Spear’s has travelled all over the globe this year to bring our readers fresh insights on established luxury destinations from Paris and Rome to the Hamptons and St Lucia, and to report on new frontiers in high-end travel, like Cuba, Montana, Tasmania and Abu Dhabi.
Spear’s has travelled all over the globe this year to bring our readers fresh insights on established luxury destinations from Paris and Rome to the Hamptons and St Lucia, and to report on new frontiers in high-end travel, like Cuba, Montana, Tasmania and Abu Dhabi.
A luxury ranch in Montana
Filling out my Indian visa form for a visit to Mumbai last month, I was stumped when asked to submit a list of all the countries I’ve visited in the last decade.
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I didn’t even manage to fill in everywhere I’d been this year: Turkey, Uganda, Libya, the UAE, Holland, France, Italy, Switzerland, New Zealand, Wakefield… before the electronic form complained that I’d run out of characters.
I suspect many Spear’s readers would have suffered a similar fate — but unlike me, they probably have a savvy PA on hand to smooth things out.
While we’re always interested in selflessly road-testing the world’s most relaxing getaways (have you seen our Spa selection?), we also know that plenty of our readers are keen on adventurous holidays too.
The grim predictability of 21st century office life (recurring threats of global economic meltdown aside) seems to have turned even the most conservative of City slickers into adrenaline junkies at the weekend. Spear’s Freddy Barker surprised us all with his daring off-duty activities: abseiling down Broadgate tower, wing walking, cruising down the crocodile-infested waters of the Amazon (in a luxury ship complete with swimming pool, of course). Whatever next?
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This year, we learned that no destination is too remote for the Spear’s reader. Mark C O’Flaherty reported on New Zealand super-lodges accessible only by helicopter, and we received some high-altitude copy from James Suenson-Taylor, who filed from Everest’s base camp. Suenson Taylor to take a mid-life, extended gap year with his wife, visiting 111 cities in 23 countries.
So you can see, it hasn’t all been sundowners and deck chairs for our Spear’s writers. Oliver Thring dined on sea cucumber entrails and pufferfish sperm in Japan, but he says he enjoyed it. I headed back into Libya more than a year after my evacuation, and went to bed each night to the sound of (mostly) celebratory gunfire while writing a story on oil corruption — and I have to say I enjoyed that too.
Sure, our carbon footprint won’t win us many eco-friends, but we plan to continue criss-crossing the globe next year. In fact, Josh Spero has already booked a trip on The World for the beginning of January, a luxury cruise ship that he’ll take around the Caribbean — he’ll be reporting back in February.
Read more by Sophie McBain
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