The travel office, in the past three or four years, has been arranging a different kind of journey for the Maison's members than the journeys for which the wider industry now most aggressively competes. The journeys are quieter. They are, in many cases, longer. They concern themselves with smaller numbers of places visited, with longer stays in each, and with a deliberate avoidance of the establishments and itineraries that have, in the present commercial climate, become the principal subject of the popular travel press.
The shift is not, on our reading, a fashion. It reflects a settled view, on the part of a particular kind of traveller, that the costs of the journey are no longer principally financial — they are the costs of attention, of dignity, and of the increasingly rare experience of being unobserved. Establishments that, twenty years ago, could be relied upon to honour these costs have, in many cases, made other commercial decisions. The traveller who continues to prize them must now go to greater lengths to find what was, at one time, simply available.
The houses of which I write are, by definition, houses our members will not encounter through the ordinary channels. They are, in some cases, private — owned by individuals or families whose decision to receive guests is conducted through introductions rather than through bookings. They are, in other cases, technically commercial but conducted in a manner the wider commercial world has lost the patience to sustain. They have, in nearly every case, eight or twelve rooms rather than forty. They have, in nearly every case, a director who has been in place for fifteen or twenty years and who knows, by name, the cooks and gardeners and laundresses by whom the house is, in any practical sense, made operable.
The Maison's working relationships with such houses have been built over time, by partners who have spent their professional lives in the trade and who understand the particular conditions on which such houses prefer to be approached. The conditions are, almost always, that the introduction is made personally, that the member's interest is described in some detail, and that the booking — when it is made — is made by way of the partner rather than through any reservation system. Some of the houses do not maintain reservation systems at all. They prefer to be telephoned, by people they know, by people whose recommendations they trust.
I have been asked, by members new to the office, why this kind of arrangement is to be preferred to the more conventional one. The honest answer is that the conventional arrangement, in nearly every case, simply will not produce what the member is asking for. The hotel that publishes its rates is the hotel that books on a different basis from the houses I have described. The booking system that confirms the room within ten minutes of the request is the system that operates by economies of scale, and the economies of scale require, almost by definition, the standardisation that the member is, in coming to the Maison, hoping to escape.
The Maison's travel office, accordingly, conducts itself in a manner more nearly resembling that of an older travel firm of the kind that conducted journeys for a small number of named families during the long Edwardian afternoon. We are not, of course, that firm — the firm of which I am thinking has not existed for several decades, and the conditions in which it operated are not the conditions in which we operate. We are, however, conscious of the older model, and we have set out to do, in the present, what can responsibly be done in its spirit.
What this means, in the practical conduct of an arrangement, is that the partner takes the time to discuss the journey with the member at greater length than the wider industry would consider warranted. We expect to spend, in some cases, several hours on the design of a journey of two weeks. We expect to make, on the member's behalf, a number of telephone calls to people whose names will not appear on any subsequent invoice. We expect, having done all of this, to deliver a journey that the member will, on returning, describe in private terms rather than in the terms in which the wider travel press has trained its readers to describe such things.
The journeys, I should add, are not without surprises. The member who has accepted the Maison's working method has agreed, in some sense, to relinquish a measure of the control the more conventional arrangement provides. The compensation is that the small disappointments — the empty restaurant, the closed museum, the delayed transfer that has spoiled the timetable — happen with greater rarity, and that the small graces — the unexpected dinner with the proprietor, the morning at the property that no public guest has been admitted to in the last several years — happen with very considerable frequency.
I close this note with the observation that the Maison is, on the question of travel as on the question of much else, a house of patience. We will not arrange a journey at the speed the wider industry would consider competitive. We will arrange the journey, in the end, in a manner that the wider industry can no longer, on present evidence, undertake to match.
— Henry Ashford-Vane, October 2025