Travel adviser Olivia Ferney: "The main word I use is 'particular'. Rich people like very particular things." Photo / travelwithlivii, Instagram
A Birkin bag overnighted to Capri. A pink Brabus sports car for a Gen Z birthday party. Olivia Ferney, a travel agent to the ultra-wealthy, has heard it all.
The client was calling from a high-end resort with an update for Olivia Ferney, a travel adviser who books trips for the ultra-rich.
The hotel was up to White Lotus standards, the client said, but there was a hitch. The limes in the margaritas: where, exactly, were they sourced?
“She really, really always wants to make sure how her drinks are made,” Ferney said. “Limes from certain countries give her allergies.”
About six months ago, Ferney, 24, started posting videos of her calls with clients. In short order, she gained more than 400,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram. Her fans enjoy listening in as people who have almost everything complain about almost anything.
The limes in question gave the client “a little bit of a tingle”, Ferney explained by phone from Miami, where she makes her home. As she related it, the client’s complaint went like this: “I’m allergic to certain limes from certain countries, because of the pollination. I don’t have signs, like my face doesn’t swell up, but I know intuitively my body is rejecting it.”
Ferney, who may be the living embodiment of the axiom that the customer is always right, contacted the resort’s provisioning department to investigate its citrus sourcing. Then she saw to it that her client was provided with a steady drip of reposado tequila.
“We work with many billionaires and hundred-millionaires,” Ferney said, referring to her employer, Top Tier Travel. “The main word I use is ‘particular’. Rich people like very particular things.”
Just how particular? There was the client who authorised $100,000 (NZ$170,500) charged to his credit card for his daughter’s holiday, provided she agree not to contact him. Another client demanded a last-minute doctor’s consult before boarding a private jet, fearful that her new breast implants might rupture.
And then there was the woman who insisted on being extracted from a charter boat when rough seas prevented her from reaching a Greek party island. She complained that the waves were not even that high, adding that the captain was no longer speaking to her.
Increasingly agitated, the client grasped at ways for Ferney to rescue her from her nautical prison. “A helicopter would be great, a submarine would be great,” she said. She emphasised that she had not come all this way only to find herself stuck at sea when she should have been dancing till dawn on Mykonos. “I’m not 90 years old,” she said.
Ferney said she recorded her clients only with their permission. Like certain reality show stars, they do not mind going public with their over-the-top behaviour. Some videos not recorded in the moment are reenacted afterwards, she added.
“The calls I post are less than 10% of what we get,” she said. A majority remain private, because of confidentiality agreements. “I am very highly NDA’d,” she said.
Raised in Dundas, Ontario, population 20,000, Ferney grew up in a middle-class family that was as incredulous as her online fans were about the stories she posted.
After attending the University of Western Ontario, she lit out for Miami, where she met Troy Arnold, the founder of Top Tier Travel. She joined the company as a fixer for those who pay $2500 to $8500 a month for above-and-beyond services.
And what are those services? A custom pink Brabus 800 for a 22-year-old’s birthday party. Spring water shipped to a Caribbean island for a client annoyed that shampooing with the local tap water gave her an itchy scalp. A $75,000 Shadow Birkin from Hermes overnighted to Capri, Italy.
One client requested — no, insisted on — a rental house in Aspen, Colorado, with at least six bedrooms and en suite baths, a gym, a sauna and a chef conversant with her elevated form of carnivorous eating. “You know my diet — grass-fed, grass-finished,” the client said.
“I’m very numb to a lot of requests,” Ferney said.
Her therapeutic neutrality in the face of outlandish behaviour may be rooted in the fact that she takes many of her calls poolside. No matter how peculiar the demand or how heated the client, she is there to soothe and oblige.
“To be honest, the clients in the multimillionaire category are more demanding than the billionaires,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
Money is seldom an object in Ferney’s line of work — though she has noticed that plutocrats enjoy a bargain.
“You’d be surprised at how excited our billionaire clients are when we get them a $1000 discount,” she said.
And if her customers cannot have what they want?
“We usually find it,” she said. “These are people that never hear no. It’s not a word they can process.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Guy Trebay
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