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. “If you can’t even get housekeeping right, that tells you a lot about the quality of the hotel and the team behind it. It’s not really ‘expensive equals good’.”

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 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.

Master of one trade  

Foray 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.

One&Only Reethi Rah in the Maldives. Top: A sandbar at Soneva Jani, Maldives.

That specialism has since hardened into policy. Ask Foray 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.” 

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.”

Aboard the Luminara, a superyacht from the Ritz-Carlton, which delivers the group’s brand of service and hospitality at sea. (Photo by Jin Cheng Wong)

What separates an ultra-luxury stay, in her view, is mostly invisible at the point of booking: the speedboat that gets you to 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, and at the end of the day, it’s just not luxury anymore, at least in my definition.”

The corollary is that price has quietly decoupled from quality. “In the past, luxury was about how expensive the hotel was, or what brand it was,” she says. “Nowadays it’s not so much that anymore.” 

The brands she watches are the entry-luxury lifestyle lines the major groups have been multiplying: Edition under Marriott, Delano under Accor—“quite a competitive product at a very good price point” at roughly half the tariff of a Four Seasons, with service she rates “pretty close”. 

Meanwhile, the priciest room in town can still fail at the fundamentals. “Nowadays, I find that I go to those mid-tier luxury brands and come back raving about it, because they really think about the client’s journey from start to end, and remove pain points and friction at each 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 Singaporean client, she finds, is delighted by mid-tier luxury; a Dubai client has seen everything. “They won’t be impressed by a regular hotel stay. They need something beyond that”—which 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.

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.”

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

The friction concentrates around money already spent. Large bookings at the top end are prepaid and often non-cancellable, terms some clients assume a concierge can dissolve. “We can get you upgraded, we can make special arrangements, but we can’t perform miracles. Sometimes we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars already given to the hotel. Once the money’s in their pocket, they’re not going to give it back.” 

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”, plus the property credits and breakfasts the agency programmes layer on top—but a single point of accountability across a whole trip. “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.”

The sharpest read in her toolkit is the transfer. First-timers want the seaplane and the aerial view; veterans have had enough of it. Repeat guests ask her for “a resort accessible by speedboat, because they don’t want to take a seaplane again”—unless it is a private one, which is a different bill. The journey can be the product—Bawah Reserve has built one of the world’s remotest resorts on precisely that premise—but among Tan’s repeat clients, experience shows up less as new appetites than as a shortening list of things they will still put up with.

One of the white sand beaches at Soneva Jani, in the Maldives’ Noonu Atoll. (Photo by Jin Cheng Wong)

Which makes her favourite recommendation the stranger. It is a product she spent years refusing to sell: 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. 

“Why would I pay £9,000 when my basic needs aren’t even met?” 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.’”

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: The Maldives, Foray’s founding specialism, divides on access from Malé’s Velana International Airport: a cluster within speedboat range—including Patina and The Ritz-Carlton in the Fari Islands, the integrated archipelago developed by Singapore’s Pontiac Land—and seaplane-only outer atolls such as Lhaviyani, home to Six Senses Kanuhura and Kudadoo. Emirates connects Dubai to Malé in about four hours, one reason the Gulf became the Maldives’ pandemic lifeline and remains among its strongest source markets.

Why book? Booking through a concierge costs the same as booking direct—rate parity is standard—while affiliations add value on top: Foray is a Virtuoso member and a Forbes Travel Guide endorsed agency, channels that typically carry property credit, breakfast, and upgrade priority. The trade-off sits at the top: large villa and buyout bookings are commonly prepaid and non-cancellable.