Meet the travel agent who plans trips for the ultra-rich: Now she’s spilling their most absurd travel demands
Olivia Ferney organises holidays for the richest people in society. Here’s how she does it.
How dare you think that the world’s uber-rich, top-of-society elite were all hissy-fit prone and expectant of 5-star service all the time? It’s prejudice to think that those who have money think the world revolves around them, that they can get what they want when they want just because of some numbers in their bank account.
Oh, you were absolutely right. Olivia Ferney makes her living by organising holidays for those so rich you don’t even know their names, and the requests that she’s had to deal with from the entitled voices on the other end of the phone will make your skin crawl.
The 25-year-old Canadian is the marketing director and travel specialist for Top Tier Travel, and she spoke to The Independent about some of the weirder demands that her clients have made.
One in particular stands out. An unnamed client, a young girl upset about her dad’s remarriage to a young new wife, wanted to rent an entire “branch” of the Palm Jumeirah archipelago in Dubai to “cheer herself up.”
“She called me and she wants a full arm of the Palm in Dubai”
“She called me, and she wants a full arm of the Palm in Dubai, which is not physically possible for me to rent. There are homes, there are hotels… it’s basically like asking to rent a province or a state. It’s just not feasible. That one shook me to the max. We did not get it done, will not get it done. It is impossible to do stuff like that.”
Ferney also reveals that she had to re-source lemons for one client as they weren’t vegan enough, and another requested an emergency helicopter extraction to a party in Mykonos.
She has made herself famous in the public domain by posting these surreal conversations on Instagram, where she re-records them with friends.
“I have new clients that are outrageous,” she told The Independent, "and I love them, but they want to be on the calls. They’ll call me with absurd requests that you’ve seen on my social media and afterwards will text me and ask, ‘Did you record that?’ I’m like, ‘No, if I didn’t tell you that I recorded it. I did not record it.’
“Tech people are my favorite people in the world”
“A lot of new clients are just obsessed with the Instagram page. They want to be a part of these crazy stories. Partly because they’ve found someone who understands their request and can handle it and they want a little spotlight moment on Instagram. I did not think it would go that way, but it has, and it’s very interesting.”
One client in particular contracted Ferney for their trip to Mykonos, and they simply wanted an absurd number of chocolate bars: “Tech people are my favorite people in the world. Even the crypto guys are usually super nice. We had a group of crypto guys that just went to Mykonos, great guys, so easy to work with. They wanted nothing but Kit Kats. I’m like, ‘I will get you millions of Kit Kat bars!’ What a blessing of a client."
Olivia revealed the hardest group of people to work with are not, in fact, the richest of the rich, but those who are ‘only’ millionaires: “The toughest group is that middle wealth, people that spend like they’re billionaires, but are ‘just’ millionaires.”
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“For example, they’ll hire a mega yacht for $300-$400,000, then get furious because they get post-purchase anxiety, because they know they weren’t supposed to spend that money. And they want a refund. Which is ridiculous. They’ll make up ‘issues’ with the trip to try and get cash back every time. Never going to happen.”
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