Little rich kids are living their best lives at over-the-top resorts

During a six-month backpacking tour of Southeast Asia, Maximo and Sebastian Tuscano pit-stopped for four nights at the Andaman, a 178-room Luxury Collection resort on a lush bay in Langkawi, Malaysia. They marvelled at the fauna in the surrounding rainforest—the flying lemurs, dusky leaf monkeys, more than 300 species of butterflies—and swam in the lagoon-style swimming pool. They hunted hermit crabs, helped a marine biologist feed specimens at an on-site coral nursery, and participated in pirate-themed games and crafts. 

In all, it was the perfect way for Maximo and Sebastian, twin brothers, to celebrate their 4th birthday. 

“I wanted the children to be stimulated and engaged. No video games or TV, please!” recalls Darcy Tuscano, one of their moms. And while they spent plenty of family time, “it was nice to be alone as a couple, knowing the kids were safe and having a blast without us.”

As family travel has evolved into a $500 billion industry, based on numbers from the Family Travel Association, properties are catering to their littlest guests in ways that reflect their locales, just as for adults. “Hotel kids’ clubs used to be windowless rooms with crayons,” says Julie Danziger, director of luxury travel services at Ovation Vacations, a travel agency based in New York. Now, she says, they’ve become interactive training grounds for budding global citizens. Take L’Apogée Courchevel, a ritzy ski resort in the French Alps, where the Mini VIP 1850 club—named for the town’s altitude, in meters—offers perfume- and chocolate-making workshops for kids. Gleneagles, in Scotland’s Highlands, stocks a fleet of quarter-sized Land Rovers just for little ones. And at Chewton Glen in Hampshire, aspiring chefs can learn to bake cinnamon buns in the English countryside. Unlike Walt Disney or Club Med SAS resorts, none of these properties are intended to solely (or even chiefly) appeal to families. For high-net-worth parents, that’s exactly the point. 

“After 9/11, people weren’t willing to leave their kids at home anymore—they wanted to be with them,” says Melissa Rosenbloum, a luxury-travel designer at SmartFlyer. Family time became a priority for travellers, making it one for hotels, too. Today, 88 percent of parents say they’re likely to travel with their child or children in the coming year, according to the 2017 US Family Travel Survey. Seventy percent of the survey’s 1,599 respondents indicated that amenities for children were a key factor in deciding where to stay. 

That’s true for Long Island-based Mozelle Goldstein, a nurse, mother of three, and one of Danziger’s clients. Kids’ clubs have driven several of her vacations, including one to the Breakers in Palm Beach, where her four-year-old son built a teddy bear that still reminds him of the Sunshine State. The mere existence of a kids’ club can make seemingly non-family-friendly vacations work for both parent and child. Consider the Brando, a cluster of 35 villas on the private island of Tetiaroa, near Tahiti in French Polynesia.  “Would you ever think to go to French Polynesia with your six-year-old?” Rosenbloum muses. But with the resort’s Lagoon School—where kids can learn about life on an atoll through snorkelling, treasure hunts, and whale-watching excursions—somehow even an ultra-sexy bucket-list destination in the South Pacific becomes appropriate for tots. 

The Brando’s Lagoon School costs about $81 per child per half-day session, pocket change for guests spending upward of $2,200 per night for a private pool villa. According to Danziger, guests can typically expect to pay $30 to $60 for half a day, or rarely more than $100 for full days, at kid’s clubs with daily rates. “It’s not a revenue play,” says Rosenbloum. “Hotels are doing this to compete. Otherwise, they’re not going to get business from the parents.” 

@2018 Bloomberg