Luxury vacations

Tell Us Everything, Travel Entrepreneur Katrina A. Garnett

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels, Tell Us Everything

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Katrina Garnett recently launched My Little Swans, a luxury family travel web site for adventurous families looking for one-of-a-kind adventures that involve things like lunch at a Bedoin camp in Jordan and sailing Alaska's Inside Passage on a private yacht. Unlike her previous, very-techie businesses, this one was born out of Garnett's hobby: She's originally from Australia and she and her husband regularly take their three children on ambitious trips across the globe.

Garnett's not intimidated by traveling with kids, instead she's passionate about the advantages of exposing children to world cultures. MyLittleSwans.com aims to cut out the travel agent by featuring itineraries from her many trips with restaurant, hotel, shopping and other suggestions of places she and her concierge partners have personally vetted. Plus, the site's selected list of tour operators in each of those destinations can arrange for custom adventures from a backstage tour of a Chinese opera to a hiking trip with the Maasai tribe in Tanzania.

Garnett – and by extension her site – is like that in-the-know friend always up on the newest, hottest and best. But she also shares the little-known, like her personal watchmaker in Switzerland and jeweler in Paris. She spent two years and more than $2 million of her own money developing the site and made sure it included a social media aspect, which she believes is essential for web 2.0 success. We chatted with this firecracker over drinks at New York's Gramercy Tavern and asked her to Tell Us Everything.

Why did you decide to go into travel?
I've been planning world adventures for my family for 15 years, from the time my firstborn was less than a year old. Over the years, numerous friends and acquaintances have sought me out for travel advice, so I've shared my itineraries and photos with them, and they've taken the same or similar trips and loved them.

But as the number of requests grew – and the Web became increasingly difficult to navigate from a discerning point of view – I saw there was need for a comprehensive trustworthy online resource that makes it easy for families to plan extraordinary journeys and to go straight to the source for the best guides and insider experiences.

My Little Swans is not just a bunch of pretty pictures and opinions. There are, of course, countless travel websites and online sources, but I think few that are developed with an eye to the future and a deep understanding of the tech underbelly; I'm a total tech nerd. And as most of my friends know, I'm also a bit of a perfectionist and can be a nut when it comes to research, so the MLS content reflects this 150 percent and always will – nothing is "pay for play" or ad-driven.

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Luxury Super Bowl XLIV Travel Packages

by Deb West (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Sports

With just under a month left until Super Bowl XLIV it is time for fans to start thinking about making their way to Miami, Florida for the big event. If you are a Ravens or Cardinals fan you must be thrilled by yesterday's wins and we now have the final teams for the playoffs in the AFC and NFC. Whether or not there are clear cut favorites for this year's Super Bowl is still up for debate but you can count on having a fabulous luxury vacation and seeing the game if that is what your heart desires.

One purveyor of luxury sports event vacations is the company Fine Things Packages. They offer an "Ultimate Super Bowl Package" for upwards of $15,000 per person. The company prides themselves on being a leading provider of major sold out sports events worldwide, having the best service team in the industry and independent of all of the normal ties that often lead to a conflict of interest in the travel industry.

Some of the items this ultimate package includes are:

Four nights accommodation at the five star Four Seasons Miami
Round-trip first class airfare from anywhere in the Continental United States to Miami
One lower lever ticket between the 30 and 50 yard lines to Super Bowl XLIV
Ticket for the Saturday night party of your choice including - Playboy, Leigh Steinberg, Sports Illustrated, etc
Official NFL Hospitality
Access to NFL Gameday Fan Plaza
Various transportation from the airport, game, etc.

To see the exact specifications for this travel package click here. The company also offers more moderately priced packages starting at $4,350. the biggest difference seems to be in the quality of the hotels, class of airfare and stadium seat location. If the Jets, Ravens, Colts or Vikings make it all the way to the Super Bowl we know that their local fans could use to escape from the winter weather as well as go cheer on their home town favorite! Hope your team wins!

Tags: Cardinals, four seasons, FourSeasons, Luxury vacations, LuxuryVacations, miami, Ravens, super bowl, Super bowl XLIV, SuperBowl, SuperBowlXliv

Luxury Houses: Holiday Escapes

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Decor, Estates, Luxury Travel & Hotels, Books

Hotels are fine as far as they go. For a really luxurious vacation however, renting a private house or villa is much the better choice. Of course the prices at the top-end can be astronomical. If money is no object, however, a new book called Luxury Houses: Holiday Escapes is a perfect guide to the best high-end hideaways around the globe. One of the standouts is Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld's former villa in Monaco (pictured here), which can be yours for a mere €30,000 per week. For that you get six bedrooms, panoramic views of the ocean and the mountains from an enormous terrace, a pool, Jacuzzi, game room and a tent on a private beach. The interior is described unironically as "quasi royal."

Also on display is the Birkenhead House in Hermanus, South Africa (about $7,000 per night) with eleven bedrooms and three pools, dominating a steep cliff above Walker Bay where whales frolic; and Villa Indigo in the Caribbean Sea within a protective reef in Anguilla with two pools and a private beach and sandbar, for $16,000 - $38,000 a week depending on the season; as well as dozens more ritzy rentals from ski chalets in Switzerland to modern palaces in China.

Gallery: Luxury Escapes - Villa Karl