The Rise Of Luxury Villas And The Rise Of Universal Travel

Picture the scene. You’ve queued for an hour at security, then spent half of another on a lukewarm flat white in a departure lounge that seems to have been designed as a deterrent. Several hours later you stumble out of arrivals, bound for a five-star hotel in some wildly desirable corner of the world.

Only it isn’t quite the dream you were sold.

There was a time when travel was a privilege. The people who explored the world belonged to a small, rather exclusive club, and they dressed for the occasion. Then the club threw open its doors, which is wonderful for the world and less so for the vocabulary. Expectations have soared, and words like “luxe” and “exclusive” now appear on everything from budget minibreaks to motorway hotels.

Which is why private villas are having a moment. Most of us still can’t skip the airport (the private jet remains aspirational), but the one part of any trip you can control entirely is where you lay your head. Increasingly, those who can are making it the first decision rather than the last.

So, let’s go again. Same airport, same queue, and this time you skip the coffee.

You step out of arrivals into a waiting car, and the air-conditioning is already set to exactly the right temperature. Forty minutes later the gates swing open onto a drive lined with frangipani, and there, at the top, is the house. Someone takes your bags before you’ve thought to ask. Someone else appears with something cold, citrus-bright and faintly dangerous, and you are on the terrace with it before you have properly said hello.

The pool is the colour of a postcard that’s been slightly over-edited, except that it’s real. Beyond it, the view runs unbroken to the horizon. The fridge, you discover, has been stocked with everything you mentioned in an email last week and one or two things you didn’t, but will be delighted by. Dinner is whenever you decide it is. Breakfast is whenever you wake up, taken in whatever state of dishevelment suits you, with no buffet queue and no one rationing the croissants.

By the second day the staff know how you take your coffee. By the third, you have stopped checking your phone. By the end of the week, the brochure has been proved, if anything, a little modest.

It’s hard to argue that this isn’t the better version. When even the grandest hotels have become reassuringly easy to book, only something genuinely singular stands out. Call us snobs, call us realists weary of the same off-the-shelf offerings. Either way, the numbers suggest we’re not alone: villa rentals have climbed steadily in recent years, and the choice of properties keeps growing.

There’s a quieter appeal, too. A villa lets you travel the way you actually want to. You can wander down to the local market in the morning and return to a kitchen that will happily turn your haul into lunch. You can dine out among the locals one night and stay in the next, with a private chef and the stars for company. You get the flavour of the place without the coach party, and the character without the compromise.

So the next time someone promises you “exclusive”, ask what it excludes. A villa has a very good answer: everything you’d rather not share.

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