Foray Travels on what ultra-luxury travellers want now—and why price no longer buys the best stay

Eleanor Tan has paid upwards of €2,000 for a night in a Paris hotel, and what she remembers is the housekeeping, because they got it wrong. “To me, these are very basic things,” she says. “Housekeeping done well is something guests barely notice—done poorly, it’s a signal of how the hotel is really run.”

Tan sits at an unusual junction in the luxury trade: between its most fluent consumers and the hotels that have to deliver for them. Foray Travels, the company she co-founded with Jay Zou, in Singapore in 2020, is a travel concierge that does exactly one thing—hotels and resorts—for a clientele mostly based in the Middle East, particularly in Dubai. No flights, no two-week Italian itineraries. “We chose to be a master of hotels and resorts,” she says, and six years of bookings at the top of the market have left her with an unsentimental view of which properties are worth the money, and which are not.

Castiglion del Bosco, a Rosewood Hotel located in Montalcino, Tuscany, Italy. (Photo courtesy of Rosewood) Topmost: A sandbar at Soneva Jani, Maldives. (Photo by Jin Cheng Wong)

Master of one trade  

Foray Travels was born into the worst market in travel’s modern history. Tan and her co-founders registered the company in Singapore in 2020; Covid arrived two months later. “It might’ve been unlucky or not,” she says, “but I think it was precisely because of Covid that we managed to stand out and find a niche for ourselves.”

With Singapore closed, they went looking for anywhere still moving. Dubai was open, its travellers wanted out, and many of its agencies had shut or frozen. “We really just went in blindly, and luckily we found a base of customers there who wanted to travel to the Maldives.” It was, for the first two or three years, effectively the only destination on the menu, and it ultimately became the firm’s specialism.

That specialism has since hardened into policy. Ask Foray Travels to plan a two-week Italian itinerary, activities and all, and the answer is a polite no. “You have to be a specialist in everything, which we find difficult to manage—you become a jack of all trades but master of none.” Agency friends tell her she is leaving margin on the table, since packaged trips pay better. “That’s not our end goal. It is about profit, but we don’t want to keep chasing it and forget how we started the business.” The team numbers about 10 people, across Dubai and Singapore, and she intends to keep it that way: “The bigger you scale, the lower the quality of customer service becomes.”

It is a conviction Boulevard has heard before. Kenneth Cai, co-founder of elite travel concierge beCuriou, told us the heart of hospitality is “the software—the people”. Tan’s version narrows the aperture further: the hotel is the product; her trade is everything around it that the website never shows.

When price stops meaning luxury

Five years of post-Covid travel have produced a different client. “Right now, clients are a lot more discerning. Most of the time they come to us already knowing what they want.” They have seen the villas, the drone shots, the menus. “Visual beauty alone isn’t enough to impress them anymore.” 

Patina Maldives is a newly opened beach resort in Fari Islands and a member of Design Hotels. (Photo courtesy of Patina Maldives)

Prices, she says, have risen “at least 20 to 30 per cent” globally, and expectations have risen with the invoice. Even paradise has become a checkable claim: “It’s easy to promise paradise; every resort in the Maldives promises paradise on their website. Whether it’s actually a paradise when you get there is a completely different story.”

In her view, the product and service delivered during the stay is only half the equation—true ultra-luxury starts before a guest ever arrives and is mostly invisible at the point of booking: the speedboat that gets you to a resort like The Ritz-Carlton Maldives; the connecting rooms that actually connect; the dinner reservation made before wheels-down. “The hotel must be able to deliver and execute all this before arrival; otherwise it makes for a disjointed experience from the get-go. Which is why most of our work is done during the guest’s pre-arrival.”

The corollary is that price has quietly decoupled from quality. “In the past, luxury was about how expensive the hotel was,” she says. “Today it’s less about the price tag on its own—brand still matters enormously, but as a signal of consistency and execution, not just prestige. We also find that an experienced hotel team makes a world of difference in complementing the ultra-luxury experience. In hospitality, experience is an absolute asset and differentiator—you can’t fake or put a price tag over it.”

Which is why sometimes, the priciest room in town can still fail at the fundamentals. “More mid-tier luxury brands are surprising me with how they are also able to map the client journey end-to-end, smoothing out friction at every stage.”

The Dubai standard 

The clientele explains the exacting standard. “In a market like Dubai, luxury is just part of everyday life. They’re very familiar with it and know what to expect.” A client elsewhere may be delighted by mid-tier luxury, but a client from Dubai has seen everything. “They won’t be impressed by a regular hotel stay. They need something beyond that.” This sends her team back to the same discipline: remove the friction, make the whole experience intentional and cohesive, and tailor it to the individual rather than the segment.

