Insight’s Luxury Gold offers ‘best of the best’
The best of the best.” That’s what Insight Vacations is calling its newest product, Luxury Gold.
“It’s the vacation of a lifetime,” says Insight Vacations CEO John Boulding: traveling in style to the most glamorous destinations, staying at the best hotels, dining at Michelin-starred restaurants, and getting exclusive access to sights only a select few see.
“It’s the best luxury product in escorted touring,” claims Boulding. “While our Premium Program averages 32 to 40 guests, with Luxury Gold the maximum is 28.”
Luxury Gold features the best collection of hotels: imagine staying at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, an Italian villa in Tuscany, or TripAdvisor’s UK Hotel of the Year, The Milestone in London. “These are ‘wow’ properties,” Boulding says.
Each tour of Europe also offers Michelin dining experiences. “On Capri, the hotel Capri Palace has an amazing seafood restaurant on top of the Blue Grotto, Il Riccio,” relates Paul Melinis, Insight Vacations’ director of sales. “Gerard Depardieu was sitting to our left, and Leo DiCaprio was sitting to our right. In five minutes we were sold.”
The welcome dinner highlights Insight’s Dine Around feature, in which you choose from a number of authentic local restaurants chosen to deliver something extra, like a private flamenco show in Seville.
Then there are the VIP experiences. While you don’t miss main sights like the Prado in Madrid, the statue of David in Florence, and the mountain ride in Switzerland, Luxury Gold has also created a series of unique experiences other operators don’t feature, like entrance into the Sistine Chapel before opening hours, a tour of Monet’s garden in Giverny, or access to the Vassari Corridor, the first art gallery in the world that links the Duke’s Palace to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “With an art historian, you’ll see 10,000 artworks not seen by the public,” Boulding promises.
Lastly, Luxury Gold offers the kind of service in which every detail is taken care of, from private pickup service to and from the airport to your baggage being delivered into your room. Almost all the evening meals are included, though some nights are left free so you can explore on your own.
Need a reservation at that hot restaurant you’ve been reading about? The tour director is a traveling concierge who will take care of it, as well as any other special requests you might have. (My tour director Mike Doughty told us about having to go back to a hotel to retrieve the false teeth a guest had left behind.)
“The tour directors are not there to sell you optionals,” Melinis assures. “They’re there for guests to have the time of their lives.”
Boulding himself started as a tour director with Con Tiki, one of Insight Vacations’ sister brands under mother company The Travel Corporation (TTC). “I’ve been with Insight since 1979; the company took the top-of-market view of being better than other tour operators,” he says. “We’d select better hotels in the right locations, and changed the business to include major sites like the Eiffel Tower and gondola ride so that our guests didn’t get nickel-and-dimed. They felt it was a complete vacation.”
Insight also innovated business-class legroom on their touring coaches, with a maximum of 40 guests on any premium tour. They were the first to offer farther-flung destinations like Romania, Albania, Moldova and Tunisia. They found that guests were looking for more free time, so Insight overhauled its tours in 2016, stripping down its itineraries and offering Relaxed Starts at 9 a.m. so guests could take advantage of the hotel facilities.
“The quality and luxury is in the details,” notes Boulding.
Four years ago they experimented by going into the luxury market and upgrading their mix of hotels, which had initially mingled premium and luxury properties.
In 2016 The Travel Corporation was back to being a family-run business, owned by South Africa’s Tollman family. TTC now owns 30 brands, including Red Carnation Hotels and Uniworld River Cruises, and boasts almost 100 years of experience in the hospitality industry.
The company is most proud of Ashford Castle in Ireland, the No. 1 hotel in the world, according to Virtuoso, while Conde Nast Traveler ranked The Milestone in London No. 3.
“We get very few complaints as it is — ridiculously low,” Boulding says.
With Luxury Gold, I’m sure the complaints will be even fewer.
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Ask your travel agent about Luxury Gold by Insight Vacations, or contact Rajah Travel’s Manila office at email: intltoursmnl1@rajahtravel.com, tel. no. 523-8801; Rajah’s Makati office at email: intltoursmkt@rajahtravel.com, tel. no. 894-0886. For updates, like Rajahtravel.com on Facebook and follow @rajahtravel_com on Twitter and Instagram.
