickier. They demand more than their money’s worth. They want exclusivity, adventure, and a kind of raw unexpectedness a la Walter Mitty. And they want bragging rights, of course, but not the pedestrian kind you’re likely to find hashtagged on Instagram.

From soaring over the Kenyan wilderness in the same yellow Gipsy Moth biplane that Robert Redford’s character piloted in Out Of Africa, or an exclusive backstage pass to premier fashion pageants in Paris, these well-heeled globetrotters are more likely to mention their escapades casually at the next huddle of the board of directors.

No one knows their pulse better than Anthony Lassman. This London-based realtor has a keen eye for the tastes of wealthy patrons, a trait he has cultivated over 25 years during his flourishing career in high-end real estate consultancy. Today, alongside that pursuit, he curates exclusive travel experiences for those he knows can afford them. His clients — the “cash-rich and time-poor” — are worth anywhere from $200 million to $8 billion. Luxury for the UHNW traveller, he remarks, is about discovery, space and time, as much as it is about special places and people, and unique experiences. “Being able to do what you want, when you want to, with no one pressuring you about meal times, cars waiting, getting to airports…”