City view from the Armani Hotel Dubai. (Photo by Jin Cheng Wong)

The service intensity is unlike anything else in the trade. “Whenever we have very VIP Middle Eastern clients travelling, we’re essentially on call 24 hours a day.” Replies are expected within five minutes; past that, the phone rings. “When you’re dealing with high-net-worth clients, it’s something you have to get used to.”

What the client actually buys is not a discount—“hotel prices are super transparent nowadays; we’re the same price as what you’d get online”—nor simply property credits and breakfasts the agency programmes layer on top. It’s a single point of accountability across the whole trip, and an expertise deep enough to solve problems most travellers can’t solve on their own—a room that materialises when the hotel says it’s full, a reservation that appears when the restaurant says otherwise. “We offer peace of mind.”

Where she sends them 

The Maldives remains the house specialism, and Tan sorts it with a dealer’s precision. Patina Maldives, in the Fari Islands, is her one-fits-all: right for honeymooners, families, and multigenerational groups, with “some of the best dining options in the Maldives, across all the islands” and, decisively, a 40 to 50 minute speedboat ride from Malé. 

For the full-dress end of her book, she reaches for Cheval Blanc, Joali, One&Only, and the Waldorf Astoria: “very glitz and glamour, a lot of chandeliers, marble, and all that, which speaks to them.” Asian and European clients tend to ask for the opposite—“a bit more low-key, relaxed, barefoot luxury”—and are pointed to Patina or the new Six Senses Kanuhura. First-timers get deliberate caution: “We try to be a bit safer when recommending first-timers to the Maldives, because it may be difficult to get it right the first time.”

An ultra-luxury riverside sanctuary, Mandapa sits at the cultural and western heart of Bali, Indonesia. (Photo courtesy of Mandapa, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve)

Aside from the Maldives, ask Tan for a recommendation and her own list moves easily across continents: closer to home, there’s Bawah Reserve—one of the world’s remotest resorts; Mandapa, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve folded into a bend of Bali’s Ayung River; Amankora, whose five lodges scattered across Bhutan she recommends less as a single stay than as a slow journey through the country.

Further away, there’s Passalacqua on Lake Como, which feels less like a hotel and more like someone’s exceptionally well-kept home; Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco, a working Tuscan wine estate with a hotel quietly attached; and Four Seasons’ new yacht, which she’s been suggesting to clients curious what the brand feels like once it leaves land.

Left: Passalacqua in Italy is a five-star boutique hotel in the lakeside village of Moltrasio. (Photo courtesy of Passalacqua) Right: Amankora, an Aman Resort scattered across the central and western valleys of Bhutan. (Photo courtesy of Amankora)

Which makes her favourite recommendation the stranger. A product whose value proposition for her clients she spent years deliberating over: the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express’s classic one-night run between Venice and Paris, where a historic cabin costs upwards of £9,000, is too small to open a carry-on in, and shares a lavatory—eight cabins to one—with no shower on board. 

Then a familiarisation trip put her on the train, and the evening undid her: black tie, a fine-dining dinner, the bar car with its music and its unhurried drinks. “The staff on the train are phenomenal; I think half the experience is down to how great they are. They know how to talk to guests and know what makes you tick.” She now recommends it—once, not annually, and with the roughly £12,000 suite for anyone who wants their own shower.

The conversion was complete enough to sell itself. “In fact, I sold the experience to one client while I was on the train myself. I was sharing pictures with him, and he said, ‘Sign me up.’”

Go further with Foray Travels.

Read next:

• Exploring Bawah Reserve, one of the world’s most remote private island resorts
• The interview: Elite travel concierge beCuriou co-founder Kenneth Cai on why human connection is the new currency of ultra-luxury vacations

More luxury travel, hotels and resorts

The brief: Foray Travels

Foray Travels is a Singapore-registered luxury travel concierge, with a team across Singapore and Dubai, that books only hotels and resorts—no flights, no packages—for high-net-worth clients roughly 70 per cent based in Dubai and the wider Middle East.

The destination: Globally, wherever there are luxury hotels and resorts. For Foray Travels, the map matters less than the marque—they work only with a handful of brands, among them Aman, Rosewood, Oetker Collection, and Cheval Blanc, whose standards they trust to meet even their most discerning clients’ expectations.

Why book? Booking through a concierge costs the same as booking direct—rate parity is standard—while affiliations add value on top: Foray Travels is a Virtuoso member and a Forbes Travel Guide endorsed agency, channels that typically carry property credit, breakfast, and upgrade priority.